rearview reflections by Waly N. '24

Somedays, I check to make sure my diploma is real and I didn’t just dream the whole thing. I get a little bit jumpscared when I get an alumni newsletter. It doesn’t really feel like it meant for me, though, somehow, it is. I’ve been getting MIT emails saying “please donate 👉🏿🥺👈🏿” which I cannot mentally process. I’ve been an MIT Educational Counselor⁠01 read: Interviewer for this application season, and being on the other side of the table feels both intriguing and odd.

me, circa 2025, looking at the other cruft blog posts

As one of the least crufty of the cruft (for now 😳), I wasn’t too sure what to write about. I don’t have some great life wisdom to share or huge post-MIT takeaways. Or career pivots, self-discovery in a new hobby, or newfound interest in underwater basket weaving. I’m pretty similar to myself at graduation other than some variance in my Spotify playlists, experiencing the horrors of apartment hunting, and figuring out how to use a dishwasher. Not entirely certain if I have conceptualized being crufty or an alum for the matter. I last blogged in June,⁠02 I really didn't expect to be back so soon lol which has been a while, but considering how many hiatuses I went on as a blogger, it also doesn’t feel like it.

When I was graduating, my emotions revolved in a pretty binary fashion between WOOOOO I’M DONE 🥳 and *crying while packing my boxes*.⁠03 'It’s a terrible day for rain' - if ykyk Being a bit removed from MIT and having some time to sit back and just think, I’ve been reflecting a bit about undergrad while keeping in mind that hindsight is 20/20. Or whatever my current prescription is since my eyes are very far from perfect. 

After spending pretty much all of my conscious years of existence in schooling of some sort, working a job has let me dwell a bit on this. This led to me commuting home one day and making a short list of things I missed about MIT and things I’m happy to be leaving in the past. Honorable mentions included missing having access to MISTI/global opportunities or makerspaces and not missing sharing a bathroom or living in a 115 sq ft brick oven coffin (Macgregor <3). I wound up elaborating on just a few while spilling tea while drinking tea in a tea shop with a friend.

the low barrier of entry to try new things in college (missed)

Let’s say I want to learn how to do Pogo sticking for a new, outside-of-work challenge. I could go buy a Pogo stick if I wanted to and learn via YouTube, as one of my friends said when I posed this terrible, terrible hypothetical idea. But chances are, I probably would like to take a class so that I don’t break my neck and suffer an untimely demise. But then a class costs money o__o, and I need to find a place that actually can make a living off Pogo stick classes to offer them to begin with. If I’m a student, and we have a Pogo sticking club, it probably isn’t too difficult to try it out at the beginning of the semester, see if I like Pogo sticking or not, and then continue from that point. 

This example is a bit of a hyperbole and idealistic. I don’t think we even have a Pogo sticking group @ MIT, but I wouldn’t be very surprised if we did.  But hopefully, it barely gets the idea across.

I miss having pretty easy access to trying new things (whether it be languages, sports, or niche hobbies) and having it require relatively low travel time or monetary cost, along with being easy to find and join. To try out a new hobby as a “working adult,”⁠04 I love being a 20-something year old teenager :D it can feel like you have to get some initial equipment/tools and potentially travel far to a place. And then, you might not be certain you actually like x or y. You might be able to find a community that enjoys doing [insert hobby], but that can be hard to find at first in a new city. It’s still worth it in the end to try new things, but I wish I appreciated more the sheer access I had to a ridiculous variety of extracurriculars just a few months ago.

academic stress & work-life balance difficulties (not missed)

During undergrad, I often struggled with being able to “rest.” There was always something I could be doing, perhaps even something I should be doing. So my relaxing didn’t feel very relaxing, and it was hard to actually turn my head off. I assume for some people that comes easier (and for others, perhaps harder), but with a nice load of executive dysfunction, I was having the time of my life.

Now, working a job, I find that it is way easier to have a semblance of work-life balance and actually feel relaxed doing whatever it may be after I’m done with the workday. I haven’t taken part in too many hobbies since moving to the West Coast in the fall, but when I have, I’ve found more fulfilment in them. I feel that it comes down to two key things for me.

First, not living in the same place as I “work” (whether that be studying or working) helps a lot. When moving after MIT, I planned to not live ~too~ close to my office since I wanted to quite literally feel that work-life separation. I do work remotely sometimes, which may defeat the point a bit, but mentally, I still find it a bit helpful. If I lived, let’s say, a 5-minute walk away from the office, I wouldn’t be able to create that same disconnect in my head. I guess this could have somewhat been achieved through not living on campus during undergrad, but I enjoyed living on campus for a lot of other social reasons, so I wouldn’t ultimately change that. If I ever found myself in grad school, I think I might try something similar to what I’m doing now.

Second, and arguably more helpful, is having two laptops. One is my personal laptop, which I got in the fall after my previous one bit the dust with 2 days left in my senior spring, and the other is my corporate laptop. Having a work laptop and my personal laptop is an absolute game-changer in creating that distinction in my life. When I’m doing work stuff, I can just do that and not have as many other distractions grabbing my attention. And when I’m doing personal stuff, I don’t have work notifications appearing on my laptop. I just learned by accident ~ a month ago that there is a feature on Windows to create two “desktops,” which might have been helpful to do back as a student. Would I have actually done it, probably not :P

close proximity to friends (missed)

The concept of distance from friends changed a lot for me after graduating. What felt far during college, is something I could, in some sense, only dream for now. It was like, oh no, I live in East Campus and you live in Next House, what a tragedyyyy. Sooooo far apart :(. I have to walk a mile…

Except now it is like oh I live on the West Coast and you live on the East Coast, what an actual tragedy. I need to go to an airport, catch a flight, and get from the airport to wherever. I miss having rather close proximity to people I was both close friends with and more casual friends with. The fact that people I lived really close to (in retrospect) are now spread out so far is a bit of a surreal concept for me still, even though it has been quite a few months since graduation.

Like most people at MIT, I moved away from home for college, but it wasn’t very far for me all things considered, since I lived ~4 hours away on a bus. I was a bit far from my high school friends, but holidays usually brought us back to the same place. Being cross-country from friends who also have families in other cities is definitely a different vibe. If I wanted to take a bus and visit my friends not on the West Coast, I would be likely to need a spine and hip replacement by the time the bus makes it across the country. I don’t think such a bus even exists, though, in theory, I could take Amtrak for like 80 hours.

boston cold temps + wind tunnels (not missed)

Boston winters are cold. The winters when I was at MIT weren’t too bad (but I also never spent an IAP on campus between COVID and doing GTLs), but I still didn’t particularly enjoy the temperatures either. Boston also tends to be pretty windy, and it probably also deserves the title of “Windy City” considering it is the only place that has absolutely demolished my umbrella(s). 

I currently live in Seattle, and Seattle’s winter is so calm and mild compared to Boston. It isn’t ever really below freezing, it just is a bit gray and rainy sometimes. I don’t really mind that, and I do feel people in the city are a bit dramatic about the doom and gloom. But, it is possible I’m just seeing one of the nicer winters and will swallow my words next year. The fact that there is generally no wind chill, as someone from the East Coast, is also pretty surprising since the temperatures you see are how it actually feels. Compared to seeing 23F on the East Coast and realizing it actually feels like 15F…

More widely, I feel similarly about Boston and Seattle as cities. They both aren’t New York, but they have their charm in their own unique ways. I love the greenery here, especially since a lot of the trees as evergreens and keep the winter days a bit more colorful.

can’t go MIA from responsibilities™️(missed)

More times than I would like to admit, I woke up for a lecture, questioned the meaning of life, and went back to bed. I then woke up later, a bit more refreshed but still sleepy, and then finally dragged myself to the next class on my schedule. 

At the start of every semester, I knew that if I fell into the trap of missing just one lecture of a class, it was bound to snowball into missing a lot more than just one lecture. Especially if the class was before 11am. Unless it was a thing that required mandatory attendance, like a lab or small class, I kept falling victim to this somewhat-easily-avoidable-issue-that-I-probably-should-have-done-better-with. I don’t think the body I had in college was the same that commuted an hour-ish each way to high school every day. 

Sometimes, by sheer muscle memory, I nowadays wake up, and I’m like ahhhh I’m not feeling it, I’ma skip today. But then it hits me. I CAN’T. Well, I could if I had no concept of impulse control, but then I would probably be on the express route to getting fired, and for good reason. Unless I was actually sick or on leave. So I drag my uncooperating body out of my warm, comfy bed into the cold, harsh world that awaits it. 

Do I miss being able to simply be irresponsible sometimes and make bad decisions like skipping lectures? Yes. Am I proud of it? No… Go to lecture y’all o_o

And with that, I return to cruft blogger slumber to ponder on these takeaways some more 🤔