Froshmore by Audrey C. '24

Hi I’m Audrey, a new face in this bloggerverse! As the illustration above suggests, I’m starting my second year here at MIT. And that feels weird. 

Drawing has been a lifelong passion for me. It’s a release, my peace, an outlet to make myself feel whole and sane. I’m excited to experiment with illustrated formats on the blogs. On the other hand, writing is a relatively new interest. During my freshman year of college, I was like, “wow people who are good at writing are so cool! If I start writing for fun more often, maybe I can be cool too.” Writing for fun usually meant putting down whatever mess going on in my head into words and making my friends read those word vomits. That doesn’t necessarily make me “cool,” but I did find out that I enjoy oversharing. Lo and behold, I now get to overshare my life on the internet :D. 

This year feels like a year of calibration for me in many ways, beyond just adjusting to a nearly normal version of the MIT experience. For one (positive) thing, my general living habits have been improving. My sleep schedule right now is infinitely better than it was last year (like going to bed three hours earlier on average), thanks to in person 9am classes/meetings. I eat a decent breakfast pretty consistently now, whereas last year I never woke up in time for breakfast. It’s not like I have my life completely together though — there’s always too much to do and not enough time. I’m trying to be proactive about avoiding burnout this year, but we’ll see how that goes. I dropped classes. I added classes. I dropped clubs. I committed myself to a new club. 

The biggest “calibration” on my mind right now is that I’m in a weird purgatory of majors. Hmm calibration implies the existence of an objective state, like sleeping better. “Transition” is probably the better word here, as there’s no concrete answer to what I should do with my time and ultimately my life. Throughout all of freshman year, I’ve been a deadset course 6-9.⁠01 computer science + brain/cognitive sciences joint major Yet recently, I spontaneously changed majors to course 2A⁠02 one variation of the mechanical engineering major for reasons I’ll likely elaborate in another blog. I’ll almost certainly⁠03 sophomores can't officially double major until the spring, so I had to switch rather to than just tack on meche. finish my computer science degree though, since I’m decently far into it and I’m truly excited⁠04 I'm pASSIONATE about computer science, I promise!!! about the ideas and potential that lie in computer science. But for now, I’m in this wishy washy liminal state trying to explore meche while simultaneously furthering my forays into computer science. 

To be honest, I’ll probably always feel like I’m going through a period of transition during my time at MIT. After all, college itself is a liminal zone of some sort, one between childhood and real adulting. I probably overuse the word liminal. It’s a fun word.