last first day (take 3) by Cami M. '23

113 days.

As of yesterday, I am officially a second semester senior. Every minute that passes by feels crucial, like not a second is even to be wasted. I feel this immense pressure to do it right, even though I don’t even quite understand what right means in this case.

I spent the first month of this year in Europe, studying abroad in Madrid before going on a whirlwind vacation trip with Raymond through the non-Spanish European cities of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. It was the perfect reset before coming back to Boston, because my time there really made me appreciate how much I missed and loved the Boston-Cambridge area. I also just really missed being in a proper routine.

This semester I am taking the most classes I’ve ever taken in my MIT career; not out of a dislike of myself or want of a challenge, but because I need to do this in order to graduate.⁠01 I took too many 3-class semesters and I need 180 units beyond my requirements to graduate and I need 54 more units in order to hit that 180 number.

Luckily, my classes this semester are incredibly exciting and weird and pushing me out of my comfort zone. This semester I’m taking:

• English 189VG – Video Game Storytelling. This is a Harvard class and I’m really enjoying the content so far. We play about one video game a week and talk about it really intensely and everyone in the class has such interesting, profound things to say that I never would have considered.
• 21H.S05 – Encoding Culture. This class feels as though it was made for me. It’s a special subject class taught by the Digital Humanities group at MIT that focuses on how to analyze datasets (of text, images, audio, and tabular formats) in a way that tackle social and cultural research questions and hypotheses.
• 21M.150 – Introductory Music Theory. I had a brief musical stint when I was younger, where I took piano lessons from the second grade to eighth grade. I have some understanding of music theory, but have lost a good chunk of it and have been meaning to get back into it. I plan on taking piano lessons after graduation again and also just ordered a brand new acoustic guitar (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) so really I’m just excited. The professor is an absolute sweetheart and I’ve enjoyed the first session so much, where we spent the time practicing rhythm and sightsinging.
• CMS.614 – Critical Internet Studies. I’ve taken this class before! And I’m TA’ing it! This is Petey’s class on Internet studies which tackles a whole bunch of things but I’m really excited. I’ll be doing a later post this week on everything I’ve read, listened to, watched, and played for my classes so you can see the interesting readings for this class.
• ES.100 – An Introduction to Maker Skills. Originally I was supposed to take a lamp making class (EM.21) because I realized I’ve never made anything at MIT before and I really want to leave here having learned something about making something physically, but the lamp class ended up conflicting with CMS.S60 so I get to now take this mainly freshman seminar that serves as, well, an introduction to maker skills! I’m super excited to just learn and get introduced to all these new things and skills and machines in a safe, beginner-friendly environment.
• CMS.S60 – Rap Theory and Practice. So I ended up getting into the class and it is taught by the Lupe Fiasco himself! Rona is also in the class so we have lots of blogger representation (woot woot)! I’m intimidated out of my mind for this class, as I already have a rap due tomorrow (16 bars introducing ourselves; I’m gonna shit myself.) But I think I have a lot to learn from this class. I’m an avid R&B, rap, and hip-hop listener so I really appreciate the fact that we get to listen to so much music in this class and really dissect their meanings and understand the amount of thought, energy, and time that goes into creating any sort of lyrical structure at all.

Aside from my classes, I (obviously) plan on continuing blogging as well as being a part of LSC! We actually have a screening of Inception coming up this weekend, so I’ll be working refreshments with my friends Michelle and Kylee.

Really, I want this last semester to be a wholesome farewell to MIT. Last semester felt like a lot of growing pains, for not only just me but all my friend group. We struggled a lot with things like major breakups and finding ourselves and understanding what the future entails, but now that we’ve gone through those pains, we find that we’re looking forward to what the future now holds for us. I have a pretty clear idea of what these next few months look like, and so I’m excited to just dive in head on.

I’ve made some pretty big adjustments to my schedule this semester. I’ve switched to a morning schedule, courtesy of Kano (she’s a blogger, you’ll meet her in a bit), who tweeted a long, long thread on tips to convert to a morning person. These are ALL directly taken from Kano, credit to Kano, please love and respect her always. Essentially the steps were:

• Know how much sleep and time you need (for me, Cami, personally, I need 7.5+. Anything less and I’m dead inside).
• Have something to look forward to in the morning (I work out right in the morning so this is good!)
• Have a cup/bottle of water ready to drink by your bedside and drink it (I don’t really do this but it’s cool)
• Wake up with the light of the sun instead of your alarm, or really just consider a non-audio way of waking up (I do this! It’s just as peaceful as Kano says.)
• Set out your clothes the night before to minimize brain effort in the morning or really just prepare things the night before to make it smoother (I…need to start doing this because it takes me so long in the morning to figure out what makeup look I’m doing and what outfit I’m wearing)
• Have a window of chill time before bed with no devices (I do not do this…I usually read on my phone before bed or watch TikToks..)
• If you’re struggling to get out of bed, play a playlist of morning hype songs (I actually do this even when I’m not struggling to get out of bed. I usually play my Spotify generated morning hits playlist to get ready to embrace the day)

I found all these tips incredibly helpful to make my swap to a morning schedule. So far my schedule’s gone a little like this:

• 7:30am wake up
• 7:30-8:10am getting ready (putting on my outfit, skincare routine, makeup, jewelry, packing my stuff)
• 8:10am-8:25am quick breakfast (usually instant oatmeal)
• 8:30am-8:40am commuting to campus via bus or campus shuttle
• 8:40am-10am work out (i’ve been getting back into lifting!! since i took a two month break for traveling and was pretty on/off with it this fall since i was sick a lot. i’m currently doing nsuns and c25k)
• depending on the day…
  • M/W/R 10am-10:30am commute to harvard for my harvard class
  • T/F 10-11am down time / work time
• lunch is usually 11am-12pm or 12pm-1pm depending on if i have class or not
• 1pm-4pm i usually have class in this slot
• after 4pm i do my extracurriculars like blogger meetings or i sit and do work
• and i try to be home by 10pm at dphie to hang out with the deephers
• 11pm get ready for bed
• 11:30pm sleepy time <3

This is an incredibly different schedule than what I’ve been doing for the past three years here. Usually I’ve maintained a 1am/2am sleeptime and a 10am wakeup time.

This was mainly to avoid fomo; I love hanging out with my friends and wherever they are, I want to be usually, so I thought that this transition to a morning schedule would be difficult.

BUT by some miraculous twist of fate, ALL of my friends this semester have switched to a morning schedule. I believe this is actually caused by the fact that we were all in Europe (separately, doing different things) for IAP and so the jetlag has caused us to all wake up at 7am and we’ve just decided to keep it that way. I’m so excited to not only be a morning person but be on the exact same schedule as my friends now too!!!

Other updates I have: I’m 21 now which feels like a big boy age and I feel funky and weird about it. I’ve been apartment hunting and will do a huge blog on that once Raymond and I’s housing is finalized. Europe was great and I’ll talk about it more once I get my bearings. And I’m just really excited (and heartbroken? and anxious and nervous and just UAHFLHLKAJFSD) for this semester, my final semester.