Please note:

The MIT Welcome Center will be closed December 23–January 1. Our office will be available by phone and email on December 23–24, and closed for the winter break from December 25–January 1. We will open on January 2. Happy holidays!

Rachel F. '12

  • Course 6-3
  • rfongspeaks [at] mit [dot] edu
MIT student blogger Rachel F. '12

Biography

I'm Rachel, possibly more frequently referred to by my Athena username, rfong, although we have to be at least Facebook friends before that's socially acceptable.

I spent the first 18 years of my life frolicking in San Jose, CA, untouched by the rigors of real work and uninflated grades. Now, I cohabit a room on the top (and, inferentially, the warmest) floor of the west parallel of East Campus with a ginger cat named Reese, who takes his REM a lot more seriously than I do.

Most of my activities are blocked into adrenaline-filled spurts of consecutive hours; when I'm not entrenched in some kind of masochistic 50-hour coding marathon, I've probably just sold my soul to some kind of masochistic 8-hour-long mural-painting, music-library-organizing, bulk-photoshoot-editing, or oh-my-god-I-just-got-a-shipment-of-tea-and-I-have-to-taste-test-and-calibrate-the-brew-parameters-for-everything marathon. Once, I actually slept for 32 hours, but I had the flu, so I don't think that counts as an intentional effort on the part of my conscious mind.

You may find that I tend to describe concepts in ways that are overliteralized to the point of meaninglessness. For example, my field of study, computer science, is centered around developing methods to get small amounts of data from very large amounts, while my physics major friend spends his time dirtying clean paper by reorganizing collections of squiggly pencil lines.

I won't lie: I'm going to be spending a lot of time describing the curvatures of squiggly lines. But I hope that looking at all those squiggly lines together, in their intricate arrangements, can help give you a better sense of the big picture.

Metaphorically, that is.

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