goodbye by Shuli J. '22, MEng '23

I was probably one of the youngest people ever to read the blogs. I have no idea how I stumbled across them as an elementary schooler with very limited unsupervised screen time, but I did, and I fell totally in love. The blogs were one of the first pieces of writing I ever binged, after Harry Potter but before any other book series, fanfiction, and the newspaper. Sam and Mitra and Mollie, the earliest bloggers, were MIT to me. They were weird and cool and smart and funny. They weren’t just everything I wanted to be, but everything I wished I could find around me as I struggled to make friends through elementary and into middle and high school.

When I got into MIT, visited for CPW, and finally comMITted, the biggest reason behind my decision to come here was the people: the people I’d met and liked at CPW, but also the people I hadn’t met yet, whose pictures the blogs had painted. Sam and Mitra and Mollie had long since graduated, but their MIT — full of friendship, companions for psets and for adventures, people with whom to get into trouble and then out of it — was waiting for me. There was never any question about whether I would apply to be a blogger. The blogs were almost solely responsible for my application and matriculation to MIT, and I knew I wanted to share that with those who would come after me.

Today, it is five years and one month after I comMITted; four years and eleven months after I applied to be a blogger. I have been blogging for ten semesters; five years; about seventy-five blogs. Although I can still bring it up in my mind, the MIT that the blogs showed me when I was still young has been almost entirely replaced by the MIT that I’ve seen myself with my own two eyes. Of course, the MIT I know after five years of living here is more on every level than the one I knew only through others’ words. This MIT is larger, better, more complex, worse, more joyful, harder. But at its core, I do think that it is the same. MIT has been a place where I felt more like I belonged than I ever did before. MIT has been a place where I cried because I felt so alone. MIT has been a place where I accomplished things I never believed I could. MIT has been a place where I fell down and did not know how I could possibly get back up again — and where someone reached out a helping hand and pulled me up. All of these experiences are the kind that shape a person, and shape the relationships between people.

I loved the school I went to from grades 7 through 12; I spent six years there and when I left I was a fundamentally different person than I was when I arrived. I believed then, and still believe now, that that school made the person I am today. I don’t think this is true of MIT: I am not a fundamentally different person than I was when I arrived. But I’ve changed dramatically. I arrived at MIT with the raw materials I needed to be an adult — maturity, compassion, curiosity and a desire to grow — but no idea what to do with them. MIT took me in, ragged at the edges, with sharp spots and pieces that didn’t quite fit together, and helped me shape myself into something I could be proud of. I’m not all the way there yet (who is?) and I don’t know exactly what my next steps will look like, but I’ve come a long way and I know that I know how to keep moving forward.

All through this process I’ve been blogging, writing about the mundane, the little joys, the big questions, the uncertainties, the accomplishments. Sometimes late at night when I don’t want to go to bed and I’m feeling a little bit of bittersweet nostalgia, I get caught up clicking through my own old blog posts. Their emotions feel so familiar, but the time they write about feels so long ago. My own blogs are, to me, primarily a benchmark of how I’ve changed and how I’ve stayed the same. When I fell in love with the blogs, I didn’t have the maturity to see these changes in others; the MIT I first loved was static, one solid shape rather than a detailed picture. There’s nothing wrong with that — you have to see the shape of a picture first before you can begin to fill it in. If you are new to these pages or to MIT, I hope for you, sometime in these past years, I’ve drawn some of the shape. But if you’re a regular, then I wonder if I might have managed to fill in a few of the details. I hope so.

After five years of blogging, I’ve changed in all the ways people usually do. I’m more tired, more jaded, more experienced. I have a better sense of what I want out of life, but still feel that I don’t know what I want out of life. I’ve made friends and lost them. I’ve struggled through tragedies and kept going. The change I’m proudest of is that I’m more confident in myself and who I am. I came to MIT a quirky nerd who was unafraid to speak up, who liked leading groups and loved learning new things, who wanted to work hard and do well. I am leaving as someone who is all these things, and proud of it; someone who doesn’t feel that I have to hide who I am to make friends and feel welcomed. The blogs were one of the first places I ever saw people like me being so openly proud of who they were. I hope that some of my own journey to reach that place has come through on here. I hope that if you’re a young person reading these words, you can believe, as I did, that this is a place — and there are many such places — where this can happen to you too.

Now the magic of MIT has done everything it can for me: the real world calls. Five years ago, MIT was scary, big, exciting, unknown, full of possibilities. Today, my new job and my new city feel the same way. They will shape me, just as MIT has, in ways I do not yet know. This is an adventure beyond what the blogs can show me and what I can show on the blogs. But I have the friends I’ve made, who can guide me, learn alongside me, and help me when I struggle. I have the lessons I’ve learned about living, which I’ll surely build upon but which make a strong foundation for that building. And I have confidence that I’ll figure it all out somehow.

Thank you for reading, today and at any and every time in the past five years. Thank you for making this space where I could learn first from others and then from myself. Thank you for being there through the best and worst of times. This place has changed my life. I hope I have repaid the gift by changing, in however small of a way, yours.

💜