stupider than ever by Aiden H. '28

Hey! How are you? Oh, me? I’m AWFUL thanks for asking.

It’s the week after spring break, and here’s a list of things I need atm:

• nerf gun
• BB gun
• harpoon gun
• a sedative

Whattt a week to repeatedly kick my ass–and not “oh there was so much to do” or “oh im kinda slammed this week”. I was fully jumped. Curb stomped. Other terms for excessive and illegal amounts of violence. And from what I’ve heard, every single person I know also was!

I genuinely have never felt less validated in every capacity. Let’s go through it!

Internships/Summer Crisis

I started applying for summer internships in October. I have applied for 141. I got 1 AI “interview”. I have 0 positions. This makes me feel awful for many reasons:

First: I feel like I give my absolute all to this school. Nearly every waking moment is spent on some form of gaining a credential (classes for degree, research experience, etc.) and the rest is spent on keeping me alive so I can continue to work on gaining experience. So when one of the only ways to validate these experiences as worth it or working yield literally zero results, it’s crushing. It wasn’t even in the middle of the pack. It was flat rejection—the idea that literally thousands of people have to be SO much better than me in EVERY possible position that I’m not even considered an option.

Second: Literally every single person I know has something for the summer. When I say this, people retort with “Nooooo I know so many people having issues this summer”—LIES! This has led to a lot of unnecessary comparison and dangerous competition on my behalf in friendships, but when genuinely every single person you know has something going on, how are you not supposed to feel that?

Third: It leaves me in limbo for what to do over the summer. The options are:

a) Stay in Boston and try and find a UROP, making only $16/hr IF I get approved for funding. This requires me finding somewhere to live in the next four weeks.

b) Stay in Boston and work a restaurant job. This will make me a lot more money, but it won’t help my future in any way. This also requires me finding somewhere to live.

c) Go home and do nothing. This is the easiest for finances/housing, but I did this last summer, and I want to feel like I’m actively moving forward in the world. Going home for the summer when everyone else is doing stuff just feels so lackluster and kinda depressing. I also have two concerts I already bought tickets for in Boston, and there ain’t no way I’m not going.

The hard part about all of this is that I don’t know how bad I actually want a summer internship anyway. I think I moreso want to say and feel like I have an internship, feel the validation that that would bring me, instead of sitting there and doing the work. I don’t have an actual passion so deep for any STEM/tech job that I would feel like a part of me is missing the work—I would just be missing the check. This is a vain thought process, but it’s true for me and probably a vast majority of students, too.

Research

I’m in the process of writing a paper for one of my UROPs, which is great! But as I was working on writing the methodology section Wednesday night, I was combing back through code from August and noticed that a function that is absolutely critical to my algorithm was actually never called. I wrote the whole thing, tested it, and just never called it in the algorithm. It has been running without this for months, and all of the data for the whole project (~450,000 files) was now wrong. Not calling this function actually makes the topic of the project and entirely different field of algorithms research than what I thought I was doing!

I had a minor anxiety attack, cried, and sent the craziest midnight email to my PhD mentor apologizing profusely and providing options. As the amazing man he is, he just told me to “take it easy”, and the next day at our weekly meeting, we found a fairly easy way to shape the paper around it.

Nonetheless, I just feel like a total dumbass.

Classes

Don’t like ‘em! Two of them are fine, one is very meh, and the other two bring me inexorably pain (so much so that I wake up and genuinely feel angry and want to cry at the idea of sitting there, wasting an hour of my life staring at a board with material I don’t care about and would be upset over if my life revolved around it).

Also! I took an exam for 7.06/Cell Bio right before break, and they returned scores on the day we got back. On one hand, it was the highest exam grade I’ve gotten since September. On the other hand, because I messed up the first exam so bad, I still needed to do 3 points better to be able to get an A in the class. Shoot me!

Sleep

I flew overnight from Denver to Boston Saturday into Sunday, so I got back to my dorm at 7:00 AM. Completely wiped, I layed down to take a nap, but because I’m incompetent at even basic tasks, I set my alarm for midnight instead of noon.

I ended up sleeping until 3:00 PM, and have not felt the same since.

And again! Saturdays I work the mail desk in East Campus from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM. Because I didn’t go to sleep until 2:30 the night before (I was watching Caught Stealing, which is just an absolutely awful movie btw), I got off desk shift at 10 and went to take a nap. But, of course, I set my alarm for 11:30 PM instead of AM!!!!

I slept until 4:15.

Miscellaneous

• I’m breaking out
• The dorm kitchen is a mess
• It’s April but the weather feels like February
• I had Houston winning March Madness

In reality, none of these things matter that much. My life is fine, if not going extremely well. Nothing around me is going awful. There are a million worse things the world. Everything will be fine. During the week, I knew this, and actively felt guilty for complaining about my shitty week.

But ugh, it was just one of those weeks, y’know?