new information about my life just dropped by Teresa J. '26

Hi! It’s been a while.

I first opened this Google Doc on Nov. 27th, 2024, hoping to post it for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving slipped away, and I thought, hey, it might be fitting to post it for Valentine’s day, and now two Valentine’s days have passed.

I’ve decided I’m just going to release this blog from draft hell exactly how it was when I lasted edited it during this past summer. Take it as a somewhat undetailed recap of my junior year, with annotations where things are now drastically outdated.

So, I’m in HackMIT! HackMIT is a 24-hour college hackathon hosted on MIT’s campus – read Janet’s blog in the hyperlink to learn more about being on the organizing team side of things! 

During team meetings, we like to start off with an icebreaker that’s some variation of slay and nay; a good and bad from our life as of recently. At a marketing committee GSD a while back, Jinhee W. ‘26 decided to switch it up. She instead asked us for our roses, thorns, and buds of the week. 

Roses and thorns correspond neatly with yummies and bummies, but throwing buds into the mix was new. To be completely honest, I don’t exactly get what a bud is – some of us interpreted it as things on the horizon, some of us interpreted it as things that were almost roses but not quite. For the purpose of this post, I’ll just use it as a bit of a catch-all: things I’m thankful for, things I’m looking forward to, and things I’m hoping to accomplish.

Anyways, this is a long and not super relevant way of explaining the format of this post. Here’s a life update, in the form of roses, thorns, and buds.

roses 

1. i drove my car up to massachusetts

   Last summer, my dad and I drove his old, pretty, red 2011 BMW all the way from St. Louis, Missouri, to Cambridge. The 18 hour drive was a massive undertaking (mostly for my dad), spanning… idk, whatever states are between Missouri and Massachusetts. 

   I needed a car for the summer since my internship was in Western Massachusetts, and I wanted to live close to the MIT campus – about a 30-minute one-way commute. But even as summer has slipped away into the dreary, slushy, feels like 1° Boston winter and back to summer again, I’ve kept her (the car) on campus with me.

   Keeping a car on campus is honestly a complete hassle, as the pile of parking tickets on my dashboard can attest to, but she’s treated me well. So far, she’s accompanied me to many Costco runs, a day-trip to Salem, and two spontaneous road-trips to New York. I’m excited to see where she’ll take me next :)⁠01 i am devastated to announce that after getting in a minor car accident, she was totaled and i no longer have her </3

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2. i started rock climbing

   Like every other 20-something living in an urban tech hub, I’ve picked up bouldering as a hobby. I actually started climbing more than a year ago, around October of my sophomore year. I was going to write a blog about it, but I was really mid at climbing and Uzay had already written a piece that captured some of my feelings better than I could.

   Climbing is the best excuse for my friends and I to get off campus, and it also encourages me to sleep well and eat properly. I had to take a long break last year due to a wrist injury, and just started getting back into it last semester. I’m still pretty mid, but I’ve been consistently climbing three times a week, and it feels good to get back into it! 02 follow my friends' and my climbing account @sexysendsaturdays... shameless plug!

   based on a v4 at central rock gym harvard

   my chalk bag, crag (pronounced craig)

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3. i survived 4.031

   Gloria and I were partners for 4.031 (Design Objects and Interaction) last fall! She wrote about it in this amazing blog, so I won’t elaborate too much. 

   I’m really proud of us. Certainly on the level that we created cool, beautiful, (mostly) working things, but this is also the first time in my three years as a design student where I really felt like I was designing. The MIT design curriculum emphasizes iteration, ingenuity, and engineering, among other things. While I’ve tried embracing this in my previous design classes, it felt like this year I finally had the bandwidth and experience to really put forward all my effort into being a Design Student At MIT. 

   We spent many late nights, bleary eyed in Metropolis or N52 or the Formlabs 3D Printer Farm. Independent of how innovative or portfolio-worthy our projects were, we worked hard and learned a lot, and it was really satisfying.

4. i got a perm

   My hair is naturally wavy! In a three-quarters-of-college crisis, I decided to do away with curl creams and 40 minute blowdrying routines and get a straightening perm! At this point this life update is so overdue that my natural hair is growing out,⁠03 it's literally SO overdue that i have since re-permed my hair and my cowlick is coming back already and my bangs have the craziest cowlick if I don’t tame them with a straightener.

5. i got a dog

   More accurately, my mom got a dog to act as my replacement. His name is Fluffy and he is really cute.

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thorns

1. i lost my umbrella

   … like six times. Shoutout to the Burton Conner desk workers for sorting my umbrella-containing Amazon packages every few weeks.

2. i completely obliterated my film

   As one of my design major electives, I took 4.341 (Intro to Photography) during junior fall. It’s a pretty enjoyable and fulfilling class, but incredibly time intensive – mostly because the second half of the semester is dedicated to the film photography unit.

   For those who are unfamiliar, film photography is different from digital photography in that it requires a lengthy process of developing, fixing, washing, and drying your film in various chemical mixtures before you can even begin to get a picture of… your picture. 

   In the midst of final project week, in a moment of unfortunate sleep deprivation, I drowned my last two rolls of film in fixer instead of developer, and was met with sad, blank strips. (It’s lowkey not that deep looking back, but at the time this was my last straw.)

   some photos i took during the class!

   some photos i took during the class!

   some photos i took during the class!

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3. i lost the pull-up

   I don’t know if literally anyone remembers or cares, but in one of my freshman year blogs I expressed a strong desire to learn how to do a pull-up. The good news is, I have since learned how to do one! In my peak, I could even do four in a row. 

   The bad news is, I lost the pull-up last year when I was out with a wrist injury, regained it during the spring semester, and have now lost it yet again – I’ve been out of the climbing gym for a few weeks, recovering from a sprained ankle.

   But let it be known that I could do a pull-up at one point. And will be able to do one again.⁠04 indeed i can!

4. i was sick af

   This is in part a rose, and in part a thorn. My junior spring is the only semester I can remember where I didn’t get sick at all (aside from a short-lived sniffle during spring break).

   My immune system isn’t that great to begin with, and the concoction of the Freshman Flu, lingering remnants of Covid, and whatever is perpetually swirling around New England did not help matters. I was battling my health for most of 2024, but finally managed to catch a break in the new year.

   Getting sick can be pretty debilitating at such a fast-paced school, despite MIT’s best efforts. Once you fall behind on a few lectures, catching back up can be very overwhelming.

   On the bright side, being sick so often helped change a lot of my habits for the better. This past semester, I really began prioritizing myself. Cooking my own meals, scheduling my own medical appointments, exercising regularly, forfeiting a few hours of studio time in favor of quality sleep – all mundane things to be proud of, but things I’m proud of nonetheless!

5. i miss my dog

   I miss my dog :(

intermission: mixed bag speed round

1. i was an orientation leader for the class of ‘28
2. i took archery pe in the winter, and got a huge bruise on my arm
3. i got a flat tire (and resolved the matter all by myself 👍)
4. i swam for the first time in maybe six years (i am going to fail the swim test)⁠05 at mit, everyone needs to either pass the swim test, or take a swimming pe class in order to graduate. i ended up taking the swim pe class this past iap... and i passed!
5. i got my family addicted to pokemon tcgp.⁠06 i have since stopped playing tcgp and am now a pokemon go enjoyer... should i drop my friend code?

buds

1. i used up my eggs

   One of my other goals from my freshman year blog was to learn how to cook. I’m proud to say: I’ve been cooking!

2. i have many iceland photos

   In the middle of junior fall, Jinhee, Gloria, Lee C. ‘26, Disha C. ‘26 and I went to Iceland! 

   I want to keep this brief because I’m hopeful (the reason why this is in buds and not roses) that someday Gloria and I will finally finish The Iceland Zine we said we were going to make many months ago.

   Needless to say, it was so so beautiful. It was my first time traveling internationally without my parents, and the trip didn’t come without its near misses, but it was definitely a highlight of my junior year, if not college as a whole.

   photos from iceland!

   photos from iceland!

   photos from iceland!

   photos from iceland!

   photos from iceland!

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3. i took a comics class

   To fulfill my HASS Concentration, I took CMS.595 (Making Comics and Sequential Art). 

   It was chill in the sense that, every week, I got to draw while my professor yapped about comics. It was not chill in the sense that, making comics is so much work.

   To be completely honest, a lot of the work that ended up coming out of the class is either personal or in a state of incompletion that I don’t quite yet feel comfortable sharing. But this class has definitely helped me evaluate how I see myself as a storyteller and artist. Every week was an exercise in thinking deeply about what to say, and how exactly to say it.

   It was a lot of fun! 

4. i will be in an Apartment

   The college aged girls yearn for the Ikea.

   For my final year of MIT, I’ve decided to move into an apartment with (aforementioned) Jinhee, (aforementioned) Gloria, and (un-aforementioned-but-equally-important) Sabine C. ‘26. 

   We have been a continuous echo chamber of “omg… apartment…” since we first got the idea late into junior fall. Our group chat is abundant with plans to construct our own furniture, debates on bed frame or no bed frame, and links to Therabody wireless compression boots. 07 see gloria's recent blog for some roomie action! spoiler: my furniture is mostly from facebook marketplace, i do have a bed frame, and we have not made plans to purchase therabody wireless compression boots yet.

5. i am in hackMIT

   Since I started this post with HackMIT, I might as well end with it too. From October to March, I had the pleasure of being head of the organizing team’s Marketing Committee.

   I’m not going to lie, it was a lot of work. Like, a lot. But it was, without a doubt, one of my favorite experiences since coming to MIT. It’s impossible to express just how much the community has come to mean to me.

   I’ve since handed over reign of the Marketing Committee to Lauren Y. ‘27, who has done incredible things with the HackMIT website and Instagram (shameless plug). We’re getting into the tall grass now, with the hackathon coming up in just under two months, but I’m so excited for what’s to come! 08 hack2025 was a success! i have since retired from the club, but i am excited to see what they have in store for blueprint2026 :)

   some closeups from junior year

   some closeups from junior year

   some closeups from junior year

   some closeups from junior year

   some closeups from junior year

   some closeups from junior year

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Admittedly, this is not the most epic or ground-breaking comeback post ever, for which I apologize. I felt like I’d at least drop by and fill in some parts of my junior year. See you in my next blog (trust)!