(I guess the title should say “I will graduate today” since it’s now 1 AM, but I’ve grown too fond of the title to change it :P)

I didn’t do a proper graduation post last year because I was tired, and I wasn’t even sure what to say. Now that this is very likely the last time I’ll be at MIT, I’m going to take an honest crack at a proper Graduation Post. Bear with me!

Becoming a blogger

Being a blogger has been the most favorite thing I’ve done at MIT. I got what I wanted to get out of it, and much more.

I didn’t even read the MIT Blogs until the August before I came to MIT. I didn’t know it existed, mostly because I really wanted to get into MIT all throughout high school, and I didn’t want to jinx my chances of getting in by interacting with MIT-related content. I dunno. When I found out that a good handful of my SSP friends at MIT were applying to be a blogger, I decided to shoot my shot as well. I wanted to carve out a space online where I could show off my creative voice, like the people I used to follow when I was younger (e.g. Allie Brosh, Kate Beaton). On the MIT Blogs, I got to feel out the kind of voice I wanted to lean into, and what I liked to write about that energized me, in front of a specific audience that wasn’t too large that it was overwhelming.

That being said, the blogs don’t always show how tight-knit the blogger community itself can get. For the time that I’ve been a blogger, I got to be surrounded by some of the coolest people I’ve been around. I’m so happy that I got to meet all these guys. It never felt like a job to me. Heck, a couple of weeks ago, Petey and Ceri took all the graduating bloggers out to dinner, and we spent about 3-4 hours just vibing and talking about all sorts of stuff. Even during the school year, I looked forward to going to blogger meetings, and I got FOMO whenever I had to miss one. I’m not even someone who gets FOMO that often.

I also want to say a special thank you to Petey and Ceri and Jeremy and Kellen (from the olden days), who were people I looked up to while I was still trying to find footing as a fresh young adult (and Sara and Karen and Sam and other people I’m definitely forgetting right now, sorry!). They took a chance on me, gave me opportunities to work on artistic projects with MIT Admissions, and allowed me to express myself while I was still finding my voice.

Learning new skills and interests

I learned how to code and I learned how to write fiction, two things that I wanted to get into back in high school. Learning to code made me a better writer, and learning to write made me a better coder.

Back in freshman year, I hedged that I was a “(near) beginner” at programming, but I was just straight-up a beginner. The most advanced concept I learned before coming to MIT was the for loop. When it got covered in the first week of 6.0001 (now 6.100A), I dreaded the learning curve that I was going to have to go through to even think about graduating with a CS degree here.⁠01 I was really close to switching my major to CMS (Comparative Media Studies) a few times. Which, to be honest, I still would've really enjoyed and gotten a lot out of. Getting over that was grueling, but I got really lucky that I actually enjoyed coding despite the struggle, and thus I could have the patience to sit and code for long stretches at a time.

Coding was just one of those skills that I thought would be cool to pick up at some point in my life. But when it came to writing, especially writing fiction, I was a lot more daunted by jumping into it. I had always liked to write stories—I wanted to grow up and become a movie director all throughout elementary school, and I had all these .docx files about the kinds of stories I wanted to write. I just couldn’t get myself to write the actual story.

After living with Fatima for two years and listening to her talk about the writing classes she took and the poetry she wrote, I mustered up the courage to take my first ever writing class in junior year. It’s probably the best choice I ever made at MIT. I couldn’t write stories on my own before because I didn’t have enough confidence in myself. But after learning the fundamentals of fiction, going through workshops, and writing some complete (albeit not that great lol) short stories by myself, it gave me the confidence to experiment with writing fiction on my own from there.

One of the mindsets I had to develop while learning to code was to take a problem, break it down, and then figure out how to create modules of a solution that could logically chain together to produce what I want. I could break down a problem, but because I was so used to the holistic big-picture nature of visual art, it was difficult for me to stay patient with myself while I was in the depths of whatever cause-and-effect chain of computations I was trying to make. When I took writing fiction more seriously, that skill naturally fed in, and it wasn’t as daunting anymore to build up a sequential structure for the story. And then writing inspired me to write code that (hopefully) makes sense visually, as well as write up better documentation that doesn’t just explain the technical elements of the program, but coherently expresses it for someone who’s seeing the code for the very first time.

College life

MIT was a good fit for me. College life in general was not.

I don’t regret going to college at all, and I got what I wanted to ultimately get out of it, which was learning and honing a specific set of skills that would give me a headstart in a particular field, or at the very least give me a set of skills that I could carry with me regardless of what job I end up in. For me, it was a worthwhile use of the last few years. I just didn’t enjoy being a college student, and I don’t think this would’ve changed regardless of where I went to college.

I’ve found out that I’m much more introverted than I thought I was. Not that I don’t like talking to people—I really enjoy talking with friends, and I don’t mind talking to strangers—but I need dedicated time and space to recharge by myself or I become grouchy and tense. Even with my busy schedule in high school, I could still kind of separate myself from my student identity once I got home from school. Once I became a college student, I didn’t like how the boundary between my academic life and my personal life blurred together. Even when I enjoyed being at MIT specifically, being surrounded by college-related events and college-related people all the time was tiresome for me, and it took a while for me to get used to. There was a period of time where I felt like I had to be “on” as a Diligent Student even when I was just resting in my room.

I’m going to miss the specific quirks of being a college student, but I don’t want to prolong my time as one. The mere thought of staying in university any longer makes me antsy.

Very, very mixed feelings about AI

I think the tech behind AI is really cool, and I love learning about it. I’m very happy that I chose the major that I chose. I’m looking forward to expanding my expertise in this field (or anything related, I guess) as I join projects in the future.

And in a stubborn and masochistic way, maybe even a little prideful of me, I’m determined to stick around AI because I HATE how it is getting pushed out into the world right now.

I want to first give credit to those, including researchers and engineers and legislators, who are working in interpretability and explainability, sustainability, and regulation of AI products. I’ve come across promising AI projects, especially if it’s an AI tool that has been thoughtfully and rigorously designed within the context of a specific environment, alongside human workers and aligned with human workers. There are projects out there in science that are trying to find what AI tools can do to advance discovery in research, that humans just can’t do right now no matter how much time and brainpower we have.

It’s also worth mentioning that something that’s “AI” doesn’t necessarily fall under the umbrella of generative AI, and doesn’t always require an absurd amount of computing resources (not that these examples are exempt from discussion about ethics, just that it might require a different angle). I don’t want the efforts that I’ve mentioned above to be dismissed just because it has something to do with the concept of AI. When I use the shorthand “AI” in this section, I’m mainly talking about what it largely represents in the mainstream at this very moment.

I’m going to graduate tomorrow, and I really hope I don’t hear the kind of speech that boils down to “AI is the future, it’s here, it’s inevitable, and we count on you guys to lead the revolution.” I agree that we need more diverse perspectives in AI development spaces. But I’m so hopeful that somebody in any of the graduation ceremonies at MIT will at least urge us to be wary of where AI is headed right now. For those going into AI development to be thoughtful about what they are creating, to encourage the graduating class to not just lead AI development but steer it in a direction that will be more humane, to not assume that human agency in of itself is a technical error.

I’m concerned about the blatant disregard I’ve seen from city officials and tech businessmen alike towards living communities, especially those in rural areas, who are concerned about their water and their energy. I’m concerned about all the trust that’s being put into AI agents, especially given the risks that have already emerged like user manipulation and security issues,⁠02 I saw yet another news clip about an AI that accidentally deleted the database of a company. The anchors concluded with the question of whether AI is growing too much in power. And I say no, it's that we're delegating too much power to them. and what that reflects about those who are implementing them with little discernment. I’ve come across online job postings that have given me the impression that they just want to use me to get rid of other employees quick, before probably terminating my own role soon after I complete my task. Major media empires hiring for generative video AI engineers, companies looking for people who can build “emotional support AI”, companies hiring for “AI artists”⁠03 By this, I specifically mean prompt engineers—stupid title by the way—who give prompts for a generative AI model to spit out so-called artwork. (for fuck’s sake).

I personally want AI research to keep going and new insights to be made about what we’ve created, and not in spite of these concerns at all. I’m excited to see more thoughtful, carefully-designed niches AI can fit in that can further scientific knowledge in ways that people cannot safely do themselves. I want to see some kind of breakthrough with AI interpretability or AI explainability, where an AI model is no longer treated as a black box or just a jumble of numbers. I want to see sustainability become a normalized and prioritized subject matter when designing an AI model, and I want to see more regulation around data center construction, and around training data curation. I want to see people who can communicate how AI works for the broader audience, to de-mystify AI and inform the public about what certain AI models do and depend on, outside of what is described by promotional company material.

I want to see MIT’s prestige be used to encourage us to think critically about the fields that we’re entering for the next few years, and use the resources and opportunities we’ve received to shift the paradigm towards a trajectory that will hopefully be aligned with how engineering can serve people, not to pressure them. I don’t want to sit in Killian Court and be flattered into upholding the so-called “inevitability” of AI, in exchange for validating my work ethic or my intelligence or whatever.

I hate the framing that AI is inevitable. Yes, it’s hard to un-learn a piece of technology that has already shown promising results. But sometimes I’ll come across some kind of interface, like a web browser, that has made opting out of AI increasingly opaque or just straight up nonexistent. It is disingenuous to claim that “AI is inevitable” when the choice to opt out of them is being deliberately removed.

To tie all this to my Gen Z peers booing AI at some of the recent commencement ceremonies, this reaction shouldn’t be dismissed as anti-innovation or willful ignorance. It’s a matter of trust. Even if this whole hype around slapping AI agents in everything falls on its face (which I honestly feel like it will), this wave of AI-boosting has revealed a concerning amount of widespread apathy towards new and vulnerable members of the workforce. There is a lot of lost trust that will be very difficult to get back.

Being a little different than I was 5 years ago

I’m coming out of MIT with a bunch of gripes about my experience. I wish I had better professors for some of my classes. I wish I didn’t feel like being ground to dust, and I wish my friends didn’t feel like being ground to dust. I wish I didn’t spend “the best four years of my life” staring at my iPad for most of the time. I wish I was good at my major when I started. I wish I was more extroverted. I wish I didn’t have anxiety for half of the time that I’ve been here.

The reason why it was hard for me to write a graduation post last year was that I didn’t know how to reconcile these gripes, when I felt like I had to write a conclusion with rose-tinted glasses. But I’m glad I took an extra year to go for an M.Eng. Obviously because I get a master’s degree now, but also because I got to have time to reflect on my journey through MIT. Because for all the disappointment that I had about the college experience I envisioned for myself, I’ve received gifts that I didn’t even imagine would be in my future, yet influenced me in a way that shaped my specific MIT experience. Maybe I’m just now receiving my rose-tinted glasses, but I prefer this weirdly-yet-endearingly-shaped experience way more than the picturesque experience I wanted for myself.

I’ve become a much better collaborator. I discovered a love for writing. I discovered so many cool friends who also love art and writing. I’m no longer petrified by the thought of coding. In fact, I have ideas for coding projects that I want to make. I know how to put aside my fear of looking like a fool, in order to prioritize learning something new in the moment. I’ve learned how to ask better questions. I tempered an anxiety disorder by learning to skateboard. I took a public speaking class and made a friend there. I’ve gained a newfound appreciation for my past teachers. I got to make my roommates laugh, and then post those jokes online to share with readers around the world.

I’ve been so lucky to meet some of the coolest, kindest, funniest, creative, outstanding people I got to meet in the last five years I’ve been here.

IHTFP. IHTFP.

Miscellaneous

• Favorite MIT experience other than the blogs: Doing a MISTI internship in the UK last summer. Shoutout to my team at Bristol Robotics Laboratory.
• Random thing I’ll miss: My room in junior/senior year had a straight view of the Charles River and the Boston skyline. I still miss opening the blinds to watch the city lights before going to sleep.
• Song I associate with MIT for some reason: “cz” by Mk.gee. I played this on repeat when I was studying for my finals in freshman fall. Whenever it shows up on Spotify, it reminds me of the evenings I spent in Hayden Library trying to understand what the hell I learned for the past few months.
• Finally, a playlist of songs I collected since 2022 about how I felt being a college student at the time. Listen in order!