Starting out on a journey…
Life is a road and I wanna keep going;
Love is a river and I wanna keep flowing.
Life is a road; now and forever, wonderful journey.
I’ve been drafting a “why I love MIT” post for quite some time but I have never been able to finish it because I just couldn’t explain what I felt towards the great Institvte. Yet after Convocation, I am able to target explicitly what I love.
The second speaker, Phillip Clay, addressed our experience at MIT as a “journey” - something wide open, just waiting for us to explore and find our way through the darkness, until we too achieve the ultimate goal of becoming someone that we are proud of. In a way, I too have begun a series of journeys: one to reach MIT, another to transition, and I am just about to start my third, appropriately titled Freshman Year. In each of these paths, I have faced considerable troubles. For example, I never would have dreamed I would be admitted in the first place, but after failing the Math Diagnostic Exam, I felt as if MIT had seriously made a mistake in admitting me. (21/100 isn’t exactly a brilliant score, if you know what I mean, and I actually went into the testing room with the intent of attempting the test…)
I knew I would hit lots of walls, not only academically but socially. Already I have had to learn to adapt to housing/seminar arrangements I dislike (including adjusting to roommates who sleep incredibly early), I have to audition against hundreds of other musical masterminds to join MITSO, I have successfully failed my first test at MIT (quite extremely too), I failed to qualify as an admissions blogger (I have the slightest feeling my controversial posts may be at fault ;D), and just flipping through the textbooks for my upcoming fall semester classes makes me want to curl up under the covers with my Flu GiantMicrobe (that my brother bought for me at the MIT Museum) and cry. The lab assistants weren’t kidding when they said MIT is set on beating you down to the ground, letting you find your way back up, and beating you down again.
And yet, we enjoy it here. Why? Surely we can’t all be masochists (okay, maybe that -is- a possibility); rather, I believe we enjoy it because we enjoy the challenge of being beaten down to the ground. We take pride in saying that we were able to beat the system (ex. hacking culture); we enjoy seeing those lofty walls looming ahead and find thrill in figuring ways to scale them; we enjoy the fact that we’re stepping into an open door onto an open path in our life at MIT. There is something amazing in the fact that we are aware of the challenges ahead - there is a certain camaraderie that forms between students as we face the unknown together, be we friends or strangers - and that WE, not our parents or mentors, are ultimately the ones who carry the tools that will be able to pave the way towards the future. I hope not to sound full of purple prose or random cliches, but whenever I feel extremely upset, I just look up at the wide Cambridge sky and marvel in the wonder that lives in this Institute of Technology… and I know that tomorrow will be better.
On an unrelated note, I clearly remember drafting a HUGE entry about why I dislike Apple - you know, to explain to all my iPhone-fanboy friends - but now I can’t find it in my drafts or published posts at all. Strange… and disappointing, since I spent quite a bit of time making it sound perfect :p