it’s always day 1 by Alan Z. '23, MEng '24

Yesterday was the first day of my senior spring, which is also the last first day of my undergraduate studies at MIT. It is the kind of milestone that keeps appearing, with an increasing sense of urgency. The last day of your last fall semester. The last day of your last IAP. The first day of your last Course 21W class, your last Course 6 class, so on and so forth.

It is the kind of milestone which deserves reflection, but, since I am at least honest enough to acknowledge that it will not receive such thought, I am instead going to erect a shrine to it by documenting everything which occurs, in the style of posts by Shuli and Cami before me.

I mention a lot of building numbers in this post. For more information on these, please go to whereis.mit.edu, or read this helpful CJ blog post!

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part 1: getting to class

8:50 AM: My first alarm—a primer alarm, just to make sure I’m awake enough to hear the second one—goes off. I turn it off and go back to sleep.

9:15 AM: My second alarm goes off. This time, I acknowledge it. Instead of getting up, I lie in bed, check my email, and read Twitter for a few minutes. It is senior year, and I have gotten the art of “getting to class exactly on time” down to a science; I can afford to waste a few more minutes.

9:19 AM: I finally get out of bed. I go through my morning routine slowly—I don’t believe in breakfast, so I skip it, but even despite that:

9:55 AM: I have gotten an unusually slow start to the day. I put on my jacket, shove my books and laptop into my bag, and I try to book it out of Next House as fast as I can. This is usually a ten-minute walk, but, on a good day, that time can be cut down to seven or eight.

10:04 AM: I am at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Amherst Alley. At MIT, classes start five minutes after their scheduled start time,⁠01 at "MIT time". so I have a minute to make it to class, which is just across the road and up a flight of stairs. The red light taunts me.

part 2: class?

10:05 AM: I arrive at 21W.743, which is supposed to be a class on “Voice and Meaning: Speaking to Readers through Memoir,” and which I am attending with the intention to drop.⁠02 this is because it is one of three classes I am signed up for which can satisfy my writing major requirements, and I only need to take one. On the other hand, I also need to get into at least one, and some of the classes have enrollment limits. I am around twenty seconds late, which is a mild tragedy. The professor is not here, but two other students are. Eventually, we are joined by another two students, to make a total of five people. The room is dead silent.

10:20 AM: The professor is still not here. I pull out my laptop and start preparing notes for my SuperUROP meeting after class. Two of the people start talking, and, eventually, all five of us are talking to each other, wondering where the professor is. After all, we haven’t gotten any emails from them, or any other emails about the class, so…what’s going on?

10:28 AM: The following conversation ensues:

A: This is too much chaos for 10:30 AM.
Me: This is exactly the right amount of chaos for 10:30 AM.
B: It’s not 10:30 AM; it’s 10:28 AM. We didn’t invent clocks for you to be wrong about what time it is.

10:48 AM: “Has anyone actually emailed the professor?”

11:00 AM: We finally send an email to the professor.

11:08 AM: The first person leaves. At the same time, the Wi-fi in the building—and later, it seems, across campus—slows down to the pace of molasses. What else are we supposed to be doing with our time, if not browsing the Internet?

11:14 AM: Someone walks up to the window, jiggles the door handle slightly, and then leaves. A moment of false hope, so quickly dashed upon the rocks.

11:15 AM: We decide to go over to Building 14 to ask the CMS/W⁠03 the department the course is listed in: Comparative Media Studies and Writing. academic administrator what we should do. The course is scheduled to end at 11:30 anyways, so there’s not much more point in waiting.

11:23 AM: We knock on Shannon’s⁠04 important side note: Shannon is wonderful and always has chocolate, which helps when you need to talk to someone because you're very worried about something academic. door. She tells us “I think that class might have been cancelled.” After waiting for her emails to load on the incredibly slow network, she confirms it and apologizes. We all part ways; I run down to Hayden Library to go and print some documents.

part 3: meeting(s)

11:29 AM: I print out my documents for my first SuperUROP⁠05 SuperUROP is a program where you do research as an undergraduate for a whole year, and sometimes your department gives you a little more money and communications credit. meeting of the semester. It takes a while because, again, the Wi-fi is extremely slow. Truly, I love attending this Institute of Technology.

11:38 AM: I finally make it to my the elevators in the Stata Center and take them up to the eighth floor of the Gates Tower. Just three minutes late—not too bad, all things considered! I’m meeting with the two graduate students and the other SuperUROP I’m working with, on a project about social media regulation. We talk about the work we did last semester, discuss some of the themes of the articles and laws we read, and then begin outlining the paper we want to write.⁠06 highlights of this process include: sections labeled 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', and '0' and 'NOT PRETTY' written in all-caps. I’m excited, because we’re doing a lot of data collection—i.e., reading lots of legal documents—but I’m also nervous, because—wait for it—we’re doing a lot of data collection.

12:11 PM: Mid-meeting, I get an email notification that my advisor has approved my subject selections for the term. I click the big button that says “Submit registration” and bam! Now, finally, I am definitely a student at MIT in my senior spring, with classes and all that jazz.⁠07 I met with my advisor last Thursday, during Registration Week, to talk about my subject selections and all that, but he didn't put it into the system until today. Not a huge deal, but it is kinda funny. Very exciting.

12:40 PM: Our meeting wraps up. I chat with my fellow SuperUROP for a bit while the elevator takes us back down to the ground floor, and then we part ways. I head over to the Forbes Family Cafe for lunch, where I bump into Jerry M. ’23. I eat my pizza quickly while we talk; neither of us have had our first class of the day yet, but he’s heading off to Harvard for class afterwards, where he’s taking a class on “Financial Crises and Recessions of the 21st Century.”

We talk for a little while about it being our senior year, about the way we used to attend all of our classes religiously as freshmen, even if they were at 9 AM. I still have some 9:30 AM classes, although I’m trading that off with having no classes on Friday. Jerry’s classes don’t start until the afternoon, but he still has to get up early so he can work on his research. Then again, our sleep schedules haven’t changed that much; I remember that, in my very first class at MIT—a recitation for 18.022 (Calculus II)—I ended up falling asleep because I’d stayed up too late.

12:55 PM: I finish my pizza. I say goodbye to Jerry and begin my slow wandering towards class, which is nearby in Building 36. Somewhat dazed, lost in the spell of the “free” 10 minutes before a class which ultimately must be squandered, I accidentally pull a push door for longer than I would like to admit. Fortunately, I eventually make it to class.

part 4: class two, electric boogaloo

1:00 PM: It’s not MIT time yet, but the professor is asking how people learned about this class. The answers vary: a CTF⁠08 capture-the-flag, a term of art for 'cybersecurity competitions where you try to get into intentionally vulnerable software'. server, a friend, posters, special subject listings, etc. The room is starting to fill up, but the professor reassures us that “according to the registrar, we should just fit all the students who are registered.”

1:05 PM: And we’re off! This class is 6.S983,⁠09 the 'S' here stands for special subject, which basically just means 'good luck Googling this course in another five years.' In past years, the course has been offered under the number 6.888. or “Secure Hardware Design.” It happens to be a graduate-level class, and, correspondingly, there seem to be a lot of graduate students in the room, or maybe just particularly jaded undergrads. I have seen two or three people I recognize in a room of thirty or forty, which is not too bad.

We talk over why the class is important or interesting. It turns out hardware attacks are particularly difficult to fix because, often, they are a consequence of desirable characteristics of the design itself,⁠10 for example, in order to make your computer go faster, your CPU sometimes performs something called 'speculative execution,' where it guesses the piece of code it's going to execute next. This is great—until parts of that execution is leftover in some micro-architectural state, and now an attacker can figure out data they weren't supposed to have, because that code was never supposed to run in the first place. However, if you turn this behavior off, computer performance tanks, because it turns out we can get really good at guessing, instead of waiting to know what comes next! You can Google 'Spectre CPU attack' if you want to know more. meaning that preventing them requires making a lot of tradeoffs. We review a lot of content on computer architecture from 6.004,⁠11 Computation Structures, or, 'what actually goes on between your apps and pure physics.' which I am more than familiar with, given that I took the graduate-level course on the subject last semester. I take notes anyways; I’ve switched back to paper notes, and so I do my best to keep up, just to jog and cement my memory.

2:07 PM: My attention drifts. I check my Discord, where someone has texted me asking if I want to pick up a commitment for later this spring. I’m tempted. I think about it, in the background, for the rest of the day.

2:20 PM: Class begins to wrap up, as we talk about logistics, between all the different kinds of assignments and whatnot. The professor, who I’ve had for some of my other classes in the past, is very nice, but that doesn’t mean the class is going to be easy; she mentions that one of the labs has been considered “really hard” by previous students. “Try Lab 2, and see whether or not you want to drop the course,” she says. “It used to be the first lab in the class…it messed some people up.”

Still, I’m impressed by the thoughtful design of the class and the way it’s run, with lots of opportunities for feedback, lots of opportunities to get support on various portions, and very clear communication about deadlines and assignment weighting and so forth. I’m excited; I really like the professor, and I really like this kind of low-level computing, so I think it’s gonna be a good time.

part 6: a small break

2:24 PM: After class ends, I head over to the fourth floor of Building 12, which happens to be one of my favorite places to work. Along the way, CJ texts me asking if I want to get dinner together. It is at this point I realize I don’t have a dinner break—I’ve got something from 5 to 7, and from 7 to 10.

I feel a twinge of regret at making such a rookie mistake, but move on quickly. Oh, well. I tell CJ no, and then sit down and work on updating this blog post, fleshing out all the details which have been hastily jotted down in my Google Keep.

3:26 PM: My writing attention span only lasts an hour. I take a break and check the same four apps I always do: Discord, Gmail, Messenger, and Twitter.

3:44 PM: During my break, I learn that the Student Center—where a pipe burst in the extreme cold over the weekend—is now closed until next Sunday, which means that the production of Heathers I have been orchestra directing is now in even more dire straits.⁠12 we had opening night last Friday, and then our shows on Saturday and Sunday were cancelled for this reason. At this point, I am inured to the pain, so I return from my tour of the neighborhood to the land of productive work, and begin reading Exit West, a novel assigned for the Harvard class I’m taking this semester: ENGL CNL, or, “The Novel Lab.” The class is very exciting, especially since I get to write fiction again, and I am enjoying the readings a lot, since I haven’t had the time to really read novels outside of classes! On the other hand, it started two weeks ago, which means I’ve been halfway in school mode ever since. Alas.

The rest of my classes this semester are quite varied: I’m taking 6.1220, “Design and Analysis of Algorithms,” as part of my Course 6 major; 21L.486, “Modern Drama,” and 21L.487, “Modern Poetry,” as part of my Course 21W major, since I’ve written a play and a lot of poetry during my time here; 21M.405, the Chamber Chorus; and 6.UAR, which is the class associated with my SuperUROP. It’s a busy semester, but I’m very excited by most of the classes, and I’m able to drop some classes and still graduate, which is great. I am a little saddened to know that there are a lot of classes in subjects I’m interested in that I will never get to take—some deeper dives into chemistry and biology, or some passing interests in physics, mechanical engineering, or political science that I will not be able satisfy here—but such is life. Alas, alas.

I make a good amount of progress through the book, which is easy, because the book is good and it keeps me wanting more. I don’t want to stop and take notes, but, unfortunately, I have to in order to get through the class, and so I do.

4:34 PM: I stop reading. I send an email for my acapella group. I look at my to-do list, think about it, and then decide to ignore it. I do the same social media tour as before, and then return to reading; this time, I make my way through some of W.H. Auden’s Selected Poems, as part of the reading for my thesis.

4:55 PM. I stop again. Time to move myself to my 5 PM obligation.

part 7: LA (no, not the city)

5:05 PM: I find myself in 38-530, a lab space for electronics that I last stepped foot in Spring 2020, when I took 6.08.⁠13 a class with the handy name "Introduction to EECS via Interconnected Embedded Systems" and which Cami talked about extensively <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/6-08-intro-to-eecs-via-interconnected-embedded-systems/">here</a>. This semester, I am working as a lab assistant (LA) for 6.1900, which is the new and improved “Introduction to Low-level Programming in C and Assembly,” cobbled together from the guts of 6.08 and old 6.004. I check out a lab kit and get to work, running through the lab and the post-lab that the students will be working on on Wednesday, so I can be a helpful resource!

This takes a little longer than I expect it to; I suppose my hands are a little slower than they used to be, since I haven’t wired anything in years.⁠14 on the other hand, we cut our own wires in Spring 2020, which really sounds like an 'old man yells at cloud' type of complaint. BACK IN MY DAY WE USED TO CUT OUR OWN WIRES! I struggle with the breadboard, but the bit-wise operations and stuff work, and, at the very least, the development environment works on my computer. Some other people are not so lucky; I hear lots of grumbling about upgrading operating systems and re-installing Rosetta⁠15 translation software which emulates code written for certain computers (x86) on other computers (ARM). and Visual Studio Code.

6:47 PM: I finish the lab—by the end, I have a working game, which is kind of neat! We haven’t really discussed anything about what to expect on Wednesday, which I’m a little nervous about, but it’s probably fine. I’ve got to get to my next class soon, but I stick around for a few minutes longer, before ditching to go to my next class in 14N-112. I gingerly place my kit at the top of my backpack, which is concerningly full…especially since there are more books to buy in my other classes.

part 7: class three…electric boogalee?

7:03 PM: I arrive outside of 14N-112, where a surprisingly large number of people—including two of my friends!—are gathered, waiting for the start of our class on “Modern Poetry.” The room is locked, and we end up moving over to a random classroom in Building 2 instead, which is just nearby. We spend a concerningly large portion of the class discussing who, exactly, is enrolled in the class, and then proceed to read and discuss Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” The conversation is interesting, but slow and winding, the kind of class where you feel like you are probably learning something based on the quantity of information suffusing through the air, but you are not exactly sure what.

We talk about the myth of Odysseus, the historical development of the myth, the historical context of Tennyson’s poem and his declamatory use of iambic pentameter, so on and so forth. We compare it to Dante’s description of Ulysses—before the unified documents we now call the Iliad and the Odyssey—in Canto 26. It is interesting, but I don’t know what to make of it. Much to think about.

9:05 PM: We take a “five-minute” break which is scheduled to end at 9:12 PM. I get up, stretch my legs, and eat some cookies and oranges. I am definitely starting to get hungry.

9:16 PM: Our break ends. We turn our attention to the syllabus, slowly discussing the poems we will be reading and the structure of the class, before turning our attention to the specific work required for us. I am still considering whether to take this class or 21L.486, but I am not exactly certain. In the meantime, I continue to collect quotes from the professor:

“Read this to your grandmother when she dies…I mean, when she retires.”

“I am trying to chew a cookie and look intelligent at the same time, but this is a nearly impossible combination, so I’m going for the cookie.”

“The COOP doesn’t love you and it doesn’t love books.”

10:06 PM: Class ends. I check in with the professor about the pre-req for the class, since I’ve taken many writing classes before, but none in literature. He says: “Wait for a minute. The next time the topic comes up, lie to me.” I nod solemnly and begin the walk home, along with my two fellow Nexties.

part 8: homecoming

10:27 PM: We arrive back in 4W main lounge, after taking the Tech Shuttle and picking up some packages at desk. I get my Mystery Hunt pin and a book I’m reading for my thesis, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. I finally eat dinner, which consists of a cup of instant ramen, and I play the Heardle with my roommate while it soaks in the hot water. I watch my friend’s world record speedrun for a very specific Minecraft category extension while I eat, asking him questions as we go along. After I finish eating, I spent some more time writing up this post.

11:48 PM: I take another break from writing this post. I wrap up some small tasks I have to finish by tomorrow, including printing the piano accompaniment for my 21M.405 audition tomorrow, which involves two trips down to the Athena cluster:⁠16 a room where MIT used to have computers for shared usage, but which now mostly just holds our printers. one for the first printing, and the second to adjust for a poor page turn. On the second trip up, I buy myself a soda, mostly just for the sugar content.

12:10 AM: I send a text tentatively agreeing to pick up the commitment from earlier in the afternoon, given some additional stipulations, and although I might regret it, I am still extremely excited about it. This, it seems, is why I am always busy—I never quite know when to say ‘no.’ Maybe one day I’ll grow out of it. I prepare my to-do list for tomorrow, and call it a day. Just one more thing left to do: finish this blog post.

12:51 AM: I finally finish writing everything up, and schedule this post for noon. It’s a bit later than I’d like to be up, especially given my wing’s new sleep schedule contest,⁠17 set up, of course, by yours truly. but my audition tomorrow isn’t until 10:30 AM, so I think I’ll live. It’s been a busy first day, without a lot of classwork done, but I suspect that things will be alright, and—in any case—I’m happy with the shape of the day, so I will rest contently, and then on again into the tempest of the semester.