Hi again (and goodbye) by Elizabeth Choe '13
(For real this time!)
When Petey messaged the blogger alums about coming back and posting for the 20th anniversary of the blogs, I originally hadn’t planned on writing anything. And that is because while everyone else has been checking in from all corners of the world and sharing the many adventures post-MIT life has taken them on, I, uh, never actually left MIT.
See, after graduating from Course 20 in 2013, I ran an educational media outreach program in MIT Open Learning for a few years (working with Ceri!) while doing some independent video production on the side. Then I came “back home” to Admissions, helping to run these very blogs with Petey while also working at the MIT Media Lab’s then-called Learning Initiative. In 2018, I started my PhD in Course 20. Just the other week I had a lovely lunch with Ceri, Petey, rfong, and Danny in the schmancy new Admissions building. Bryan is now a professor in Course 20 who I saw every week for the past 6 years. I have lived in the 01239 zip code for almost half of my life. MY KERBEROS01 The username that stays with you the entire time you're actively at MIT HAS BEEN CONTINUOUSLY OPERATING FOR THE PAST 15 YEARS. Honestly, what is there to catch up on?
The catching up is that I finally left MIT and started a new gig leading science communications for an oncology-and-AI research group at a big biotech company a few months ago. But I don’t think it’ll feel real until May, when, by some poetic stroke of coincidence, I both walk across the graduation stage, bidding official adieu to the place that raised me (and my Kerb finally expires), and I also get married and really start life sans MIT. Truth is, I have been a bit in emotional denial over the whole thing, and as I messaged Petey, “I am reluctant to write because I am afraid of what will come out of me. Lol.” How do I distill the last 15 years into one farewell post?
Let’s start with the easy things, the stuff that hasn’t changed:
- I still have a penchant for dramatic flair (I wrote two farewell posts on these blogs before and look how that turned out. I still live within walking distance of MIT. I am doing Just Fine™).
- I am still a perfectionist (as evidenced by the number of times I have started, scrapped, and restarted this post).
- The Student Center, despite having a dramatic interior renovation last year (losing Verdes and Anna’s! RIP), still kind of has that weird smell???
And yet, so much else has changed:
- My freshman year, I converted to Catholicism after growing up atheist and the Tech Catholic Community became one of the most important communities of my undergrad experience. My first year of grad school, I left the Church and the Addir Interfaith Fellows program became my community of meaning, ritual, and service during my PhD. Though I’m no longer religious, the most precious thing that came out of these groups was experiencing what it means to be held and hold others in community and collective care. And for that, my formerly super-individualistic self is very grateful.
- My sophomore year of undergrad, homesick and missing my then-7-year-old brother, I filled out transfer applications in my Simmons dorm room. The heads of house at the time, John (a Course 20 professor) and Ellen, convinced me to stay. I gave myself another year. And then another. And… the years (and subsequent hours in John’s office working through career decisions, breakups, deaths) passed by… Eight years later I moved back into Simmons as a Graduate Resident Advisor and spent the next five years supporting undergrads through grad school applications, heartbreak, and grief. I really had to learn how to listen, to sit in someone’s joy and pain, and to navigate the problems in the life that aren’t easily solvable, which are all things that MIT very much did not teach me how to do, but are skills I am glad to have learned, given that I was kind of an asshole when I first got here. (Oh, also, my then-7-year-old brother graduated from college this past year.)
- In early 2014, a staff member, comparing MIT to smaller liberal arts colleges, reflected to me that “MIT is not really an activist campus.” Later that year, Michael Brown was killed by a police officer a couple hours east of my hometown, spurring the national Black Lives Matter movement. It was the first time I saw student protests on campus. When I first came to MIT, I did not think much about my identity beyond someone who was good at school, I did not think much about problems beyond the ones that were in my p-sets, and I assumed institutions operated in the interest of the people they served. I can’t condense this shift—mine or campus’s—into a few sentences, but I will say that watching current students (and staff and faculty) grapple with the world as their whole selves, no matter how imperfectly, has changed me in ways that I hope will only grow.
- Before I got to MIT, I was impressed by achievement and power. As a freshman, I watched with awe as the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research was built. A decade later, I joined that same institute as a PhD student and shortly afterward, a few Big Bummers happened: 1) Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for heinous crimes that, despite some being public knowledge, people at MIT overlooked to accept his money and influence. 2) High-profile faculty I once admired were fired or placed on leave for various forms of trainee abuse. 3) I came to understand who David Koch was, how he and his brother made the fortune that funded much of MIT—including the very building I worked in—and how profoundly misaligned their values were with my own. Grad school was a time to reckon with the qualities I once lionized. I now believe smart people are everywhere, and intellect is fairly unextraordinary. What’s far more remarkable is when, despite all the forces that push you otherwise, people are humble, generous, patient, empathetic, self-aware, or genuine, and when they do the right thing even if no one’s watching.
-
Like many of the blogger alums, I got into running in my 30s, racked up a collection of chronic and invisible illnesses (and ADHD!!!), and honestly *wildly waves hands* can we get an epidemiological study on us?? (But for real, all this taught me to not assume how other people go through life, and also, damn, MIT student health insurance is actually really good. That might be what I miss the most???)
-
From childhood, I thought being smart was mutually exclusive with everything else about me, and that if I wanted to be taken seriously in the professional world, I had to be literally serious and kind of a hard-ass (which, to a certain extent, is true). It took me a long time to realize that the friends I made at MIT didn’t value me because I was smart, but because I was a silly-ass mofo who makes people giggle. Kind of sad, but honestly? Having the MIT credentials freed me up to lean into the rest of who I am. Post-undergrad, I was in my feminine era. And now post-grad, I’m in my silly era, letting some tempered version of a rowdier, spirited me exist in lots of spaces, including work (where I am one of the few extroverts in a sea of introverted data scientists, which, if MIT has prepared me for anything, it is this).
MIT—I hated it. I loved it. I couldn’t wait to get out. I stayed for 15 years. It changed me forever. I’m forever grateful.
- The username that stays with you the entire time you're actively at MIT back to text ↑