gesturing around MIT by Waly N. '24

After **quite** the hiatus,⁠01 *Checks watch* wow I was a sophomore last time I posted... yikes it would probably make sense to say what I have been doing and what exactly has been keeping me away from the blogs. The thing is, I don’t know quite how to phrase it, especially to a public audience, most of whom I probably don’t know. But, people say that a picture is a thousand words, and talking about less thrilling aspects of my third year so far for a thousand words would not be too fun. So, here is a status update in the form of a photo from a graded exam instead.

Academics-wise, last semester was quite a ride. A ride on a street with a lot of potholes. Though I told myself I would never take 5 classes again at MIT,⁠02 GUESS WHO IS IN 5 CLASSES AS WE SPEAK. some people never learn. I clearly enjoy lying to myself and made a brash decision to do so. I wound up dropping a class. Not cause I was doing terribly bad, but because I hated it so much. During that bumpy ride, and the previous 4 rides I had had at MIT, I thought a lot about what I wanted to explore and try. What I wanted to drop or stop doing, or what I was doing just because I should. This thinking got especially spurred by some regrets, events, and decisions that have happened spanning the end of my sophomore year and this past summer.

In a different world, I would probably wind up being a humanities major of some sort. I’ve been sad that at MIT I haven’t dabbled in humanities topics as much as I could have or wanted to.

So, I feel happy that I took a leap this school year that I’ve wanted to do for a while. I moved around some of my extracurriculars for this year; I dropped a club I liked to try new things like dance. I’ve been learning more about photography after getting a camera. And I took a drawing class, which was the first art class I’ve ever formally taken. 

For this drawing class, which is 21M.601, Drawing for Designers, our first assignment was to do something called gesture drawings. Basically, gestures are quick, 1-minute sketches of random things. You can think of it as a warm-up for drawing. For the task, I had to find 50 unique things on campus and spent a decent bit of time gesturing around MIT.

1. Though ideally, I would eat 3 meals a day, most of the time I eat somewhere around 2.5 meals. 1 of them being lunch, the other 1 being dinner, and the .5 being some odd mixture varying from an actually nutritious, self-made smoothie to a box of raisins. On this day, I wound up buying lunch from one of the vendors in the Stud. Most food on campus is a tad expensive, so I often opt to make my own lunch, but the bowls at this Dominican place are pretty decent. I slowly ate my food as I trudged along through my assignment
2. For this assignment, I was supposed to time each drawing I made. I wasn’t supposed to take over a minute, so I used my phone’s timer to keep myself in check. When I couldn’t think of anything to draw on my second drawing out of fifty total, I proceeded to draw my phone. Not much more to it.
3. I was sitting in Stud 2, one of the floors in the student center. Well actually, it was more like Stud 3 because it was on the upper floor of Stud 2’s Lobell Dining Court… which I guess makes it the 3rd floor of the building. Weird how that works out. Anyways, this was the view outside the window on that floor. There is a tree, and it faces Mass Ave, where Lobby 7 is. I didn’t get too much time to draw out the details, so I scribbled some of the features.
4. Now that I think about it, I don’t see disposable plastic bottles too often around campus. People often have hydroflasks or some other type of thermos. Here, I draw a poland spring water bottle I saw on a table near me.
5. When I drew this one, I was still eating my lunch and saw the dolly-type-of-thing an MIT employee also eating lunch had. It was aluminum with painted blue parts. Perhaps he used it for moving stuff around? We will never know.
6. The place I was at was pretty quiet, other than some subtle conversations. Some people were working on stuff, so I just drew them since they were rather stationary. Hopefully, they didn’t mind.
7. Dolly-MIT employee guy also had a can of coke with him, the normal kind. I don’t think he ever wound up drinking it while I was there.
8. In Lobby 7, there usually are MIT keychains you can pick up. I’ve been using them since freshman year, though I’ve switched them out a lot. They tend to break after extended periods of use, and since I have my keys and ID on them, I use my keychain quite a lot. I recently learned that lots of people at MIT don’t carry their keys and just leave their doors unlocked. Which baffles me. Maybe it’s the city kid part of me, but that seems horrifying.
9. This is a key chain I have on my backpack, featuring the peace sign in the colors of the Palestinian flag. For part of this past summer, I taught CS in Jerusalem to Israeli and Palestinian high schoolers, and when I wasn’t teaching, I got a few souvenirs. This one I bought in the old city of Jerusalem, near Al Aqsa mosque.
10. During our first semester, when we were walking through the beautiful hallways of MIT on gather.io, MIT sent all 2024s a little car package. The package included some niche items, like an MIT golf ball, and this MIT 2024 beaver. I’ve had the beaver on my bag for about 2 years now, and the world may cease to exist if anything happened to the little fella. He has a little shirt that says MIT 2024 and looks significantly cuter than any of the other classes’ little beaver keychains.
11. My laptop. My comrade through psets, youtube, procrastination, and everything else. I got a decent laptop when I started MIT, and it has broken down on me multiple times. One day, I might have to do CPR on it. I have a bunch of stickers on it, including a Course 2 sticker which is now slightly awkward….
12. Last last January (2022), I taught through MIT’s Global Teaching Lab program in South Korea. With my 3 other teammates, we ran 2 weeks of hands-on STEM workshops for middle/high school students. On our last day, the host staff caught wind from one of my teammates that I REALLY wanted this plushie I had seen in stores, but I was hesitating to buy it. They got the plushie, named Choonsik as a parting gift, which was incredibly sweet. This Choonsik was a special New Year’s edition, so he is wearing a hanbok (traditional Korean clothes). I was hoping to bring Choonsik home when I went to South Korea over IAP this year to teach again for GTL, but my friend held him hostage :(.
13. My headphones, which I love dearly. Though recently, I haven’t been wearing them much. You see, my blogger picture is pretty inaccurate now. I have decently long hair (by my standards). My hair is very curly and coily, but if I were to stretch it out it is roughly 6 inches long. So when I wear headphones with my hair, I leave a massive ridge in my hair as soon as I take them off. I love beanie season when I can wear my headphones in peace.
14. This is… well was one of my favorite mugs. I probably haven’t gotten the chance to make it clear enough so far, but I am a very big ATLA fan. This mug is a Jasmine Dragon logo in Starbucks’ logo style. Sadly, I accidentally sent this mug flying off my desk one day, and it shattered. My semester went terribly since that faithful day.
15. At MIT, we have an Ipad loaning program, so I have been borrowing an Ipad from MIT since I started. I’ve grown a bit attached to it, even though it is not mine at all. I also have an apple pencil, and I draw it in action.
16. My plant! I’ve had this plant since freshman spring, so it is about two years old. Of my original 3 plants that started junior year, it is the last one standing :(. It has gone through hell and back (me forgetting to water it for an extended period of time), but it’s extremely resilient. I am a terrible plant parent, but I am happy it has made it through MIT alive so far. In fact, maybe it’s even been doing better than I have.
17. Also during my freshman spring, I took Toy Product design, a class meant to serve as exposure to MechE. As we worked towards our final presentation, we made many posters, prototypes, and misc objects. This was a boat that we created for a poster that I am now hanging up on my wall.
18. At the moment, I live in East Campus, and unlike most students in other dorms except Baker, I have a sink. A sink is absolutely amazing to have in your room, and I will miss it a lot when I move elsewhere next year. Being able to brush my teeth at 3:28am with no one walking in… sublime. My room’s sink has a mirror right above it, so I can see my bedhead after I wake up. The previous room resident etched stuff into the mirror, which is interesting. Not sure why, but hope you are doing alright Tony.
19. Sometime long ago, I got these bag clips that are shaped like owls. I mainly just use these clips for decor, and one of them bares a striking resemblance to the Duolingo bird. A frightening reminder to do my daily lesson.
20. Before someone lectures me to not hang stuff from pipes, trust me this is safe. Just trust me. I’ve been doing Taekwondo at MIT for 3 semesters now, and I’ve gotten 4 belts so far. I’ve been hanging them up in my room and adding the old belt each time I get a new one. So far, I have the white, yellow, green stripe, green, and blue stripe belts.
21. Oh, remember when I said most people have hydroflasks? Well, this is my hydroflask. It’s eggplant colored since I lost my original one. UPDATE: I lost this one too.
22. I bought this lamp freshman spring. I came into my Macgregor room and absolutely hated the lighting. Petey said something along the lines of “it looks like a ufo is taking you” to me freshman year, which was 100% accurate. On Zoom, my face looked dark and the only thing illuminated was my hair.
23. In my room, I set up LED light strips that I bought online. They are pretty cool light strips if I do say so myself since I can sync them to music and make my room look like a discount disco party. I drew the remote for those light strips. This reminds me I have another roll of light strips I can program with an Arduino, but I never got around to actually figuring out how to use those…
24. It really wouldn’t be MIT if my room did not have some type of insect problem. Or should I say arachnid problem? It’s much better right now, but my room usually has lots and lots of spiders. I’ve found them just vibing in a corner pretty often. One time. one was on my plant though which was not terribly great. To be honest, I don’t mind them as long as they don’t jump-scare me. Another time I was walking to bed, and a spider went down right in front of my eyes, about an inch away from my face. It did not survive the encounter as I panicked.
25. This picture is actually related to my LED strips. I put a command hook on my wall near my strip’s sensor so that I could hang a speaker right there. That way, my lights sync properly to the music, and not to conversations that might also be happening in the room
26. This one is terribly cursed. But I was running out of ideas to draw. I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this here before, but I’m a rather big Avatar the last Airbender fan. Very big fan. Over the past summer, with some of the other MIT students I was working with, I watched The Last Airbender. You might know where this is going. Yes, I watched that movie. A terrible movie that made me want to throw hands with everyone who approved of it. It was a terribly scarring experience.
27. My memory is a bit hazy on this one. I think I meant to draw a tent I saw on campus. MIT often puts up tents for major and minor events. It’s quite a common occurrence when the weather is warmer. Whenever the tents leave campus, the grass under them being all dead and crusty is sadly also a common occurrence.
28. MIT’s campus has many different types of lamps and lights, and this was one of them. Nothing particular to see here.
29. I sometimes work at Hayden Library on campus, which is conveniently 1 minute away from my dorm room. In fact, I can see it from my window. Hayden has a cafe, which serves up some drinks like chai lattes and iced teas. I generally tend to drink whatever I buy really fast, and this time was like no other. Only the ice remained.
30. I want to say this one is a person working on a couch. But on second thought, I am not quite sure what I was going for. Yes, I might only have had a minute to draw this… but I’m still confused about how I produced something of this quality.
31. I have a rather large collection of lip balm. I am pretty forgetful, so I misplace a lip balm somewhere in my room, can’t find it, and buy a new one after dealing with crusty, chapped lips for days on end. Then the day after I buy a new one, I find the old one. At this point, I have a berry, peach, mint, and coconut lip balm. There are probably more to come.
32. My glasses. If anything happens to my glasses, I am doomed. I wear my glasses pretty much every day since my eyesight is very blurry without them, and I would need to squint to be able to catch most things. That being said, if you put up 3 fingers in front of me and ask “hOw ManY fInGeRs aM i HoLdiNg uP,” I will be able to see perfectly out of spite.
33. More plants! This was a plant in the student center, just vibing on the floor above me.
34. For this one, I drew my hand. Drawing hands is something I’ve always found rather difficult to do, so I would say I am rather satisfied with this quick sketch looking pretty good.
35. Here, I drew my shoes at the time. I bought these shoes at home in New York and brought them to campus. Perhaps I don’t know the right places, but clothing in Boston feels very expensive. So generally, I buy stuff in NYC when I go home, and bring it back with me to campus.
36. In the student center (stud), there are a bunch of very tall potted plants (trees?) on either the second or the third floor. They are a nice addition to the study area that is there. The stud is being renovated soon, so I am not too sure what will happen to the plants, but hopefully, they return next fall.
37. I saw a person working on something using their mac in the stud. MIT is pretty split on windows vs mac users, so it’s rather common to see both of them being used.
38. As I was doing these drawings, I bumped into an HS friend who is an MIT ‘23. We talked for a bit, and she passed me some items I could draw for inspiration. The first of these (I think) was a clear water bottle with a long straw going through it. Hydrate or diedrate folks.
39. The next of these was a nice wallet she had. I don’t remember what color it was, but it was fun to draw, it kind of felt like drawing a book.
40. My brass rat! During sophomore year, every class gets a ring designed by members of their class, the Ring Committee. There is first a premiere event, where the ring is presented. Then, there is a delivery event, where you get your rings, take snazzy photos, and get covid (if you are me). I got a Ultrium ring, which is the ring people tend to wear daily. A fun fact was that I was on the committee that selected our year’s Ring Committee o__o
41. This was the aforementioned friend’s AirPods case. I, as a good Android user, do not have AirPods, though I might try to get some non-Apple earbuds soon. I have headphones (like the ones that go over your head), but as I mentioned before, if I wear them, I’m left with a trench in the middle of my hair. So earbuds might be a good investment.
42. Since I live in a cook-for-yourself dorm, I (sometimes) get groceries. Personally, I find Boston grocery prices to be really expensive, especially near MIT. I find it funny when people tell me New York is more expensive than Boston food-wise, but maybe that is just because I know where to look for food in the Bronx/NYC. My two saving graces in Boston are Daily Table and Aldi’s, which I both really love. Sometimes I go to Aldi’s to stock up on snacks and non-perishables, and I drew this fruit bar I got from there. It was absolutely disgusting and I never bought it again.
43. In the past year, I’ve taken planes quite a few times. Around 9 times actually. Most of these times were for doing MISTI, MIT programs where you teach/intern abroad. On international flights, they tend to give you the headphones with the jack, so I keep one in my bag in case, for some reason, I immediately need a pair of earbuds. Even though my phone does not have a headphone jack.
44. When I was teaching CS over the summer in Jerusalem, one of my students made this bracelet for me on the last day :)). I really love it and I’ve been wearing it since, and I gotta say I’m surprised it has stayed on my wrist so long. I can’t really take it off, and I’m not going to cut it either, so until it breaks do us part.
45. This is my laptop adapter so that if I ever need to use an HDMI cable, I am ready. I also use this sometimes for the projector I have in my room. I bought a cheap trajectory screen I can put up and remove as a please, which was a solid investment for watching the world cup last semester.
46. A quarter. All the money in my account in a single drawing.
47. My phone! Lots of people ask me why I have a random leaf in the back of my phone case. I picked this leaf off a tree last year in San Francisco when I went there for 3 days to participate in a CS event. It’s been chilling in my phone case since along with a sticker I printed saying, “I’m tired.”
48. I have a few mugs, but I don’t believe this is one of mine. Considering the last 3 of these drawings were done in my floor’s lounge, it probably was someone else’s mug. As for my mugs, the three I currently have are a MecheE mug from my old days as a Course 2 before I sold my soul to coding, a mug from the CS summer program I taught at, and a pretty new one my friend gave me from when she was in London. Have I mentioned before that I’m a big Avatar (not the blue people.) fan? Perhaps I’ve talked about this before, but I used to have one that was a Starbucks-inspired logo for Uncle Iroh’s Jasmine Dragon. But it is no longer with us. It is drawing 14.
49. A faucet. I’m starting to run out of ways to go on tangents for rather simple objects I drew.
50. And we have reached the end! For the end, we have a decoration which is a stick with a few pinecones attached to it. I’ve seen it before many times, but never actually paid attention to it until I was desperate for one last thing to draw as the deadline neared. 

I originally meant to post this around the start of last semester… and let’s just say things don’t always go as planned. I spent a bit of time editing the part about my semester from the present tense to the past tense. On the bright side, I have lots more art I worked on last semester I can now share, like my end-of-semester portfolio for the class. You can probably tell which ones were more rushed than others 😅. Having never taken an actual art class before, I think I was rather happy with my progress throughout the course. I tend to get a bit frustrated easily with things art-related when something goes awry, but I got better with that as the semester went on. I don’t know if I will take more drawing classes at MIT (I don’t know if we have any more than this one, to be honest), but it was a great learning experience that I’m happy to look back on as I start a new semester.

charcoal

pencil

charcoal

pencil + charcoal

charcoal

ink

charcoal

ink

charcoal

Previous Next