time travel is overrated by Boheng C. '28

on the last day of freshman orientation, just a few days before i arrived at MIT, we all gathered in kresge auditorium for one final event. our assignment — the first assignment we got at MIT — was to write an email to our future selves, which would be automatically delivered to our inboxes at the end of freshman year. 

my letter, written while walking home from the auditorium, was a list of eleven questions. sadly, at the end of last year, i was too busy studying and organizing and last-minute packing and flying back home and visiting my old friends that i never had the time to answer my questions. 

but here they are at last, along with my best attempts responding to them — responses from both my current perspective and from my perspective when i first saw the email notification in my inbox, a moment buried four months in the past:

hi,

what classes are you taking?

right now, i’m taking⁠01 i have many thoughts about all these classes, but that’ll be for a future post! 7.30 (fundamentals of ecology), 8.033 (relativity), 8.041 (quantum physics i), 21G.707 (spanish and latin american comics), and 24.906 (linguistic study of bilingualism). at the end of last semester, when i first received the email, i had just finished 6.200 (circuits and electronics, formerly 6.002), 7.05 (general biochemistry), 8.03 (vibrations and waves), 18.032 (differential equations), and wgs.303 (history of gender).

what do you do on a wednesday evening?

after i leave my last class (8.033), i walk back to my room. i finish copy editing articles for the tech, our student newspaper; i check the grammar and reword sentences until our deadline. 

i bike across campus to quizbowl⁠02 jeopardy-style academic competition, but with teams practice. i am distracted though and i stare out the window at the charles river, fidget with the buzzer in my hands, scroll through pages and pages of dormspam⁠03 an email mailing list to which nearly all undergraduate students are subscribed. at most hours of the day, it’s flooded with club advertisements and clothing sales and pleads for lost items — an incessant stream that most choose to filter from their main inbox. emails but hardly click on any. i walk back to my dorm through the infinite corridor, now filled with jugglers and their inquisitive onlookers. it’s getting dark, or maybe not quite dark but a blank tealish gray, and the warm indoor lighting is what the color of the sunset should be if we could banish cambridge’s godforsaken sad clouds.

i sit down in a lounge on my floor. i watch an 8.041⁠04 quantum physics i, taught in a hybrid format; our lectures are pre-recorded (on opencourseware) and our psets are auto-graded, but our recitations and office hours are in-person lecture or read some linguistics papers as the kitchen saturates with the aromas of dinner imminent. 

but i usually don’t cook on wednesdays. instead, i bike to the dining hall at maseeh through a pitch-black outfinite. i walk back through killian court, through a path between the big dome and the charles river, and at times i stop and listen to the crickets and crane my neck upwards and watch the stars float overhead.

when i return, i begin reading graphic novels for my spanish class. i read deep into the night, interrupted perhaps by a biweekly housecomm⁠05 the house committee (student government) of my dorm, east campus meeting or quantum mechanics questions; i read and read, in my room and in a lounge, until my head is inundated with too many new words and too little sleep and my eyelids spasm with the intoxication of fatigue. i sometimes finish the reading; often i don’t, but i plop onto my bed anyways and i dream happily.

are you talking to someone? a professor or classmate or roommate or friend?

as i’m writing this, i’m talking to a few friends who live on my floor (tetazoo) and some who live on the floor below us (beast). it’s late, so our conversation is punctured by long pauses and longing stares and it’s been slowly losing steam for the past few minutes. our conversation drifts; we’re talking about which places we want to go to this weekend, and many of us are hopelessly lost in phones or daydreams.

what do you think about building 9’s subbasement?

sadly not much :(

what’s the fastest path from simmons a tower tenth floor to the banana lounge entrance?

you already know the fastest path, but you might not know all of them. and there’s so many cool things that you get to see if you don’t take the fastest one!

killian court (near the big dome), facing east

basement corridor and machine room of building 13

kresge oval auditorium (left) and stairs leading up to the student center (right)

the outfinite, which runs parallel to its more famous sibling (the infinite corridor)

basement tunnel system at the intersection between buildings 8, 16, and 26

intersection between mass ave. and vassar st., near the north end of campus

terrazzo mural floor of building 6c, which contains physics labs and the metropolis makerspace

and finally, the banana lounge itself!

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have you ran into a red line [subway] station just as the train was departing?

i must have at some point, but i don’t recall when. perhaps the metro had just departed when i ran into the central square station, suitcase in tow, trying to catch a 10:30 am amtrak at boston south station bound for stamford. i might have stopped in exhaustion and caught my breath and panicked since i wouldn’t make the train. (thankfully, i did arrive on time, but only because i read the departure time wrong and i thought that it was going to leave a few minutes before it actually did.) 

or maybe i ran into the station as the metro was leaving when i entered alewife or harvard station to dodge wind or rain or just tiredness, to relieve myself from the obligation of biking home. i would’ve been content to be sheltered within the station’s dry warmth, even if it meant waiting for the next train.

or it could’ve happened on any number of occasions — impromptu trips to the aquarium or beach; a final trip to the airport at the end of fall semester, snow everywhere and 6 am; returning from late-night central square runs. it must’ve happened at some point.

have you felt snow?

yes!

charles river!

kresge oval

view of briggs field from simmons

near building 12 (mit.nano)

rip snowman :(

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do you still think the charles is pretty as the sun filters down through the trees and the crickets sing yet once again after the torment of rain and wind?

i do :)

where are you?

i’m typing on my phone and i’m with some of my friends, loitering in the stata loading docks⁠06 an electronic waste dumpster located in the basement parking lot, serving as a transient graveyard for monitors, printers, keyboards, chairs, fridges, sometimes even lab equipment. many MIT students make frequent pilgrimages to the loading docks to <em>cruft</em> — that is, to dumpster dive and sort the functional devices from the broken. and wallowing in 1 am lethargy. (we didn’t end up finding anything worth taking, not that we had anything in mind that we wanted to find.)

when i first saw the letter in my inbox, i had just returned to my room back home⁠07 i don’t really know what to call home anymore. i’m referring here to the house i lived in for most of middle and high school, which contains my bed and books and seven years of now-fleeting memories. but would it be wrong to say that MIT is also a home for me? would it be misguided to call my dorm room last year — with all its stuffed animals and chalk drawings and fairy lights — a home? since surely i made it home, or at least <em>a</em> home. and what about all the other places i’ve lived in? what about my childhood home in shanghai? what about my current dorm room, the place with most of the things that i know and hold dear? in short, i can’t really pinpoint a single place to call <em>home</em> anymore. but the same has been true since i left the world that i knew as a toddler and came to the united states — a new home. in los angeles, sitting at my desk for the first time in a year. it’s strange to think that i had sat there nearly every day since quarantine, and then one day i suddenly left for a faraway place called cambridge and didn’t come back for a short eternity. it was warm, warm enough that the air hugged and choked me in its palpable heat, so much more than the frigid puffer-jacket hellscape of cambridge⁠08 it’s getting really cold here again and i don’t like that :( .

are you supposed to be here?

i don’t know. i don’t really understand what my past self meant by this question; i don’t really know what i meant by “supposed to be” or “here.”

if i assume “here” to mean “at MIT,” then i think the answer is both yes and no. yes, in the sense that everyone at MIT is supposed to be here; no, in the sense that many people who aren’t here are also supposed to be here.

of course, being in the privileged position of being an MIT student, along with all the privilege that brought me here in the first place, the question for me is why rather than why not. out of the million and one things that could’ve happened to me, this has been a good and kind one — filled with friends and things to do and so many memories. but all the other things that could’ve happened to me besides MIT — well, of course they would’ve been different, yet all these paths wouldn’t be less beautiful or fun for lack of MIT. i don’t deserve to be at MIT any more than i deserve to be on any of these other paths.

maybe i shouldn’t be putting so much thought into this question, since i also feel like it was flawed from the beginning. it implies an impartial arbiter for what should be and what shouldn’t be, and i’m inclined to say that it doesn’t exist. if anything, MIT admissions sure isn’t one.

who are you?

i don’t know either! i’m still trying to figure that out. but i suppose that’s part of the fun of life — figuring things out and making things up as you go along.