Life After (and During) MIT by Elizabeth Choe '13

Well well well… WE MEET AGAIN. I told you guys our paths would cross!

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Elizabeth. My hair is a little darker than my avatar’s and when I smile in real life, my face looks like it’s going to explode more so than in my avatar. I graduated a year ago, so perhaps you might be curious as to how different life is for me now… Some things are definitely the same – for instance, I wrote this entire blog post without periodically saving it (I like to live on the edge), and then my brower froze when I was about to publish and I lost the entry. Now I’m re-writing it. See – things haven’t changed since my blogger days.

Other things are very different. I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave the ‘tute, so I took a job at MIT after graduation at the Office of Digital Learning (aka ODL – the same fine folks who bring you MITx and OpenCourseWare), meaning that I never actually left this place. But let me tell you – working at MIT is a suh-weet deal. All the awesome things about MIT – the people, the research, the facilities, etc. – none of the problem sets.

Which brings me to why I’m back on the blogs. See, there are lots of things about the transition to grown up life and this other side of MIT that I would love to share with you guys (and feel free to ask specific questions – I’ll try to answer in the comments), but if I’m going to be real, I’m here for one sole purpose:

SHAMELESS
SELF
PROMOTION.

At ODL, I took over an outreach webseries program aimed at getting people (especially you spry youths) jazzed about science and engineering. It was basically the perfect job ever, because it combined all of these seemingly-random experiences I had as an undergrad – making videos for Admissions, working at that TV production company, working at a lab, studying engineering – with some of my favorite things (science and kids and MIT) into this awesome amalgamation of awesomeness.*

*I am still working on the eloquence aspect of adulthood.

We just launched the first 3 episodes of Science Out Loud, which is a YouTube webseries written and hosted by MIT students. Our main mission at MIT+K12 Videos is to show folks that science and scientists don’t necessarily look like what you see in textbooks and labs.

Take Ashley. She’s awesome (I lived with her in Simmons Hall!). Oh, and SHE’S AN ASTROPHYSICIST. What a champ! Her episode is on exoplanets – planets that exist outside of our solar system – and how they’re so different from what we’re used to studying and why astronomers have just now started finding thousands of them.

Or Evan. He’s also awesome. And his episode combines two things for which every child should develop an undying love – BRAINS AND ROBOTS.

Or Prashanth (who I also lived with in Simmons) and Maria. Not only do I have a cameo in this one with a bunch of lasers (pew pew), they cover the physics behind how invisibility cloaks work.

We’ll release new episodes every Monday on our YouTube channel – on everything from squid skin with a mind of its own to growing elevators to outer space – and each one has a landing page with links to great MIT resources (like related OCW and MITx videos). If you’re interested in MIT, our great students and research facilities, or just in learning more about our world, feel free to check them out. I worked longer hours during production week of these episodes than I did during my undergrad at MIT, but it was so, so awesome. I learned so much and I got to see so many places on campus that I’d never visited before. And I got to work with some AWESOME people. Bascially, life after MIT hasn’t changed too much. I do get my own laundry machine, though.

Oh! And if you’re reading this and happen to be a current MIT undergrad or grad (or recent graduate) – we’re casting for season 2! Check out the details here (I’m looking at all of you current bloggers…)