Repilot by Ceri Riley '16

When we first decided to coordinate 20th anniversary blog posts, I thought I would largely contribute in a behind-the-scenes way, as I do with many projects in my life. While MIT students have IAP in January and take a breather from classes, Admissions Officers are in our seemingly never-ending busy season of reading applications! So it’s not like I don’t have a lot of other work to do right now.

But as I’ve been chatting with former bloggers, queuing their posts, and absorbing their stories, I got the itch to write. And when Celena C ’12 said that she was going to vlog, I got the even stronger itch to make a video.

So, last night, I scrambled to film and edit a vlog for—I think—the first time since undergrad. Special thanks to the one (1) soda I drank with dinner⁠01 I don't regularly drink anything caffeinated because I don't like the taste of coffee, I usually prefer peppermint tea, and no matter what tricks I use to try and drag myself out of bed in the morning...I will be cranky. So when I needed to stay up to pset or study or whatnot as a student, I would drink a soda! And that habit has persisted when I need to stay up on a long road trip or, y'know, throw together a creative project in the middle of the night. that powered me through editing, particularly because I was ambitious and filmed B-roll when I came into the office last week, and I didn’t want those clips to go to waste.

In many ways, I have become much more practiced in talking through my thoughts and feelings on the fly (and on mic) in the past decade,⁠02 Just based on this video, though, my lighting and graphics and color correction skills seem...much worse. Look. I could only do so much at 2am when I had to wake up at 6am to commute and be on time to work the next morning!! so I’m grateful to have impulsively created a time capsule at this point in my post-yet-kind-of-not-post-MIT journey.

Also, as I captioned and uploaded this vlog, I realized there was one key thing that I forgot to mention in all my monologuing: working with current (and past) bloggers is, by far, my favorite part of my current job. Many of my closest friends from my MIT days⁠03 In addition to my handful of close <a href="https://web.mit.edu/macgregor/www/entries.shtml" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Bentry</a> friends, whom I also still love dearly and stay in touch with. are tied to these blogs in some way, even if we didn’t actually hang out at all when we were students. This is a very special internet community, and I hope you’re enjoying this reunion even a fraction as much as we are.