highlights of a hellish semester by Ankita D. '23

okay, so, sophomore fall was brutal. it went from manageable to tedious to outright AWFUL and i’m still recovering from struggling through a class I initially thought was easy. it took me literally ten minutes to do each of the first two psets so i didn’t stress about it until i saw my grade for the second midterm. cue instant panic and regret mode…and let’s not even talk about how quickly I put a class⁠01 6.009 homies WYA on pass/no record after I saw my first quiz grade…or the stress of finding a job amidst all this academic pressure and a mf pandemic???

ANYways.

as i’ve talked about in previous posts, i got a 12-month lease with six friends from my floor, and being able to vibe with them is the reason my semester was even remotely tolerable. living in a dorm last year was wonderful because I could have all sorts of interactions at any hour, and my house this year, which we dubbed “soft house,” was very reminiscent of that.

here are my favorite parts of the semester:

• 

  minimized for your viewing pleasure

  fridge cleaning party—one of my roommates discovered a three-month-old jar of chia pudding that had festered in the downstairs fridge, which prompted all of us to start sorting through our fridges for spoilt food. it became a whole *thing* and was tons of fun despite how disgusting everything was. honorable mentions include: bananas that were completely black and surrounded by a pool of grey juice, two McDonalds ketchup packets, a jar of tomato sauce that had practically fused with a shelf due to all the liquid on it, a Tupperware of barley that had an entire fungal ecosystem in it…the list goes on.

• beating video games into the ground—we played Among Us around the kitchen table pretty much every night for a month and got so tired of it that most of us deleted the app. we also finished Overcooked 2 within a day, raced through the Peggles, and played so many hours of Mario-Kart one day that we haven’t picked it up since. the giant L-shaped sofa we got in October was really conducive to group gaming, and now there’s someone playing games at pretty much every waking hour of the day. shoutout to Wii Play’s tank game for never getting boring
• drawing this as the final project for CMS.100 (intro to media studies)
• Boston adventures—the apartment my house podded with would often go on ‘Boston adventures,’ in which they’d explore Boston via bike or foot, but it got cold DUMMY quick, so I only went on one. it was incredible; we walked along the beach at night and did a giant loop around the surrounding area
• sous-vide-ing a steak on a Wednesday for NO REASON—it was so good lol
• walking to 7/11 late at night—and by walking I mean frolicking, gamboling, romping, etc. even when it’s bitterly cold, i’d never turn down an offer to accompany someone to 7/11 to get snacks. parading in the middle of the streets of Cambridge at 1 am never fails to make me feel like the main character
• blasting 2010’s bops in our basement—I danced so hard and screamed so loud that I got painful muscle aches and a sore throat and thought I had COVID. that part wasn’t fun
• making bad decisions—like going on Omegle to tutor people in math and seeing exactly what we were joking about seeing, or making TikToks so bad we deleted them instantly
• dancing with Mocha Moves members at the park—I met up with some dance team friends (socially-distant, of course) a few times in the park near my house. we danced to old choreography together and also participated in some community Zumba from afar. it was a lot of fun…I miss being able to dance with my team in person :’)
• having to have glass-cleaning parties like five times—let me explain. seven people sharing a normal-sized kitchen is a bit rough, so we stored some miscellaneous glass bottles on top of the fridge. however, the short people in the house can’t see where exactly the bottles are, so sometimes when we’d open the fridge, the bottles would fall and shatter all over the kitchen. this happened MANY times before we committed to moving them elsewhere. we never said MIT students have common sense…

yep. it was chaotic, but fun.

can’t wait for IAP!!