Hello Summer! by Jack-William B. '21

Finally the year is over. After a week of relaxing, I can finally finish up this blog post that I started last week, but I have just been too lazy to finish up this week. Spending a whole year at MIT really changed my perspectives of the institute, and I cannot wait to get back to classes in a few months. However, the break from the constant demand of Psets, tests, and the horror of finals season, will be much deserved and appreciated.

In the next week or so, I’ll be starting my job as a residential facilitator for Interphase EDGE 2018. I could not be more excited. As some of you may know from my first post as a blogger, I did Interphase last summer, and I think the opportunity to come back as a TA for Calculus, as well as other residential duties, will be an interesting and rewarding way to spend my summer doing something I love, teaching, with an organization, the Office of Minority Education, that has done so much for me throughout the past year.

It will defiently be a change teaching calculus. I am both excited and anxious to start considering last semester I spent all my time as a Talented Scholars Resource Room Teaching Assistant rambling on about Maxwell’s’ Equations, Flux over surfaces, and every combination of R,L, and C circuits possible. I am in the process of learning LaTex, which for me who is honestly pretty horrible at anything that involves a computer, is going, well, slowly. Hopefully, I will have it down by the time the program starts so I can write out lecture notes in the fancy fashion instead of making them have to read the chicken scratch that is my handwriting.

I will also stay busy in the off hours of Interphase finalizing my research on porous carbons, biocrude oil, and hydrothermal liquefaction. I am been with the same two people, Fran and Diego, since the beginning of the school year, and I think this will be my last period with them. We have actually found some interesting data related to one of our bio sources, and we are in the process of putting it all into a paper! I could not be more excited to be a coauthor of a scientific paper, as I told myself I wanted to get involved with research and being a teaching assistant early. I can defiently call this first year at MIT a success.

In regards to finally being done with my courses, it was quite the photo finish. In all honesty, last semester was much harder than my other semester because the material wasn’t based on anything that I was already familiar with, minus Chemistry which was my easy class, so I spent so much time at office hours, and you may have noticed, did not blog as much. I was just so busy, and I would get halfway through blogs, and then I would struggle to find the time to finish them! In the future though, by the end of the semester, I had learned to manage my time effectively, with my jobs and classes, and I do think next semester will go a lot smoother now that I know what to expect from MIT courses where I am not familiar with the material.

But, to not disturb the peace and serenity in my head, let’s just forget about that looming fall semester for now! The summer will be work, but it will be all work that I can handle and enjoy doing. There is nothing I love more than teaching, so I cannot wait for the new Interphase cohort to arrive. Boston is a lot nicer to be in when you don’t have a Pset due every day I must say. I have more time to start going out and sailing again and hopefully not capsize. I also have been finding new places to eat some food like crepes and shaved ice in Chinatown. I never knew crepes and Chinatown would make for such a good mix, but the Kit-Kats, ice cream, Oreos, and chocolate chip combination is so good. I wish I had a picture to attach to this blog post… I promise on the next one I will have lots of pictures of food. I am a true lover of Boston food, so I feel like I end up talking about it so much in these blogs.

Well, I have another week of nothing to do, so I better get to it! Next weekend starts the move into Interphase and also me volunteering at commencement, so I have a few more days of boredom/lounging around, before I have responsibilities again. With that, off to get some Ramen and Edamame from Newbury Street, Its Friday night tradition!