king of boston -> king of the world? by Angie F. '28

i. the sleeping hummingbird

Here’s something you should know about me: everyone at MIT calls me the King of Boston. And by “everyone” I of course mean myself and about ten other people I have somehow coerced into deriving amusement from my ridiculous, self-indulgent bit. It all started when I was here over the summer for Interphase⁠01 Interphase is a two-year academic support program run by the Office of Minority Education with a seven-week summer component meant to ease the transition into MIT for incoming freshmen and provide them with all the support they might need to succeed while they’re there. In short, you get to build a strong foundation in some of the subjects the rest of your coursework will likely build upon, befriend some of the most interesting people you’ve ever met, learn to balance classes with extracurriculars and social life early, and get a head start on exploring networking, makerspaces, and some other things. Most importantly, you’ll find a little community of students with similar backgrounds to rely on throughout your time at MIT. I couldn't recommend it enough to prospective students! , truly away from home for the first time and overwhelmed by the feeling of having an entire city stretch out before me after a lifetime of short beachside buildings and suburban sprawl. Everyone else there either knew as much as I did or more, with the exception being my friends from out of town who came to visit a couple of weeks in. As shaky and new as it was, my status as a local cemented me as their weekend trip’s official tour guide. I took us up through the Infinite and down into the tunnels, running across the bridge and sailing around in swan boats, wandering through the Boston Public Library and diving into the MFA. However, my Google Maps abilities only took me so far, and I often found myself repeating streets, hopelessly misinterpreting T routes (at one point, our group of three ended up on two separate Green Line trains⁠02 look up the green line map. LOOK. UP. THE. GREEN. LINE. MAP. this one isnt even my fault ok , neither of which was going towards our intended destination), and spinning around as I desperately tried to align myself with the patient app’s arrow.

found footage (my friend getting taken away by the green line #ripbozo)

“Angie,” my friends would ask me, “are you sure you know where you’re going?”

“Of course I do,” I’d shrug as I brought my phone closer and closer to my face. “I’m the King of Boston.”

Somehow, even after the trip ended, the nickname stuck with me…

…and, eventually, others.

I even dressed as the King of Boston for Halloween, a completely nonsensical costume I had to explain to quite literally every person who passed me by.

oh brother

To this day, I’m not sure why I’ve become so enamored with this little identity I’ve created for myself. I guess it’s because it’s just that: an identity I’ve created for myself. When I first got into MIT, I barely slept for four straight nights, the pure excitement coursing through my veins keeping my eyes plastered open for hours on end. When I got here for the summer, I found myself spending copious amounts of time staring up at my ceiling in the dark once again, overwhelmed by the feeling that, here, I could finally be wherever, whatever, and whoever I wanted to be. When the semester kicked off, those sleepless nights persisted, but some of the excitement gave way to something else, a restlessness I couldn’t really name. I’d fall asleep and find it still there when I woke up, following me through morning classes and afternoon dining hall visits and, finally, nights spent on Killian Court staring at the dome. Lit up from within in blinding, brilliant white, it towered over me in a way that seemed to say “ok, you can be whatever you want. So, what’s it going to be?”

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I applied to MIT dead set on course 6-4⁠03 AI and Decision-Making , on making my way to the forefront of AI development and steering it to responsible yet world-altering growth. Over the summer, I fell in love with the idea of building something I could see and feel and turned to engineering: course 2⁠04 Mechanical Engineering to be more specific. Once the semester kicked off, though, I found myself writing literature reviews on human-robot interaction in space for my UROP⁠05 UROP = the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program! Last semester, I was working on developing the Zero Robotics program at the Media Lab's Space Enabled group :) , finding beauty in the synchronicity and the mystery of molecular biology through 7.012⁠06 one of the introductory biology classes that can be used to satisfy the institute-wide biology requirement , and yearning for a return to my high school programming days as one of my best friends walked me through his 6.1210⁠07 Introduction to Algorithms pset during one of our many late night study sessions. 

the 6.1210 pset in question:

i think i woke up at like 3pm on this day

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In high school, the goals I could choose for myself were fairly limited: it was very easy to choose a few and zero in on them, mapping out a clear course of action I could attack with laser focus. Now, though, the world was opening up before me, and it was more beautiful than it was terrifying, by a lot. But, on some days, that gap between awe and fear closed, and I’d feel like I was already losing a race I’d just started. Once again, I had nights I’d spend wide awake, only this time gripped by the vision of myself five, ten years from now looking back on the time I spent in this place full of opportunities and knowing that I failed to grasp the right one. 

The September wind blowing through Beacon Street carries this fear out of me for the first time. “Maybe it’s immature, but all I know is that I want to do something great. I just have no clue how,” I tell a friend as we make our way through the night. For some reason, something within me braces itself for his response, for the dismissal that will surely follow. Nearly everyone I’ve met here so far is driven by a specific set of passions; any mark they want to leave on the world is intertwined with that. Focusing on impact alone feels incomplete, naive. 

But what I hear instead is “King of Boston to king of the world.” All I can do is nod. 

ii. the murdered dead of armies

As the months pass, this conversation stays with me; so do the sleepless nights, my mounting indecision. And I feel myself moving slower, reaching for opportunities with less vigor, burdened by the terrible feeling of being behind. Whatever it is I’ll eventually realize I want to do, others will have wanted to do it for longer, and it’ll be too late for me to catch up and leave any kind of impact. Initially, I’m not consciously aware of this conclusion I’ve reached, but it’s started dragging at my ankles by first semester finals week and pulling me back with all its might by the end of IAP⁠08 stands for Independent Activities Period, in which MIT students have the option to come to campus during the month of January and learn or do whatever they want. i have an older post about this and you should definitely read it :p . When I preregister for classes, all I can think about are my friends who took them freshman fall, or tested or petitioned out of them before I even knew they existed. When I quit my UROP, as I finally admit to myself that the work has lost its luster and I likely won’t be an engineer and need to set myself on a path that isn’t robotics, I feel like I’ve let go of a lifeline, like I’ll never have another opportunity like that again. 

I fail at one thing, and then another, and then I register for 14.01⁠09 Introduction to Microeconomics , because I tell myself that I likely won’t find that path that I long for, where I find work I can absolutely lose myself in and put every beautiful thing I’ve been given by the world (my hands my eyes my ears my single in Maseeh my late nights in Barker⁠10 Barker Engineering Library, a beautiful library under the Great Dome my hallways full of research posters all my brilliant beautiful friends) back into it ten times over, so I might as well ensure I’m successful by at least some metric: that is to say, I might as well make some money. And there are many really important and entertaining problems in econ, anyway, even if it isn’t what I think would satisfy me long term. This, of course, comes with its own set of problems, because even though the path I’d follow as a financebro is clearer to me than the one I’d follow as a course ? focusing on ?, I never once delude myself into thinking it will be easy: some of the smartest people I know have already started working on getting into the field much harder and earlier than I am now, and who am I to think I could measure up to them? The direction gives me some comfort, though, and the kinds of problems I’d be solving at any of the summer internship positions I look at in vain are complex and interesting: for a few weeks, it’s something close to enough, though I know the whole time I’m turning into something I’m not. 

Then, I bomb an interview. My interview skills are mostly fine, though I’m talking at a million miles an hour and drinking way too much water; I like the MBA student interviewing me; and the position sounds genuinely fascinating, largely because I’d have a completely technical role that wouldn’t require any financial knowledge I couldn’t reasonably develop myself in the next few months. But I’m, to put it lightly, technically incompetent, and it embarrasses me so much I briefly consider emailing the interviewer to report that I’d hit my head on the way to the interview and not realized I was concussed until after. I twitch every time I think about it for the rest of the day, and the day after that. Overall I’m pretty chill about it. And I keep applying for jobs (though I retreat from finance with my tail between my legs and aim for more pure CS stuff), and I ramp up my work for Arcturus outreach. 

Arcturus is our autonomous robotics team, and they build an autonomous boat every year for the Roboboat competition. STEM-related community service was a big part of who I was in high school, and I wanted to make sure I kept at it at MIT, where I was in such a unique position to give back. So, early fall semester, I joined Arcturus as the head of their outreach program. Every time I show up to the Seagrant lab⁠11 Seagrant is the lab where Arcturus HQ is located, as well as a lot of other cool ocean-related work! , to drag Fish n’ Ships⁠12 the name of the boat Arcturus built for their most recent competition through Cambridgeport on a little wagon or to teach kids to make their own robot boats and stop them from trying to tear the lab door hinges off with PVC cutters⁠13 real thing that happened , I catch myself staring at every sign and every piece of machinery, asking the Arcturus team members about what other kind of research goes on in the lab. 

i helped run a class on underwater robotics for splash, a program where mit students can teach middle and high schoolers classes on pretty much whatever they want!

in the arcturus splash class, kids had an hour to build a robot they would then use to compete with other students in a bracket-style battlebots competition

we ran a seasonal exhibit on our team at the mit museum!

let me drive the boat...

@ seagrant!

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Maybe I just miss home, I tell myself: for most of my life, the beach was never more than thirty seconds away. But I hear myself telling so many of my friends about this one researcher’s work learning from seal whiskers to create better sensors, and a few weeks later, I’m at an electrical engineering and computer science summer UROP fair and nothing intrigues me more than the lab creating machine learning (ML) models for ocean dynamics. And, in spite of me sending the same copy-paste interest email to most everyone who attended, that is the lab that gives me the most enthusiastic response, and the one I end up working with. A few days after my work with them starts, I find myself at an Arcturus outreach event telling the team leads that, depending on how I feel about ML stuff following my UROP, I’ll likely join their autonomy team. I’ve never thought about it before then, but as it comes out of my mouth I realize it feels right. 

On my second 14.01 midterm– which, thanks to flu b keeping me in bed for both midterm #1 and its makeup, is worth almost half my grade, putting me in a spot where I’d have to do incredibly, incredibly well on both remaining exams in order to get a grade I could achieve with a nontrivial amount of goofing off in my other classes– I answer a question I have absolutely zero clue how to approach with a paragraph on seal whisker sensors and a note informing the grader that I will likely be dropping the class, but had fun learning what I did and thought the lectures were enjoyable. After the exam, I do just that, then close my tab full of practice exams, open up Google Collab, and get to work on my UROP.

seal whisker research

the good thing about cfd research is that even when you mess up a little the results still look pretty. it's great for morale (assuming your code runs....)

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iii. the sun that eats you as you face it

“Everyone here is here because they’ve been obsessed with something.” It’s first semester again and Emily and I are sitting on my dorm room floor, closing off one of our semiregular late night debriefs. We’ve already gone through her frat and my UROP and her rocket teams– yes, teams. She’s designing the payload for one and serving as head of explosives for the other. When she said this, I couldn’t help but remember the build team events I attended during orientation week and all the work that comes with just being part of one of them, and my eyes widened. But so did hers, and the fire that never leaves them singed every concern in my mind to dust: if there’s anyone out there who can take on this world (and then everything outside of it– she’s a rocket scientist, after all), it’s Emily.

I nod, vigorously. “I think about this all the time. Like, I look at people and I think ‘you’ve wanted something so much you haven’t been able to sleep before’”

She smiles wide. “I love asking people here what their thing is.” I feel a pang of secondhand fear at the thought of being on the receiving end of that question, but nod in agreement as to not break out of the ping pong rhythm of this excited back and forth I find myself falling into with my friends whenever we remember where we are– a place that is somehow both unfathomably bigger than anything we could dream up and more welcoming than any of the smaller ones we passed through on the way here. And also because I really, really do agree. “Do you want to hear a poem about this that Jack showed me yesterday?” I ask. “Maybe he’s already recited it for you.” Our classmate Jack loves poetry– and physics and philosophy and riding motorcycles and biotechnology and country music and about a million other things. My dad calls him a Renaissance man, but Emily and I get to call him one of our best friends, and this means we hear a lot of poems.

carlos + me + jack

“He hasn’t, read it to me! But keep it under a minute. I have to go to bed.”

I don’t need to read it. I just pause to bring it back to my mind, which only takes a second: after all, it’s been lingering in my head since I first heard it, through dark, wind-slapped walks to and from the library with my hands shoved into my pockets and the groggy mornings after I spend dragging myself out of bed. Once I start, I stutter once or twice– but never stop. 

if you’re going to try, go all the

way.

otherwise, don’t even start.

 

if you’re going to try, go all the

way. this could mean losing girlfriends,

wives, relatives, jobs and

maybe your mind.

 

go all the way.

it could mean not eating for 3 or

4 days.

it could mean freezing on a

park bench.

it could mean jail,

it could mean derision,

mockery,

isolation.

isolation is the gift,

all the others are a test of your

endurance, of

how much you really want to

do it.

At this point, a smile starts to spread across my face: I’ve read the poem well over a dozen times and never made it through without one. 

and you’ll do it

despite rejection and the

worst odds

and it will be better than

anything else

you can imagine.

 

if you’re going to try,

go all the way.

there is no other feeling like

that.

you will be alone with the

gods

and the nights will flame with

fire.

 

do it, do it, do it.

do it.

 

all the way

all the way.

you will ride life straight to

perfect laughter,

it’s the only good fight

there is.

do it do it do it do it all the way all the way

Throughout the poem, Emily’s face has stayed still, her eyes appearing to be trained on the ground but clearly focused on something far, far beyond it. For a second, I worry that she didn’t like it, but then she pulls her phone out and opens her Notes app. “What’s it called? That made me think about my rockets. I want to memorize it too.” 

My smile widens. “‘Roll the Dice’ by Charles Bukowski.” We exchange plans for the morning– she’s going to hit the gym and then work on her rockets, I’m going to read for 3.091⁠14 “Introduction — and with a hug, she leaves me with my desk and my books and my laptop and, of course, my poem. All of a sudden, my morning reading seems very doable tonight. I walk out to grab some late night⁠15 perk of living in Maseeh (or Simmons)-- dining hall serves food from 10PM to 1AM on weekdays :) , passing by the floor lounge and seeing Emily, who’d stopped to talk to some friends on the way back to her room. We all wave at each other as I slip past, Emily’s voice ringing behind me. “You don’t understand how excited I am about my rockets, Izaan.”

I feel my smile creep back in, and with it comes a strange sense of certainty I don’t normally feel. All of a sudden, I’m back to a night a few weeks ago that ended in me walking down Amherst Street with Jack, my vision fixing itself to the orange statues peeking out the glowing windows of the Media Lab as I let the autumn night’s wind do its job.

the media lab during the day

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“Every moment here feels like a dream. Both in the–” I stumble over my words for a bit. “I’m so tired. Both in the way you’d think and also like– you know when you’re just waking up and you’re thinking about the dream you just had, and you’re already kind of forgetting it? I’ll do things and it feels like I’m already awake, remembering them.” Pause. “I need to figure out how to word that better.”

“I understand what you mean.”

“I keep thinking about how this is the most important place I’ll ever be.”

“No, it’s not.” Ping pong ball drops. Or maybe it was never there to begin with. “You’re here for a reason. This place is transitive and transitory: transitory because you’re going to leave, whether you like it or not, and transitive because it’s taking you somewhere.”

Writing this all down over half a year later, I no longer know what I said after that. Even as I said it back then, I don’t think I knew.

iv. you know and i know and thee know

I know that, one day, I’ll find something I love as much as Emily loves her rockets. And I know that, for now, I get to spend my days writing code that helps us understand our oceans a little bit better every time I run it, and I’m happy about it. Maybe this is that something, or maybe I’ll go back to mechanical engineering, or biology, or space exploration. Or maybe even finance… though I doubt it. But every day, I meet more brilliant people who were once just like me: undergrads who only knew they wanted to maximize their impact on the world, with no clue how or if they’d do it. And, though I still have my fair share of restless nights, I feel a little more at peace every time our paths cross. 

Part of harbor seals’ remarkable ability to use their whiskers to sense their surroundings comes from their ability to keep them still relative to their movements: it’s hypothesized that their undulatory and asymmetric shape helps them reduce the amount that they vibrate in response to forces that affect other natural and manmade sensors. Whether their bodies are twisting lazily along with the current or writhing wildly through the water as they chase after a fish, in the seal’s frame of reference, their whiskers are almost completely still. And maybe that’s all that matters. Keeping certain parts of myself still no matter how much the rest of me moves. If I stop doing STEM outreach, or writing for this blog, or letting my friends in for late night floor talks, even if it means I have more time to lock in and do twelve classes and three UROPs and lock in, I’ll be bastardizing parts of myself I need to guide the rest of me forward. Maybe I just have to focus on keeping them intact, and on staying in motion, and everything else will fall into place. 

v. we will defeat death

It’s freshman fall again, and Jack and I are staring out at the skyline. The most important place in the world.

“I don’t know,” I sigh, on the tail end of a ramble about my most recent misadventure, a few moments of hubris-induced hope followed by a considerable blow to my ego. “I guess I just wanted to be king for a day.”

“You’re king for more than a day,” he tells me. And I believe him. And for a moment I’m so aware of this dream, lying awake in my bed as the sunrise warms the brick walls of Maseeh, and each cell in my body feels razor-sharply focused, still sensing the world I just crawled out of and managing to stay perfectly still in order to take it all in. I’ve been here for almost a year, and all I want is still to be able to take it all in.

the section headings on this post are from my favorite bukowski poem, if you havent read it i highly recommend looking up "you know and i know and thee know" :)

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