tunes of interphase! by Angie F. '28

I. Lift – Radiohead

I didn’t really have a good senior year. My hometown started closing in on me in October, and it would’ve kept doing so until I collapsed under the pressure had I not gotten an MIT acceptance letter in December. I held tight onto the breath of fresh air I took in that day for months, and the effort of it made me blue in the face by March. Sin LiMITe⁠01 An event for Latino admitted students and CPW⁠02 Campus Preview Weekend rolled around, and I left that sleepless, exhilarating set of weekends with a song stuck in my head–

This is the place

Sit down, you’re safe now

You’ve been stuck in a lift

We’ve been trying to reach you, Thom

This is the place

It won’t hurt ever again

–and two main things on my mind:

1. MIT really was everything I’d imagined it to be– and more. Somewhere out there, there was a place where I could finally breathe.
2. A page in my notes app that just said “Interphase”⁠03 A little sidenote about what Interphase EDGE/x is: it’s a two-year academic support program run by the Office of Minority Education with a seven-week summer component meant to ease the transition into MIT for incoming freshmen and provide them with all the support they might need to succeed while they’re there. In short, you get to build a strong foundation in some of the subjects the rest of your coursework will likely build upon, befriend some of the most interesting people you’ve ever met, learn to balance classes with extracurriculars and social life early, and get a head start on exploring networking, makerspaces, and some other things. Most importantly, you’ll find a little community of students with similar backgrounds to rely on throughout your time at MIT. As you’ll discover in this post, I can’t recommend it enough-- if you’re a prefrosh or prospective student, I encourage you to learn more about the program <a href="https://ome.mit.edu/interphase-edge/">here</a>!

For months, all I’d wanted to do was leave. Now, I had a chance to do so early, and address my main worry about MIT in the process: I hadn’t taken physics since an algebra-based distance learning class during freshman year and didn’t really have a strong hold on chem, either, so I knew I’d have to spend my summer playing catchup. I asked my parents for permission, put my all into my application, and waited, holding my breath once more and only letting go once I got that acceptance letter in my email. I spent the month that followed feeling Puerto Rico turn into something like a waiting room: everything that I loved still stood out, but all the things that I disliked became easier and easier to shrug away. After all, I was going home.

I was still kind of nervous though– as I packed my bags, as I boarded the plane, as I walked to the front door of my dorm and felt Maseeh tower over me. If I didn’t like Interphase, then I wouldn’t be able to call what I was doing “moving out” anymore: instead, I would be running away from all the things that had made my hometown such an unpleasant place to be during my senior year. I’d be letting them win.

But as the people I’d be sharing a floor with for the next seven weeks began to filter into the halls, as I set up my bed and color coordinated my closet and put together my lava lamp, I felt some of these fears begin to subside. Passing by strangers who I knew would soon become friends, I breathed in and out for the first time in what felt like months, and Maseeh became a place that wasn’t quite home yet, but could be.

Today is the first day of the rest of your days

So lighten up, squirt

II. This Charming Man – The Smiths

My time at Interphase turned from one of meek, apprehension-riddled excitement to a vibrant whirlwind of a life, a change that was as sudden and striking as the guitar riff that follows a second of silence at the beginning of this song. It blasted through my headphones during trips through the Infinite to get to class or the Edgerton Center and runs across Killian Court just for the heck of it. I listened to it during conversations about nothing and everything and all that lies in the nerdy in between in the Maseeh 2 lounge, p-set sessions in the basement, and most notably, while walking across the Harvard Bridge with two Interphasers who would go on to become some of my best friends, Carlos and Fabián. Something most people will (unwillingly) come to know about me is that I can do a mean impression of Morrissey, the widely and rightfully disliked lead singer of The Smiths. It’s something that my friends from home have honestly gotten kind of sick of, so I was incredibly surprised to hear Carlos and Fabián’s impressed reactions to me singing along to the chorus of this song. As silly as it was, it filled me with a weird sense of peace: all the things about me that had become commonplace back home were exciting and new here, and I could pick and choose which ones I wanted to leave behind and which I wanted to keep. No one at MIT knew about my Morrissey impression, and I didn’t know about theirs. There were a million things I couldn’t wait to share with everyone I was growing to love here, and even more I couldn’t wait for them to share back. On that bridge, the sun was already beginning to hide itself behind the Boston skyline, but to me, it looked like it was just starting to rise.

a photo from the bridge that day, featuring the dome!

III. East Coast – Alex G

One of the first things I learned from upperclassmen at Sin LiMITe was that everyone at MIT will get many grueling but surpassable reality checks during their time there, usually starting in their first semester. And, of course, in typical prefrosh fashion, I nodded along while silently telling myself that it didn’t apply to me. I thought that, by accepting early on that MIT would kick my butt, the effects of the butt-kicking itself would be mitigated. After all, I’d already given myself a reality check: I’d repeated all the classic lines, about how MIT is meant to be hard and half of the people here go from being in the top 10% of their high school class to the bottom 50% of their college one, to myself over and over. Going into Interphase, I expected to struggle with physics and chemistry… but not math. After all, I’d always been good at it: AP Calculus BC was (mostly) a cakewalk, and I managed to test into Interphase’s Calc 3 class despite never having taken multivar. When I got my first p-set, I approached it just as I would’ve in high school, hunkering down over the assignment at my desk the day it was due with nothing but my class notes and my noise-canceling headphones. This went about as well as you’d expect, and as 11:59 PM inched closer and closer, it was my friend Daniel walking into the study room to find me approaching hysterics that stopped me from failing to submit anything at all, though what I had was still not enough to earn me a passing grade. As I uploaded my work to Gradescope, I sobbed to this guy I’d known for barely two weeks about how this was “the worst assignment I’d ever submitted.” He reassured me that, after this, I’d be way ahead of everyone else in 18.02 in the fall, but all I could do was shake my head: in that moment, I didn’t feel like I could ever be ahead of anyone. 

This, of course, caught up to me fairly quickly, with my professor reaching out to offer support shortly after the due date. As embarrassed as I initially was, I quickly realized there was no reason to be: he and the TAs were incredibly understanding, and all they wanted to do was help. It took me a while to accept that I needed it, and I worked through another p-set alone, listening to this song whenever I got especially frustrated. But I slowly let it sink in that collaboration was necessary at thrive at MIT, a realization that was easy to have once I started noticing all the things people around me achieved by simply putting aside their pride and leaning on each other, getting twice my results with only half of my struggle: the moment that pushed me to internalize this the most was walking out of the study room angry at myself for not making much progress on a problem on my second p-set, only to find that five of my classmates had been debating that same problem at a board in the lounge for the last hour. I accepted my professor’s offer to have one-on-one office hours with him and a TA twice a week and made an effort to ask for help even when it made me feel silly, both in and out of academic contexts (notable example: the time I looked around HMart for something for somewhere between five and ten minutes before sucking it up and asking an employee about it, only to find that they didn’t have what I was looking for at all). It is, admittedly, a massive work in progress, one I suspect I’ll be grappling with for a good amount of my MIT career, if not longer. However, being able to learn strategies to deal with it early on has been one of the most invaluable benefits of Interphase. I’ve already made more progress on this issue this summer than I had in my entire academic career leading up to it, both because of the support of the program staff and the presence of my peers, from Daniel in the study room to everyone else who showed me that even the smartest people get confused sometimes. 

One day in the dining hall, a group of wide-eyed high schoolers came up to the Interphase table, flooding us with questions about essays and stats and application tips. “Do any of you feel like you got in with a mid application?” one of them asked. I raised my hand, and was shocked to see every other person at that table– a table filled with robotics geniuses and cancer researchers and math magicians– do the same. The flip side of the MIT community’s commendable humility is that imposter syndrome is almost a campus-wide epidemic; however, this means that there’s never a shortage of kindness from your peers when the disease reaches you.

IV. Mr. Brightside – The Killers

A staple of Interphase 2024 is the vibrant party scene… ok, not really. Over the course of the summer, my friends Isa and Carlos took it upon themselves to host three “raves” that all of Interphase agrees were, in short, “a movie.” Prompted by jokes about the behemoth that is the thousand-person Boston Welcome Week Rave in the fall, they put together lights, a sound system, and the best Spotify queue known to man in the Maseeh 2 lounge, bringing the whole cohort (and a few RFAs) together for a night of singing, dancing, and karaoke. As I jumped around singing my heart out to this song, it struck me that none of the things that usually would have mattered to me in a situation like this– whether I knew the lyrics or not, my criminal inability to dance (expect a blog post about my learning experience at the Latin Dance Club at some point), who was or wasn’t watching– were on my mind at all. 

Over the course of the summer, I picked up on something a little odd: my laugh had started to change. It started with just my closest friends, but over time, I found the same barely familiar sound coming out of my mouth at every joke or funny story, no matter where I was or who was telling it. It was the sound of someone without a reserved bone in their body, the unrestrained laugh I’d usually kept deep inside me save for the most special occasions. Now, though, I heard it constantly, and it was at one of these raves that I realized with a start why: I didn’t have to hold myself back here. Not only was I happier, I was also just more me. With all the p-sets and late night Cambridge Pizza runs and bellyaching laughing fits taking up my days, I hadn’t found the time to water down the parts of myself I usually made sure to squash meticulously. The deep breaths I’d worked so hard to take on my first day at Interphase were shallow compared to the ones I took every second now, staring right at the person I was becoming and realizing I was excited to see what I’d turn into. 

Another thing I realized at one of these raves: I cannot sing for the life of me. But when I was pushed into the middle of a dance circle during “Creep” by Radiohead, I delivered nonetheless. Here’s a video of that for your viewing… pleasure? Displeasure? Watch it and see for yourself.

V. Scattered Blue Light – September

It was Sunday past 8PM and I still had $60 of my weekly Interphase TechCash stipend left. Unless I wanted to eat leftover Cambridge Pizza for the next week, the only place where I could reasonably spend the money that was still open was HMart. I slipped on my headphones, put this song on loop, and began walking over there. 

The first half of the summer had fallen behind me and I was watching the second one rapidly follow suit. My recent midterm grades, my upcoming p-sets, the next steps for my Edgerton project, the friends I already had and all the ones I was still making, my room and our raves and all the countless laughs I’d had with people who I could trust to hold me up when I needed it, no matter what– the song’s soft guitar intro and the constant horn honking and chatter of Cambridge blended together to score my rising stream of thoughts, finally allowed to wander after being walled off by yet another day of constant activity. By the time I got to HMart, my whole summer was rushing through my mind, rising in intensity with the song’s melody before they both fell to a lull as I came to a realization: I didn’t need anything. From HMart or anywhere else. I already had everything I wanted.

I asked my friends if they wanted anything and ended up leaving the store with a towering bag of fruits for Carlos, guava candies for Daniel, and an unreasonable amount of instant ramen for everyone else, the song starting over as I stepped out into the hush of Cambridge at twilight. As I looked up at the impossibly deep blue sky, it hit me that I was walking through a city, my city, alone with a towering bag of groceries. That every waking moment I had belonged to me, taking place in a little world I’d carved out all for myself. I’d failed a p-set and gotten a new laugh and found people who liked my Morrissey impression, and in doing so, I’d lived a life that was truly all my own for the very first time.

It’s all beginning to end

It’s all beginning to end

In a few weeks, I’d pack my bags and leave my summer room, feeling a slight apprehension at the thought of returning home and putting my new life on pause. But even then I’d know that, no matter what, I could always dig up those experiences from the back of my mind and breathe. In the days that hung between our early move-ins to our fall dorms and my brief departure from campus before orientation began, I’d run from dorm to dorm with my friends, feeling my little corner of the world grow slightly with each laugh-filled step. We’d choose one to end our adventure at, curling up on a lounge couch to watch some stupid TV show none of us cared about nearly as much as we cared about the fact that we were watching it together. And they’d get up to play pool but I’d stay there, closing my eyes and letting their newly familiar voices and laughs guide me to sleep. I’d hear them say look, she’s asleep a few minutes before I actually was, and catch a few words of them debating the best way to wake me up when it was time to leave. Like a kid falling asleep on the way back from a grownup party, pretending not to wake up when the car stopped and one of my parents picked me up, tucked me into bed, and gave me a kiss on the cheek, I’d stand somewhere outside my little world and let a warm feeling fill my chest at the sight of how everything unfolded when I wasn’t around. And I’d feel ready for another eternity in it, though, for now, four more years would do.