Rewriting my Blogger Bio by Nisha D. '21

Like most bloggers, as a starry-eyed freshman, I wrote a bio that has not stood up terribly well against the test of time. This isn’t a criticism on how cringy freshman year Nisha was;⁠01 or still am idk people change, and people especially change over 4 years of college. What’s cool is that I can now attribute the changes in myself and my interests directly to experiences that I’ve had at MIT, or people that I’ve met here. The delta in my personhood is literally entirely due to MIT.

So, as a fun exercise, I decided to go back to my freshman year bio and annotate it to see how MIT has changed me.

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You can usually tell a lot about a person⁠02 yes, everybody can tell that you are a freak obsessed with final fantasy 7. i guess i still am this though by what they get excited about. Not, “Oh yeah haha that’s pretty cool” excited – I’m talking wild eyed, foaming at the mouth, “OMIGOD YASSSS” excited⁠03 i will say, i do like people who are extremely passionate about totally random things. i feel like that is a big component of what i look for in good friends. freshman year nisha sort of had the right idea here .

So without further ado, here’s a short list of things that I (figuratively, and occasionally literally) foam at the mouth over.⁠04 idk what i was saying here i have never literally foamed at the mouth. that would be something that i'd get sent to the hospital for

Rewatchable TV shows. The ones that immediately come to mind are Game of Thrones,⁠05 this was before...the atrocity that was season 8. poor freshman year me. she never would have seen it coming Rick and Morty,⁠06 i still do fucking love this show... and Pushing Daisies⁠07 i tried to make my boyfriend watch this with me freshman summer and he got bored and i haven't rewatched it since :( (I seriously watched Rick and Morty Season 3 Episode 6⁠08 has only one season of this show come out while i was in college???? that's a bruh moment something like five times within two hours of its release, like this is not a joke⁠09 thank you nisha very cool )

Rock music, movie/game soundtrack,⁠10 okay tbh this is still my music aesthetic and this Japanese band called B’z.⁠11 although B'z is no longer my favorite band (pearl jam has taken that spot), B'z is not on Spotify and it hurts me everytime i think about it...they're so good  My music aesthetic is best described as  Sounds weirdly specific but ok⁠12 ...thank you nisha very cool, it wasn't even that edgy

A LOT of anime. For somebody who claims to not be a weaboo,⁠13 i still claim this, but with weaker protests I watch an embarrassing amount⁠14 i actually have not watched much anime in college at all. i meant to catch up on steins;gate 0 but never did, i watched some amount of hunterxhunter, and i did...rewatch all the berserk movies and FMAB of this stuff

Code that compiles on the first try.⁠15 i'm resigned to my code never compiling on the first try ever. but also why did i feel this was a major interest of mine?? i guess i liked coding more back in the day. rip me  AKA a blessing from the coding gods

Eight hours of sleep.⁠16 sleep brings me more serotonin in life than almost anything else tbh   Or more,⁠17 little did freshman year nisha know that she would come to require 8 hours of sleep every day to be functional in the slightest in college. granted i was very rarely functional preferably

FINAL FANTASY 7.⁠18 ...alright this is something that really has never changed in the slightest  I may or may not have written two of my MIT essays/one of my essays on the application for these blogs/literally my entire Common App essay⁠19 +entered the gaming industry, bought the remake TWICE because i was so desperate to play it, had the buster sword inscribed on the inside of my brass rat, have a tattoo all drawn up and planned for whenever i work up the courage to get it...the list goes on on this game. Why?⁠20 because nothing has ever made me feel more inspired and more seen I’m still trying to figure that one out

Japanese language⁠21 man i am so rusty. i passed the JLPT N2 in sophomore year with a decently high score i guess but it's really all been downhill from there (and food).⁠22 in my adult life i probably make japanese food more than any other type of food tbh  Once upon a time I learned Japanese solely for the purpose of playing the aforementioned video game. This eventually led to some cool study abroad adventures⁠23 NONE OF WHICH I GOT TO HAVE AT MIT CAUSE I WAS STUPID... in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Dogs⁠24 in no particular order, i would like: a husky, a malamute, a golden retriever, and a bernese mountain dog and cats.⁠25 being able to live with cats in college was truly a blessing  This should be self-explanatory

Fall in New Hampshire.⁠26 actually i think i'd have to change this to 'Summer in the Pacific Northwest' instead  a. I’m weirdly passionate about raking my yard⁠27 man i haven't raked a yard in a while... and b. I like everything pumpkin flavored⁠28 okay i definitely don't anymore, PSLs are WAY too cloyingly sweet

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If I had to rewrite my blogger bio…honestly, I’m not exactly sure what that would look like. I would probably spend many MANY hours rewriting it. But if I had to just write one, right now, with no edits whatsoever, it would probably look something like this:

“Hey there! I’m Nisha, and somehow I got hired to spew all my thoughts out into the void that is the Internet. Some people think I’m super boring, and some people think I’m sort of insane. I like to think that I’m somewhere in between.

I’m from the great state of New Hampshire and unironically love fall colors, hiking, and the motto ‘live free or die’. My primary character trait is that I’m utterly obsessed with the video game Final Fantasy VII, and everything in my life has found a way of tracing back to this. Other things I love doing are: struggling to stay proficient at Japanese, carefully curating Spotify playlists that I never end up listening to, making valiant attempts to actually learn a new guitar song, and waffling between a dozen Netflix shows before deciding to just rewatch BoJack Horseman for the eighth time.

I’m not totally sure what exactly I’d like to do with my MIT education in the future, but I think I’m just going to let my interests carry me wherever they will. That’s worked pretty well for me so far – it got me to MIT, somehow, and that was pretty statistically unlikely to begin with. I’m glad that y’all are joining me on this quest and I hope that you’ll be able to learn a thing or two from – or at the very least be entertained by – my posts.”

Better or worse than the original? Let me know in the comments!