Little Pieces of Living by Sara N. '28

In January, I came back to campus for IAP and got to do a healthcare innovation internship at the Boston Veteran Affairs (VA) Medical Center through one of the MIT Priscilla King Gray (PKG) Public Service Center programs. I was lucky to be surrounded by kind and passionate people who encouraged me to work on projects that interested me, even if they were completely outside of my skillset — this is how I ended up learning C++, Arduino electronics & programming, and survey design + human-centered design interview methodology, all in the span of the month. I shadowed a rounding team at one of the VA campus hospitals, and visited the VA’s Brain Bank, where I held a brain in my hands and then watched a cutting. It was an enriching time for me, and I learned more about what kinds of things I wanted to do more of, and what kinds of things I felt I could do without.

What else? I woke up most days before the sun came up in order to catch the 7:30 bus for the first leg of my morning commute. I shopped at Trader Joe’s for the first time in my life, and grew to love their chicken tikka masala frozen meal. I went bouldering for the first time, despite being solidly afraid of heights, and found that I loved it. One of my roommates was also on campus for IAP, so we cooked a bit together. We made quesadillas with the stove turned on all the way — unadvisable, but much more fun that way — and many servings of pasta. We made pancakes one weekend morning with friends, with chocolate chips & whipped cream & fresh fruit; I’m usually ambivalent about strawberries, but I swear I didn’t have anything short of the sweetest that day. We baked apple cider shortbread cookies with another friend; the cookies turned out to be dismal in both flavor and texture, but these things happen.

Then there were the days when January felt unbearable and insurmountable. These were the days when it got dark before 5, making almost half my waking day feel like a perpetual 10pm. Even daylight hours seemed restrained and half-hearted. I can hardly remember blue skies, only the tense white-gray of a sky flushed with snow. The wind was largely harsh and uncompromising, and the chill was biting. Some days I would come back from work with swathes of my face and hands red & raw & covered with small, soft bumps — windburn from just minutes of exposure.

If I’m honest, though, I can barely remember those days. Now, when I think of January, I think about the rarer days when the sun was truly out. I think about a wonderful conversation I was lucky enough to have with a doctor I met when I and the other MIT interns sat in on an endoscopy procedure through the VA. I think about the time I had a Subway sandwich for the first time in almost a year and how the time in between made me realize that my regular order was genuinely delectable. I think about the time I stared out the window the entire time I was on the Green Line train and tried my best to look at everything I was seeing. I had There She Goes by The La’s playing on repeat and I had felt like a part of me was soaring.

I am glad memory can work like this.

By the end of January, I was beginning to like Boston. In February, I went out into Boston alone for the first time, an experience that turned out to be so pleasant, I had to write out physical sentences about it afterwards:

Yesterday, I heard birdsong for the first time in months. I was out in Boston, walking along a cobblestoned stretch of Tremont Street, and saw a group of song sparrows darting in and out of and fluttering all around a bare-branched bush that rose till my shoulders. The sky was a real, full-throated blue. It was nearly 3PM, and the sun felt warm; there was no wind. It had snowed almost continuously just days before, but all that snow was now pushed away to the sides in great grey muddy mounds. Everything around me was in smooth, loose motion – the snow-mounds beginning to drip into drains, the thin rivulets of water tracing their way down rooftops & door frames, the sparrows and their unhurried circles.

I still get nervous, like a clenched fist, when I go out into Boston. If I’m alone, I keep a call with my mother running on in the background, just in case, I guess. I don’t know if this nervousness is something I’ll grow out of, or if its just an indelible consequence of growing up away from and a little distrustful of cities, but I think I’m fine either away. I like this tentative thing I’ve got going with Boston.

February was also the start of classes. I had a feeling I would love my spring classes more than I loved my fall classes, and for the most part, I was right. My favorite class right now is Introduction to Machine Learning (6.390), which has helped me appreciate the many moving pieces and the very real math behind the seemingly magical ML algorithms. My recitation professor, on the first day, said something along the lines of how machine learning, to some degree, is all about learning representations of the natural world, and in order to make accurate predictions or classifications or whatever, it has to learn something about us. I think it’s a beautiful idea. The class is hard for me, but I love it regardless, and feel more certain than ever that I want to work in, not just with, machine learning in my career.

In parallel to 6.390: I filled up an entire notebook with Differential Equations (18.03) notes & homework, and am halfway through the new one; I’ve gotten to do some more in-depth readings about the heart for the UROP I’ve been doing since fall semester, and I am still struck by how intricate of an instrument it is; I learned, while studying for the three midterms I had the week before spring break, that I love making crib sheets for exams.

It is April now. Two days ago, I was at home for break. Kentucky was warm and at the cusp of full bloom, though I had to leave before I could see it. Twice in those ten days, I woke up, not to sunshine through blinds, but to birdsong so collectively loud that it clearly permeated through our windows. I did a lot of grocery shopping with my family. I read out loud to my little brother. I ate a lot of good food. Now, I am back on campus.

I wrote this post because I’ve been thinking, recently, of a passage from one of my favorite books of all time— A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. I read it for the first time when I was 10, and vaguely disliked it. I read it again at 12, and decided it was the most profound, lovely thing I’ve ever read. Since then, I’ve re-read it every other year; last semester was my fifth re-read. In a sense, I’ve grown up with the book. It’s shaped me in a lot of ways, some of which I recognize, many of which I’m sure I don’t. The passage I was thinking of is:

“Dear God,” she prayed, “let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry…have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere – be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”

I had been thinking about the little pieces of my living that have been lost, and then thought— they can only truly be lost if I let them. This was my attempt to collect some of the details from these past three months. January, February, March. Onto the next.