During the first part of grad school, I spent a lot of time (unofficially) visiting Simons. there was a long program in spring 2024 with multiple weeklong workshops, one of which sparked my first research direction and set of papers in grad school. I continued to visit frequently if sporadically in my second year, after we moved closer to downtown and it became easier to walk up to Simons on a whim. the fact that JH left Berkeley, that now when I visit the bay area I work at coffee shops inhabited by adults, hippies or tech workers or artists, probably, rather than the not-yet-shaped occupation held by college students, that I no longer climb at Benchmark, is one of the more visible ways in which my life has changed over the past year.

There’s an insidious question that I’ve been grappling with again recently: is life good? or, alternatively: is it good to be alive right now?

When I was a kid I owned a branded pink cap proclaiming that it was. I don’t think I would have known anything about the brand back then, since I remember only that I picked it out of the bizarre discount dumpster landscape of the Marshall’s on Greenbelt Rd. but the logo must have resonated with me deeply, and it was a beloved summer vacation accessory for many years until finally my forehead grew too wide for children’s hats.

In high school, I loved to take online personality tests with my friends. every once in a while, someone would find a new one and send it around, then we would all take it and send back our own results to compare and dissect to oblivion, one of my favorite activities ever. I’ve long forgotten the details of most of the personality tests I’ve taken, except for maybe the weirdest ones and the ones that had the most scientific discussion behind them in the literature, which I would later come across again when browsing psychology posts on social media.

One quiz that stands out in my memory is the Fisher Temperament Inventory, which categorizes everyone as being primarily motivated by one of four neurochemical systems: dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen-oxytocin.1 in high school, I got testosterone, with a fairly high score in dopamine as well. retaking it now, my estrogen-oxytocin score now matches testosterone, again with dopamine close behind. I don’t know whether this is very concrete evidence of anything about my personality: according to the Gemini summary, the Fisher Temperament Inventory is “somewhat” empirically sound, but seems to be nowhere near as well studied as the big five. but even if it’s validation bias, I feel like it’s roughly correct that I’m very interested in technical and exploratory work, and that as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to understand human experience better, and accordingly weigh it more against my academic ambitions or personal enjoyment.

In high school, I would also fill my entire schedule with STEM extracurriculars, because almost everything sounded exciting, occasionally at the detriment of sleeping or hanging out with my friends. science bowl I loved most of all, not for any kind of deep reason but just because it was really fun to answer quickly and correctly. I’ve since lost any kind of edge I might have had at speed or pure recall, but these days redactle remains one of my favorite online games.

Although I don’t feel like my high school experience was particularly toxic, it’s true that everyone was somewhat attuned to metrics of success. an example: a cynical perspective on science bowl is that it doesn’t count nearly as much in college admissions, compared to something like winning the national math olympiad. the subtext is that olympiads might be a clearer indicator of your individual ability, and thus a more direct proxy for worthiness of respect. but I still loved science bowl more than basically anything else I signed up for, and I think it was also easy for me to not dwell too much on these external factors when I felt like I didn’t particularly stand out in competition math compared to some of my peers.

It might be relevant that I attended the kind of school that regularly mints finalists in olympiad competitions, and once in a while even produces alumni who are widely recognized as something of a generational phenomenon. during my time in high school, I was classmates with someone who could plausibly have been one of these once-in-a-decade talents, who took a gold metal at multiple international olympiads, which is how I learned that it’s possible to get rate limited from taking home more medals. aside from just the quality of education, this experience was actually really helpful for adjusting socially to academic life, since I learned early on that intellectual superstars are human like the rest of us. but also as a result of this, I internalized early on that it was futile for me to compete on this kind of technical horsepower. in the end, this belief didn’t keep me from pursuing a PhD, but it did set the the tone of the kind of work I expected to do.

I don’t know many Chinese proverbs, but there’s one that flashes across my mind: 人外有人，天外有天. outside of sky, there is sky, and the story goes, if you are a frog living in a well, there is far more world outside that surpasses your existence.

Putting aside the science content of the workshop, AI is clearly the topic on everyone’s minds these days.2 at the workshop last week, I had as many conversations about quantum as I did about GPT. my feeling based on my own circles had been that the online discourse about LLMs and intellectual work has been largely led by mathematicians, with maybe a different attitude from software engineers who are more resigned to market forces. I’ve always appreciated that quantum information is such an interdisciplinary field, with people from both TCS and physics backgrounds coming together to attempt to understand large quantum systems from first principles, and at this year’s workshop I especially appreciated everyone’s willingness to engage with the range of values held by people in the field.

Like pretty much everyone else in this field, I’ve been trying to articulate my thoughts on the value of my work for a while now. for me personally the AI crisis is pretty timely, all things considered, since I just completed candidacy this past year and naturally have been trying to pin down the direction that the rest of my PhD will take. it’s been validating to hear some of my sentiments echoed by other people: for instance, the comparison made by AZ (and many other physicists) between writing down definitions and rigorous frameworks for physics, and constructing careful prompts for a LLM to work with. from this perspective it’s hard to find anything morally wrong with a job built on prompting, and after all aren’t all of the scientists I admire most the ones who worked on the most interesting questions? and yet I have to confess it doesn’t bring me much joy to argue with an LLM, compared to engaging with colleagues, or to continually correct its output when I’ve failed to exactly specify the task that I want completed. still, I also have to admit that it’s an incredible privilege to be paid to do exploratory science at all. if you had told the me of seven years ago that this would be my life one day, I might not believe you, mainly because that version of me was terrified of grad school.

To my close friends, though, maybe it’s not so unbelievable that I would have enthusiastically signed up for something that would cause me a great deal of anxiety. case in point: one way that I’ve been finding joy outside of work recently has been in moving (and subsequently in interior decorating). I had just moved out of the Caltech graduate housing and into an off campus room last year after losing the lottery, and I originally planned to stay in the same place for a bit longer. but in March, I realized that I was starting to go stir crazy, and decided to upgrade to a larger place with more privacy.

Although I also lived off campus in undergrad, I learned after moving here that the LA market is different from Boston in a lot of ways—the most obvious ones being fewer students and a more drawn out “peak” season which isn’t tied to academic calendars, as well as more spread-out neighborhoods without much for consideration in terms of public transit. that being said, I’ve found the LA rental market was easier to navigate in a lot of ways compared to Boston. although I had decided beforehand to move out when my lease was up, but I didn’t start seriously looking until a few weeks before I needed to move. in Boston, on the other hand, I’ve heard of students signing leases almost half a year in advance. Facebook marketplace is another story of its own, but since I decided to move mainly because I wanted a nicer space, I tried to embrace the challenge of putting together an apartment on a grad school budget, and overall I’m pleased with the results.

A less obvious yet very important way in which the LA rental market differs from Boston, or any other area I’ve lived in: up until a year ago, many landlords in the area refused to provide fridges for tenants. the economics behind this are truly fascinating, as is the severe cope resulting from it (taken from a reddit thread on the newly passed law):

Another example of this kind of multiple stable equilibria: academic culture, and the differences between adjacent subfields. I once said to a friend who was having a bad time in school that I thought it was valid to choose what (not) to work on based on the people in the field, and to this day I think that my mentors in quantum and the people I interacted with in the MIT physics department are a large part of why I decided to go to grad school at all. now that I’ve seen a bit further, I admire the first generation of quantum information theorists more than ever. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully appreciate the bravery that it takes to decide to work on something that no one else in the world believes in yet.

And I for one am glad for the new legislation passed in California and the fact that I now have a place equipped with a functional kitchen, complete with full sized fridge which I have all to myself.

So far this is all to say that life looks a bit different from six months, or a few years ago, in very sharp ways. but I feel like I should clarify that none of these events precipitated anything that truly deserve the subtitle of this post. the closest thing to a crisis that I’ve experienced, and the most forceful tug at my sanity the last few months, was the period after QIP when my mother suddenly passed away.

Most of my friends who listen to Taylor Swift agree that TTPD was a pretty solid album, though with one major (haha) complaint, which is that nearly every song is written in the same key. but in some ways grief feels like C major, in that it’s a bit hard to feel much of anything for a while, and a lot of what I did feel was different tones of bitterness and frustration.

Maybe this is just projection, though. I don’t have perfect pitch or anything like that, and I don’t really pay attention to keys until they change. regardless when I’m asked what I’ve been up to in the last few months, I don’t say any of this. what I do bring up: moving, and travel. in June I escaped California to accompany JH on a pre-conference vacation in Italy. I had never done this before, partly because I’ve had a pretty busy travel calendar on my own, but this time I was glad for the excuse to leave my everyday life behind.

I’ve met a lot of people who insist that the museums in Europe are better, culturally and historically richer, with higher quality artifacts than those in North America. I don’t know if I’ve visited enough of Europe to have a well founded opinion, but it’s true that there are older European collections which also tend to feature more of a lean towards their original owners. according to the Vatican audio tour, museums and public collections are themselves an 18th century invention. now that I’m older, I feel like I can better appreciate the academic significance of historical collections. but I still think I was lucky to have grown up near DC, a short metro ride from the Smithsonian museums, and it’s also confounding and miraculous that a random Englishman with no apparent connections to the colonies would bequeath his family fortune to establish such an institute in the newly independent states in America.

I think that another consequence of growing up in the US is that it’s easy to believe in the narrative of American exceptionalism, and to overlook the perspective of King George (as a figurehead for Britain) in the Hamilton musical. oceans rise, empires fall, as they say. but in Rome there are remnants of fallen empire everywhere, including our hotel, which shares a lot with a notable piece of architecture that has its own Wikipedia page. in a city spanning over two millennia, it’s easy to feel like just another cog in the transcendent machine of human civilization. in the context of such a long human history, does it mean anything to live a good life?

There’s a scene from the 2016 anime Yuri!!! on Ice that I keep going back to, which is the opening of the final episode. after exchanging gold rings in the previous episode, Yuuri opens the scene by calling things off with Viktor (as his figure skating coach), and is surprised when Viktor starts to cry. individual humans can be surprisingly fragile. but who among us has never identified with Yuuri in this scene, accidentally breaking the things that we hold close?

Even the concept of “the good life” itself seems to imply that the haphazard, careless, typical life somehow fails to achieve a certain bar. I mean typical here in the sense of the typical set, which is to say a modal kind of life that many people tend towards. and yet there’s a whole genre of literature written by the children of immigrants in the Western hemisphere which exists partially to reckon with the ways we act while holding onto survival, and to redeem our parents for trying their best to love us.

But even putting aside questions about moral realism and the validity of the one-size-fits-all “life well-lived”, I wouldn’t know how to tell when something is “good enough”. is it enough to be content with your own life, to accept the sum of your circumstances, your good deeds and flaws? surely that’s not completely right, but it’s also impossible to accurately judge counterfactual impact when history sweeps up and flattens us all into broad strokes, river delta subcultures and individual stories be damned.

One group of people which has remained staunchly anti-AI is the online art community. I’m thinking, for instance, of Sam Kriss’s essay on the meaninglessness of the flowery prose generated by an LLM. but if LLMs are good mainly for generating unoriginal content to fill time and space, so are most humans. if I hear one more analogy between the mechanization of theorem proving and the development of chess engines, I might scream.

A very salient fear around AI that I’ve seen brought up in various circles is that of losing the human institution of science, and all of the values and culture that come with it (see, for example, Michael Harris’s writing). the obvious first-order worry here is that scientific research as a human enterprise will be eliminated, and consequently we’ll all lose our jobs, though I don’t know that everyone necessarily agrees with this sentiment or views mechanization pessimistically (notably, there is Linus Torvald’s take).

What I agree will happen: the labor of particular kinds of technical work will be devalued, and the corresponding training for this kind of labor will also diminish. there’s an interesting comparison to the profession of weaving, and the reasoning of the Luddites who resisted the mechanization of their work, but this begs the question: is it necessarily a bad thing for cloth to be mass-produced? would most of us think it essential to preserve the active practice of hand-painted door lettering like that found on MIT campus, or the sort of punchcard computer programming used in the first NASA missions?

There’s a related question of whether it’s inherently valuable to spend time learning something, especially if it doesn’t materially benefit you. to be clear, I’ve personally stood on the side of the artists. LLMs and other recent trends in education have brought this question to the foreground of academia, but it’s been around in my personal life even before that, all the way back when I was still competing in science bowl. you might think that anyone born after the year 2000 would have grown up with an internalized understanding of the power of Wikipedia, and the uselessness of memorizing trivia that could easily be googled (in which case I guess you would think wrong?). but I think it’s ok that most people don’t think this way, and it’s for the most part good that we’re able to outsource knowledge about e.g. how foods interact with certain drugs, instead of relying on memory or finding out the hard way. (and this is a bit of a digression, but I also think a lot of the questions about whether the kids are cooked because the LLMs are encouraging them to cheat on their homework should be addressed from the perspective of public education, rather than from that of a research scientist.)

Though in the first place, what a small fraction of people it is that are able to appreciate intellectual labor in the first place. earlier, when I said that AI is on “everyone’s” minds these days, who is “everyone”? even if technical workers are preoccupied with the prospect of losing their jobs, surely the fraction of the population that holds a job which is based primarily on intellectual labor remains relatively small, if Redditers regularly tell you that college is overrated. and if you do take up the stance of moral realism, and look towards public opinion as a compass for moral good, how do you reconcile the huge gap in public perception of AI between the US and China?34

My parents both have engineering degrees, and I grew up in a household in which I was encouraged to make the most of academic opportunities. but I think my parents’ case is a bit unusual among Chinese immigrants who came to the US on student visas, because while it’s not uncommon for one spouse to give up working in their field to follow the other, as far as I can tell neither of my parents worked in jobs relevant to their degrees for pretty much the entire time that they’ve been here. my mother worked in real estate during most of my time in school, which from what I can tell is a pretty median occupation in that realtors don’t need to hold any kind of college degree, and while their income is commission-dependent, most of the ones I’ve met hover in a very average range for DC. many of her colleagues were young women, who were resourceful and clever enough to pass a realtor license exam, but would not have qualified for any kind of student visa or OPT and relied on marriage to obtain green cards. and although all of the paperwork in real estate could in theory be automated, I can attest to most of the work in facilitating the buying of a home being the physical labor of touring houses, overseeing inspections, etc.

But most of my exposure in adulthood, and the reason I keep thinking back to “normal” working people, has been the past year. before I moved, I lived in a large and very affordable “mom and pop” share house, with something like fifteen residents including young children upstairs. the occupants of the building included college students, contractors, a Hilton employee, a rideshare driver, and a mother who had been very friendly to me since I moved in, commenting that I was about the same age as her daughter, who was in med school and usually out of the house. the most remarkable feature of this place, and also a leading reason I moved out, was the kitchen that was shared by everyone on my floor, which was kept very clean considering the odd hours of all the inhabitants (I’m mostly calling myself out here) but whose aisles could also become very congested at peak dinner hours, which was chill except that after February I no longer had the energy to make small talk and maneuver around other people while preparing my salad.

When my very Asian landlady asks why I wanted to move, I’m actually a bit lost for words. isn’t it awkward to say that I could care less about saving on rent now that my mother is gone? but I also don’t really feel like it warrants an explanation, because wouldn’t most people prefer to upgrade their space? anyway, it turned out that the woman who had been friendly to me moved out at the same time that I did.

To go back to my own values and occupation, why did I (or anyone) go into theory in the first place? in the discussion that Robert Huang led at Simons, he reflected on how growing up he had wanted to be a scientist since he felt that scientific progress was scarce, or at least difficult, as well as a selfless cause worthy of devotion, and that its truth was timeless. I don’t doubt Robert’s character or integrity in saying this, but I don’t know that I could earnestly assert with much confidence that my current research direction is how I can best advance human society. it only happened to be an area in which I felt like I could contribute something with a bit positive value, while learning about a topic that I was personally excited about. and even if increasing access to a scarce resource is generally considered a pretty noble cause, it’s clear that this is not the only thing we care about, or else we wouldn’t be unhappy by the idea of a future in which AI autonomously decides the trajectory of science, produces new results, and explains them to humans. it’s probably reasonable to question if we need to give up on some part of this thinking.

But there are some parts of the AI discourse that confuse me. I don’t think it’s actually controversial that systems and machines should be built to serve humans, and I also don’t know that it’s a problem for the values behind science if proofs are generated by enormous machines whose scale vastly exceeds individual comprehension. my background is in physics, after all, and theorem-proving quantum information scientists have coexisted for a while now in the same department with large-collaboration particle physicists whose machines generate so much data that most of it must be filtered out and discarded before ever being stored in digital memory.

There’s another aspect of research and academia (but also art, and any creative activity) that I think is highlighted by all of this, and only exacerbated by being a mid-PhD career student, which is that doing anything really original is very, very hard. (and, are there even any original ideas? if I hadn’t been so fired up about science bowl in a past life, maybe I would be the one with the take on chess.)

But I also want to get this out now: even if I have occasional doubts about the specific contents of my PhD thesis, if you asked me at any point whether I would regret going to grad school for theory, I think I would probably end up saying no. another conversation comes to mind, one that I had with a faculty member who would soon after be transferred from the now-closed Yale-NUS College to the corresponding department in the NUS. this professor told me they had joined in the early days of the Yale-NUS experiment, having personally gone through a North American liberal arts education. I think I might be devastated if I were in their position, overseeing the death of a decade-long collective academic endeavor. but I probably would regret it more if I hadn’t tried.

Once upon a time, I knew someone who wanted to try being a physics major for a year, before deciding to go into interpretability. in another world, would we have swapped places, could I instead be working on designing statistically sound experiments in the hopes of improving our interactions with the models? in another world, would my parents have stayed overseas, and would my mother still be alive? to me the most compelling argument against dwelling on these many worlds is that we live in and must learn to be happy in this one. in that sense, there’s no better time or place to have been a theory student than today.

And sometimes I have to stop and marvel at the progress that’s been made with natural language models in the last few years. some dead philosopher somewhere, Wittgenstein perhaps, is doing the opposite of rolling in their grave, vindicated by the empirical evidence for the central role of language in human knowledge.

A more comforting thought: one of the last places that I visited with my parents was the Sagrada Familia. I had wanted to visit for a long time, having seen Gaudi’s work referenced in various forums, not to mention the Basilica being featured in Yuri!!! on Ice as the place where Yuuri and Viktor exchanged rings. and maybe I’m just grasping for meaning, but that the cathedral has been under construction for all of modern history, and that its structure was finally completed a mere two weeks after I visited, might be one of the greatest signs of the persistence of human endeavor, and of continual striving towards everything that is beautiful.

timeline wise, I’ll be traveling again this month, before coming back to California through the end of summer. as usual, thanks for reading, and don’t hesitate to reach out or shoot into the ask box

Edit 2026.08.05 12:30 PT: there are a few more notable pieces that have resonated with me recently. even though I didn’t explicitly reference them above, they contain snippets of thought that made it in, in addition to some perspectives beyond mine: this note from Ruxandra Teslo, and this more recent piece from Michael Harris. there is also this recent post from Noah Smith which I hadn’t read when I drafted my post but feels very familiar.

They say that march comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb. I guess I don’t know anymore after moving to southern California, where the seasons all blend together. but after two and a half years, I still find that a part of me is drawn towards the turbulence of spring and the stormy clashes of muck and optimism.

Something that makes me feel old is that when I watch anime these days, I no longer feel gripped by the plotlines. I look forward to the familiarity of my favorite characters more so than the surprise twists that drive the story forward. when I read memoirs or accounts of real stories, it’s the opposite (reality being stranger than fiction, and so forth). an example: I re-listened to Murakami’s memoir on a life spent between writing and running marathons. I don’t have strong opinions on Murakami; I like his prose but I can also see why he receives criticism on how he depicts his characters. but in his defense, he writes exactly like the kind of person he portrays himself as in the memoir, a borderline recluse with obsessive tendencies who acknowledges the impossibility of fully understanding other people.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on my own relationships with other people, revisiting e.g. the sentiments I wrote about when I first entered grad school. something that feels less than obvious in high school but is made very clear to prospective PhD students: just how different each person’s trajectory can be, despite being enrolled in the same program during the same period of time. when I’m asked about my experience at Caltech, I always couch my answer in disclaimers around just how much my time here is shaped by the specifics of my day-to-day habits, my travel schedule, even the details of the research directions I decided to pursue. but I was reminded recently that even in high school, my schedule probably looked a bit different from those of my friends. more to the point, I was discussing the question of whether I wished I had done anything differently in school, and my friend asked me point-blank whether I regretted being so chronically busy. this surprised me a little, because even though I’ve thought a lot about how I can reduce the commitments that don’t feel meaningful to me, I’ve never wanted to replace them with nothing. and somehow after a few years, I usually seem to end up with just as many things on my plate. all of this has made me start to think that the problem really is me (lol).

But the main reason that, deep down, I don’t actually regret this kind of lifestyle, is probably that I never really doubted that my friends would do their best to meet me partway. and I’m genuinely very thankful that even when I didn’t do the best job of making my own feelings legible, others around me were willing to extend to me the same kind of trust. in a lot of ways it’s fortunate that the reality of my world aligns pretty well with my faith in other people, in a way that the world of my parents’ generation might not have.

I’ve also started to think more about what it means to be a physicist, especially a theorist, in a time when drastic changes to our everyday technology seem inevitable, while the post-WWII-era institutions are due for major renovations. like everyone else, I don’t really have a good answer, and I’m anxious about whether the things I do like about academia and education will get lost in the cracks, just like the era of cheap but high-quality mass produced wood furniture. but most of the time I’m excited to be living through change, because the directionality of time makes it feel like the world is constantly expanding. and maybe it’s partially that I’ve long made my peace with not achieving the exact outcomes I had in mind, or that I find working to create your own job to be a bit of a miracle when I once felt that I might not have much control at all over my own life. but I also don’t think it’s a bad thing, for example, that the kind of software engineering involved in modern NASA missions is very different from the programming tasks that had been required for Apollo 11. and even if I don’t have much to back it up, I’ve decided that I’ll continue to be cautiously optimistic about this type of meta-work going forward.

on the other hand, I do find it comforting when I can still find joy in the same things. and after all this time, it still makes me happier than almost anything to play board games with new people, and to look at interesting art, and to meet other former science bowl kids who are now pursuing grad school.

lightning round

1. Lots of substack content and online writing, in particular Karmela Padavic-Callaghan’s newsletters. among other more obvious things they remind me a lot of what I enjoyed about the voice of the narrator in Weike Wang’s novel Chemistry

2. Anime: the second seasons of both Frieren and JJK (the latter against my will…)

3. HoYoverse content, particularly Linnea, who’s my new spirit animal, as well as the Nod Krai soundtrack. after visiting Latvia for QIP this year (a rare crossover, lol) I was amazed by how vibrant the culture felt despite the tiny population of the region, and also impressed by the care that went into designing the in-game content to showcase this part of the world.

4. Many apartment tours, after deciding to try to upgrade my space this upcoming year. hopefully I’ll have signed a lease by this time next month!

5. Some fresh stuff in the coffee department, including paper son coffee which is my new favorite place in SF. I’ve also recently been enjoying weird affogato concoctions, including buying this yawamochi dessert and dunking it in my instant coffee

6. The Californian wildflowers, viewed from the passenger side of the car going up the I-5 last month. I’d never seen the highway look this full of life 🌼

   

as always, feel free to shoot something into the ask box! (though if you have time-sensitive questions related to phd programs, consider sending me an email instead)

1. Attended the Laufey concert in SF, and left with a newfound appreciation for the last track on the album

   1. Seriously, the live version gave me chills! the best kind of string instrumentals in my opinion

2. Wrapped up and posted two more manuscripts from my conference submission

   1. Received the news that our submission was accepted as a contributed talk!

3. Prepared and gave a couple of invited talks

4. Somehow let myself be talked into making har gow for dinner in order to use up a huge surplus of shrimp

   1. Proceeded to spend like eight person hours of prep and clean up for around fifteen dumplings, probably due to skill issue

      

5. Advanced to candidacy, following a process which involved giving yet another (unfortunately very hastily prepared) talk

   1. For some reason it never occurred to me that the candidacy exam also included a closed door session, so this was me when I got kicked out:

      

6. Road tripped to the Grand Canyon for Thanksgiving and saw a clear Milky Way over North America for the first time in my life

7. Continued learning about quantum information

The working title of this post was “a matter of time (symmetry)”, which is taken from both the Laufey album, and the subject of my recent papers (i.e. systems with time symmetry, or conserved energy) [1, 2]. among other things, they’ve made for a really fun time this fall. I’m still getting used to being a more “senior” student, balancing traveling with getting things done, etc., but I’m excited for everything that’s ahead.

In summary, life has been a bit chaotic and hard to write about, mainly because it’s been so centered around grad school lately. but as the year once again comes to a close, I feel like I have a lot of new things to be thankful for.

running (metaphorical) marathons: an ask box feature

how do you regulate your dopamine and stay consistently productive? research is always touted to be a marathon, not a sprint

This is an interesting question, and one I’m not sure if I’m the most qualified to field. for one, I’m not very good at running marathons. also, in all seriousness, I’m only a third-year graduate student, so I’m not sure I know what it’s really like to pursue a long career in research. at most, I can speak to my experiences and the experiences of some of my friends who are also either in grad school, or recently started postgrad research positions in industry. also, I feel that it’s important to mention that different fields look very different from the inside, and measures of success can vary even for students within the same research group.

Caveats aside,1 I think I personally benefited a lot from reflecting on both my motivations in pursuing research, as well as on my emotional needs. I’ve written about some of this before: on the former topic, how it’s funny that everyone on my high school science bowl team is now in grad school, as well as some of the new habits I tried to build in the last two years in order to align my experience with what I wanted to get out of the PhD. on the latter, probably the best piece of advice I received was to be mindful of my emotional health and my support networks as I entered the “adult world”. also, as weird as this might sound, I think it was really eye-opening to read the acknowledgements sections in the dissertations written by people I admired. while some people write very straightforward statements on their funding sources and collaborators, many had fairly personal notes that detailed how thankful they were for the people who shaped their grad school experience. most people that I knew also specifically named their family’s love and support as a crucial foundation upon which they could pursue a career in research.

But another aspect of the question which initially stood out to me is the implication that we’re capable of fully regulating our emotions and sticking to the plan all the time. for me, it’s been helpful to accept that pursuing a career or path in life on “the margin”, so to speak, will come with both emotional and intellectual challenges, and plenty of failures and setbacks on both fronts. a lot of people will tell you to audition for roles, apply to NSF GRFP, etc. for the transferrable skills and experience.2 but I think it was also important for me to start doing these things early and to keep them up in order to practice toughing out the feelings associated with rejection, or going through a slump period. this isn’t to say that you should be insensitive to your friends who are going through it, or that you shouldn’t quit if something is more pain than it’s worth, but my view is that life can be much more interesting when you prioritize learning and growth, and don’t linger too long on trying to avoid friction.

I’m also really curious how other people would interpret this question! I think there’s some inherent tension in seeking stability (both financial and emotional) while pursuing a career in something like science. open-ended paths like research are bound to have ups and downs, and for most people going into this direction is a decision mostly driven by passion.3 I don’t feel like I have any kind of definitive answer here, and I’m still fumbling around a bit myself. but then again, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

as usual, my ask box is open for inquiries! I try my best to check submissions regularly, but in case you’re e.g. a prospective student and want my input before april, feel free to contact me directly through my academic email

The funny thing about human time scales is that most of what I perceive are the ebb and flow of daily life, but it’s the larger-than-life accomplishments that seem to hold the most weight in my mind. this results in a forgetful process, in which I constantly forget how important the small things are, and feel like I’m wasting my time and not making enough progress. here’s the (out of time order) list that I made of things I did in the second half of summer, when I tried to reflect on why I felt this way:

1. Helped JH move (but remotely)

2. Sent in a couple of submissions to QIP for review

3. Read a cool paper that had cited my work, for the first time ever

4. Co-chaired a (grad-apps-career-development-oriented) workshop at Caltech, also for the first time ever

5. Went to a Stardew concert

6. Discovered a nice neighborhood hair salon and coffee shop

7. Published an interview article in Volume IV of MIT Science Policy Review

8. Learned about probability theory frameworks for non-commuting random variables

Am I insane for feeling like I could’ve done more for most of the summer? I genuinely can’t tell. (but maybe so, given that I’ve been alive for over twenty four summers now and I’ve never felt like I was maxed out.) I think this is also why I found it hard to adjust to the quarter system—progress is so nonlinear, and it’s hard to predict how much you’ll accomplish in a span of twelve weeks. anyway, if you were wondering why I didn’t go to any summer schools, well, you have your answer. though I would love to know where you’re going this winter!

One thought that came to me recently is that the decisions we make in life are based on fundamentally limited information. this comes up in a lot of ways, but an obvious example (at least in my life) is the choice to pursue a PhD. I as well as others have written a fair amount about this in the context of undergrad, and how attending a larger and wealthier school can increase the variance of outcomes. I actually never heard of this concept when I was applying to college, and it was only near the end that the mental image started to click for me. rather than a set of outcomes, each choice just leads to another set of never-ending branches of possibilities. even when I come across someone asking for advice on colleges, it’s hard to qualify the concrete impact of the school that you attend in a way that’s useful to someone else. it’s a lot easier to focus on single numbers, like the median starting salary of a recent graduate, or the fraction of the students who go on to grad school, or the number of women who are enrolled.

And now that I’m on the other side of the PhD application process, I’m also finding it hard to communicate how impossible it feels these days to plan life out (knew everything at eighteen and nothing at twenty-two indeed). I know it’s a really privileged position to be in where the average baseline is set so high that I feel like I can afford to increase variance at all. it’s not clear that this would be the best advice for all prospective PhD applicants, especially international students and others with difficult circumstances. but it can both be true to a certain extent that many people’s baseline is a bit rosier than they realize, and that uncertainty is something that we will all have to confront. personally, I’m incredibly grateful for all of the grace and patience that I’ve been extended to figure these things out

By the way, I’m always happy to field questions on my experiences, including on things like grad school. feel free to reach out directly or drop a note in my ask box: https://forms.gle/44ZnxFszpkvFHpj5A

Hey there! it’s been a chaotic past couple of months between work, travel, moving, more work, and combinations of the above, but overall the past year has felt very fruitful. it’s also bittersweet to realize that I’ve effectively reached most of my mid-grad school checkpoints now (since I plan to start thinking about candidacy in the next few months). as usual, time passes way too quickly!

on research etc.

If you follow me on any social media, you might know that I just finished my first (serious) paper. (by the way, feel free to skip this entire section if you’re not interested in wading through the details of my research experience!) roughly speaking, the paper is on the circuit depth required to compile “pseudorandom” unitary transformations.1 prior to putting it out, I was also invited to give my first couple of talks as a visitor, which was extremely nerve-wracking and very fun. a very big thank you to my hosts for the warm welcome!

In my mind, wrapping up this paper warrants taking a short breather to reflect a bit on how grad school is going. in case you’re newish here, I also wrote some of these for undergrad, which I mostly still stand by. I’ve been meaning to do a brief follow-up on some of these topics for a while, mostly inspired by and with the hope of documenting irl conversations, and what better time to indulge myself than the now?

What is expected of an undergrad (grad) student?

This is sort of an alternative way of asking, what do people mean when they say that an undergrad is performing research on the level of a grad student? which is really the question that was on my mind when I talked to some more senior grad students and postdocs about their experiences with research mentorship. (I learned that this kind of wording appears a lot e.g. in describing an undergrad you’re particularly impressed with to your colleague!) I don’t actually have a good answer to this other question, so I’d be very curious to hear if you have thoughts.

One reflection is that undergrads (at least, many of the people I knew as undergrads) tend to be very heavily influenced by their individual experiences, mentors, and other people around them. my feeling is that it’s really hard to directly compare two applicants, which is what people actually mean when they say that admissions are holistic. I was surprised to learn e.g. that many people try to avoid handing undergrads open-ended projects at all costs!

I probably think this way because of the advice I personally received that I should focus on classes first, and that the point of undergrad physics theory research was primarily to learn things about the field (very broadly construed) and about my own interests.2 and if that’s your main goal, then I also feel that it can often be counterproductive to your own interests to specialize too early. this is my main reservation towards discourse over “impressive” or “precocious” students. but I’m curious whether other people would agree!

Do I miss undergrad? do I have any regrets?

Surprisingly, no; mainly that I didn’t take more of some combination of measure theory, probability theory, classical information theory, complexity theory, discrete analysis, or any number of other adjacent topics to my current area of research (lol). MIT has an excellent catalog of theoretical computer scientists and mathematicians whom I wish I had interacted with more while I was there! also, I recently saw a… tweet? post on X? about how the goal of civilization should be to allow everyone to be a grad student forever, which I think sums up my current mentality.

how I take notes: an ask box feature

I’m putting this topic in its own section rather than with the above reflections because it’s a special feature, although it’s on a very adjacent topic. when I had the idea to make the ask box a while back, I went back and forth on whether to advertise it because I wasn’t sure if anyone would submit anything. but I’m glad I did, because I got this question that I really liked, and which touches on some topics that I keep meaning to write about but have been putting off for a while:

Hi Laura, I wonder how you take technical (physics, math, etc) notes, more specifically how detailed your notes are and how often you take them. Eg., do you write down detailed notes every time you learn something?

I ask because writing down detailed technical notes can be boring and could lead to an illusion of busy-ness while in fact no real progress is being made. On the other hand teaching and presenting is essential to making impact once something concrete has been accomplished. Good explainers and communicators are such gems, and I think they gain some understanding in the process of communication, too.

My approach to taking notes has changed a lot over the years. in high school, I got by with just the required home- and classwork and only ever took notes on textbooks that I was reading for science bowl,3 for which I found that scribbling down notes by hand was the most effective method of remembering lots of information. I think I rarely actually reread these notes, except for the maybe 4-5 times I was cramming right before a competition. when I started undergrad, I quickly realized that the weekly problem sets weren’t always enough to retain everything that was touched on in lecture (and therefore could appear on the exam), and I took a similar approach to quickly jotting down notes in lecture.

Now that I’m no longer tested on my recall ability, I’ve found that taking comprehensive notes is also much less of a priority. the only time that I write up nice detailed notes these days is when I believe I’ve thought of something that no one else has written down before (or at least, not in a way that’s accessible). that this works at all is really a miracle of modern civilization, lol! however, I do put down some quick notes when I’m brainstorming or planning out a presentation.

The funny thing about old research notes, though, is I rarely remember what I was thinking at the time. (that’s partially because I’m not always disciplined about writing things up in a timely manner, but also because it’s not really the point. the purpose of my research notes is primarily to communicate the scientific ideas themselves; in contrast, this blog functions primarily to help me articulate and document my thinking processes.) since a lot of these notes go unpublished, I’m both the author and the primary reader, and in that sense it tends to feel like writing communications to my future self… so if I had a conclusion here, it would probably be that I should be more patient when trying to explain nontrivial topics to myself.

(By the way, I know this question is about my own experience, specifically with technical notes, but I came across this other reflection piece recently which touches on some similar ideas!)

If you have any comments or questions for me, feel free to submit them at https://forms.gle/uWdE1RgQnPqmnevt8 :)

lightning round

Things I recently consumed, roughly in chronological order:

1. 18x2 beyond youthful days. great contribution to the 5 cm/s genre!

2. Selena Gomez’s comeback album with Benny Blanco

3. Plush tropical cockroach keychains from the Gardens by the Bay gift shop in Singapore which I highly regret not going back for…

   

4. Washi paper blend denim pants from Muji Labo. if you saw me wearing these seemingly nonstop last week, no you didn’t

5. Two packs of sandpaper to finish up the edges of a secondhand chair job, after I sawed the legs so that they were compatible with the side table that I had bought separately (also secondhand), but was a perfect match for the finish

6. The first two seasons of the Apothecary Diaries anime

7. House tofu from Kiraku, where JH took me to celebrate the manuscript. I’m a sucker for small plates with fun textures, lol

   ---

ICYMI: my ask box is open in case you want to anonymously share any personal experiences or hot takes, or if there’s anything you’re curious to know!

A funny story: about a year and a half ago, I was calling my undergrad advisor, and when he asked how grad school was going so far, I told him that there seemed to be a lot of free time compared to undergrad. I think he was surprised by my answer, but then he told me that maybe it was because in his experience, you usually have fewer commitments immediately after moving somewhere new, but that your schedule usually found ways to fill itself up after a few years. a year and a half later, I’m once again amazed by the wisdom of people who are older than me. here’s a roundup of some of the things that have recently occupied my time:

climbing mountains

I remember reading in elementary school that the polar explorer Roald Amundsen had trained himself from a young age to brave the elements by leaving his bedroom window open in the middle of winter. I think the inclusion of this fact was intended as a tribute to his steadfastness and heroism, but I found it mostly pretty unrelatable and a bit jarring. partially this was because growing up, my parents were very attentive to my health, but I couldn’t imagine so willfully defying the modern American comforts of insulation and central heating.

I could list other, more subtle, cultural factors which might explain why I didn’t identify with the rugged archetype of an outdoorsman, but this is starting to be a bit of a long-winded exercise in framing. in short, the message that I want to convey here is that ten years ago, I never would have described myself as particularly athletic or outdoorsy, and it took a number of misadventures in undergrad plus some kind of cultural shift in recent years that’s led to indoor bouldering becoming… kind of mainstream in university and tech circles? for me to start thinking of myself as someone that might actually enjoy climbing (plastic?) mountains.

That said, I think it would be fun to get outside a little more, especially while I’m still on the west coast. let me know if you have any notes on hikes or your favorite underrated locations in California!

asking (and answering) questions

The older I get, the more I feel like asking questions is an underemphasized life skill. this probably deserves a whole post on its own, but I’ve been thinking more about how to ask good questions in both the academic and personal settings. on that note: I’ve also decided to open an anonymous ask box! call it nostalgia, but I used to really liked this feature back when I was on tumblr in the mid 2010s, and I’m hoping that it’ll make this blog feel a bit more inspired. feel free to send in anything, though no guarantees that I’ll post it!

on what comes after

I recently watched Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End per the recommendation of a friend, who described it as the best anime they had ever seen. while I’m not sure I’d go that far, I did find the premise intriguing, and I can see why it’s caught on in my circles (largely recent postgrads). I also appreciated Frieren’s perspective on magic, mainly because it feels appropriately nutty and academic for an ironic take on the medieval fantasy tradeperson. if she had been collecting something other than magic, like botanical specimens, or integral tricks, or exotic phenomena in symmetry-protected topological phases, she would’ve been a pretty believable character.

But going back to the premise, I found it refreshing that the anime centered around a character who had already experienced more lifetimes and adventures than most commoners could imagine. not only that, but at the open of the story, she had already successfully returned from slaying the Demon King, dismantling the reign of the demons and paving the way for the era of humans all during a “mere ten-year journey”. although the show doesn’t really ask it outright, to me the setup begs the question of how future mages will ever surpass these achievements. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I think some partial answers emerge in a decently satisfying way by the end of the first season.

lightning round

Some other things I’ve consumed recently and enjoyed:

1. The first six-and-a-half chapters of Celeste A-sides, while I was recovering from a cold. my friend gifted me a copy of the game back in 2022, but I only just got around to it… I’m not sure if the gameplay really feels like bouldering, but I can see why it’s a classic

2. “Big Deal” from Forever is a Feeling. easily the best track on the record imo

3. A cocktail that came with a dash of good luck (a fortune slip). really liked this concept!

   

4. Clay pot rice with spare ribs from Ma’s Dim Sum & Cafe in SF Chinatown. never understood the hype around clay pot rice, until I tried this iteration

5. A set of wallpapers from Microsoft Design for Design Milk’s Nov ‘24 feature riffing off of the iconic “Bliss” photo, better known as the Windows XP default wallpaper. did you know that the original photograph was developed without any kind of manipulation or enhancement? all thanks to the power of Fujifilm Velvia, I guess

6. Wildflowers & wisteria blooms, all over California. even though it’s shorter here, spring is still my favorite time of the year <3

   

Jan 7 4 PM (ET): I reassure my parents that I’ve seen the red flag warning and that campus will still be open tomorrow.

Jan 7 9 PM (ET): I wash up and hop into bed.

Jan 7 9:18 PM (ET): The Eaton fire starts.

Jan 8 12 AM (ET): The fire spreads rapidly and my phone starts blowing up while I’m blissfully unaware. Caltech issues an alert that campus will be closed the following day.

Jan 8 5 AM (ET): I’m woken up by my parents, who insist on leaving early for the airport in case there’s traffic. On the way, I check my phone and try to understand the situation.

Jan 8 9 AM (ET): I briefly consider trying to find a plane heading toward the SFBA and ask to board that one instead, but I decide to stick to my original flight since I don’t think LAX is at risk. I text a friend who lives near LAX to ask if I can shelter at their place.

Jan 8 1 PM (PT): I deplane to the sound of every fire alarm going off, grab my bags, and head to my friend’s house for the night.

Jan 9 6 AM (PT): I wake up and check for updates. Since the fire is no longer spreading towards campus, I decide to go back to gather my documents just in case.

Jan 9 9 AM (PT): I arrive on campus and realize it’s raining ash. My eyes are also stinging so I decide to leave for the Bay Area, and navigate east past Ontario before heading up to Bakersfield to avoid the fires.

Jan 9 8 PM (PT): I exit the I-5 at the border of Alameda County and grab dinner before heading to Berkeley, where I’ll be staying for the foreseeable future (actually about a week).

Jan 17: Steady progress is being made on containing the fire, so I decide to head back to Pasadena to check on my plants.

(It happens that most of the plants are pretty low maintenance, which is important to me since I’m frequently traveling. however, I do own a maranta plant which is pretty sensitive both to pollution and to its roots drying out, and sadly it didn’t make it.)

I’m lucky in that my apartment and the Caltech campus were well outside of the fire perimeter, and that I still have my home and all of my worldly possessions. others in the Caltech community and in the area were not so fortunate, and I would urge anyone who has the means to support efforts to provide aid to displaced communities. here’s a link to the Caltech and JPL disaster relief fund, and another one for chili crisp mochi muffins with part of the proceeds going to the California Fire Foundation (you can also pick these up in person if you live in the Bay Area! they’re surprisingly pretty good, lol). there’s also a lot of through-provoking pieces on the internet on climate disasters and the long-term future of these areas, like The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, as well as many articles on hurricane-prone coasts in the Southeast. (while there are some parallels, I think it’s worth noting that historically, many people who choose to stay after a hurricane do so because their source of income and livelihood is tied to coastal resources. the reasons for rebuilding here are a bit less clear-cut.)

Pasadena is still recovering in many ways, and I’ve yet to return to working in Bridge, which unfortunately was never really weather-sealed. in particular, the window by my desk has a pretty big gap, and when I went by to check on the plants I realized quite a bit of soot had come in, leaving large yellow stains on the carpet. the last part was really annoying because as some of my friends and colleagues know, I had just gotten the department to deep clean the old and very fluffy carpet in my office in December! while things go back to normal, I’ll share a couple of other topics I’ve been thinking about recently.

on taking and retaking qft

Feel free to skip this entire section if you don’t want to read about physics and/or pedagogy. also as a disclaimer, I want to emphasize that I’m not really an expert on quantum field theories or quantum foundations. if anything, the kind of research that I’m interested in at the moment is probably spiritually closer to applied math. however, I’ve always been really excited about science, and I appreciate field theory as a way of trying to understand fundamental physics. so while I think everything I say here should be taken with more than a few grains of salt, I hope these reflections can be helpful to someone else who might be interested in these areas!

In undergrad, I identified as hep-th-curious, which translated to trying to take relativistic quantum field theory as soon as possible. in practice, this meant junior year, after I had already taken the undergrad quantum sequence, general relativity, and winter term classical mechanics, in addition to introductory grad statistical mechanics and some very basic math subjects, including one semester of algebra.1 I also took an undergrad string theory class which required undergrad relativity and quantum but didn’t use anything from quantum electrodynamics, which was fun because it was mostly pretty organized and self-contained, but confusing because at the end of it I didn’t really understand geometry or string theory.

Three years later, I’ve honestly retained very little about the class. partly this is because I took QFT at Harvard with Matt Schwartz, who is very interested in computing scattering cross sections, and the class took a pretty traditional particle physics approach. I had never thought very deeply about collider physics before, and at that point was already drifting towards quantum information, so I found it hard to appreciate this perspective. also, since then, I don’t think I’ve seen a single scattering cross section.

I’d actually had mixed feelings for a while about my experiences with this subject, starting from even before I registered for the course. my undergraduate academic advisor was supportive of my goals, but cheerfully cautioned me that most people would come to understand QFT much better after taking it two or three times with different instructors over the course of their academic career. at the time, I found this advice mystifying as well as deeply annoying, and chalked up this kind of take to poorly designed curricula.2 in hindsight, however, I’ve come to appreciate more that QFT is really such a broad subject that different versions of the course can be practically disjoint. although the particle physics-centric perspective might be sufficient for someone interested in working with a CERN collaboration, I guess my advisor was probably speaking from her own experience as a theorist who fell in between some of the traditional disciplines.

This past fall, I was talked into enrolling in a course on topological field theory, which was taught jointly by Profs. Anton Kapustin and David Simmons-Duffin. it was the first time the course had been offered in institutional memory (i.e. as far back as the condensed matter theory students I talked to could recall), which made it all the more mysterious and exciting. I have to admit my original motivations for taking the class were somewhat narrow-minded, because at that point I was mainly trying to decide whether I wanted to explore more traditionally-CMT-flavored research. I’m not sure I fully answered this question for myself, but I think the instructors did a good job of tying TQFT to the broader context of open questions in physics, and particularly its roots as a toy model for axiomatic QFT. other things I liked: David Simmons-Duffin’s take on the quantization of configuration space, and his “example” for teaching a first quantum mechanics class for undergrads.3 also, we spent a decent amount of time on discretized theories on spacetime lattices and how they could be used to understand the existence of the continuum limit, which I had seen briefly in the context of lattice QCD calculations but never fully appreciated. all this is to say that I came out of this course with much warmer feelings for QFT foundations, and I’m really glad I stuck it out.

on the videographer boyfriend

I don’t think this is really a new trend, but I found myself taken aback by a recent video from a influencer I follow, in which she revealed that the reason her partner hasn’t showed up much on the channel recently is because he’s usually behind the camera these days. this reminded me of a similar update I had seen from another Youtuber from a really long time ago (like, 2020 or earlier, I think), and also prompted some reflections about my reaction to hearing about these kinds of career pivots.

To be clear, I have a lot of respect for family businesses, as well as for people who choose to prioritize their partners’ careers above their own. part of my reaction is probably just surprise and curiosity around the unconventional career paths and lifestyles of these influencers, and the even more interesting (in my opinion!) but less visible careers of other people on their team. in other words, what makes someone decide to abandon all of their other dreams, accomplishments, and/or possible full-time pursuits in order to become the videographer (or graphic designer, or accountant slash manager) boyfriend?

In this case, it’s probably because some of these Youtubers have been wildly successful on the platform, to the point that the channel is a more reliable source of income than the other passions that the partner could have pursued. I can’t blame anyone for making this kind of decision, because chasing your dreams is typically a pretty long and painful process, especially when the reality is that the other person has already made it on Youtube. and by the way, I say boyfriend here (it’s a little funny that this happened with two separate channels that I follow!), but this applies to any couple in which one person decides to take on a supporting role to the other’s career. I also don’t think there’s anything really strange or wrong with e.g. getting a PhD before becoming a stay-at-home mother while your partner’s career blows up.

I do feel that there are some reasons someone might not want to make this kind of choice. (personally: it’s a bit terrifying to think about if I ever found myself without any kind of broader support network or financial safety net, and if something then happened to my spouse. in my own experience, although both of my parents are alive and well, I think having more flexibility has made our lives materially better. but also, do I have any reason to believe I would enjoy being a full-time videographer more than getting a normal job?) and while I generally don’t like to encourage parasocial feelings towards Youtubers, I think it’s sometimes reasonable to ask if I should be concerned about my friends putting themselves in situations where they’re heavily dependent on their partners. ultimately, though, I appreciate that different people have different priorities, and I admire them for having conviction in their way of life.

I’ve been reading a lot of online discourse lately on the topic of taste, why it’s important, how to build a sense of taste, etc. I particularly liked this piece on the nature of taste and the “reality” of good taste as reflecting cultural truths (imo, a similar kind of stance as moral realism), but I also enjoy combing through the numerous columns on personal style. I don’t know how much I can add to these, except to say that for me, understanding my tastes is the same as knowing myself, and it’s not just that this concept doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but rather that it’s totally inseparable from the personal context and history of me as an individual.

An example: I recently upgraded my keychain setup, which was probably the best series of purchases I made in 2024. there are three separate components on my keychain, which consist of a U-shaped carabiner clip, a wrist strap, and a cute charm with a cat drawing on it. before college, my keys lived on a lanyard clipped inside my backpack, since I found them cumbersome to wear around my neck. I only started using a wrist strap when I moved out of the dorms in 2022 and felt like I needed to have my keys on hand all the time. since then I’ve worn through several cheap ones, so it felt like a good time to buy something a bit nicer. on the other hand, the U-shaped clip is completely new, but it’s also totally revolutionary (finally, a way to keep keys from getting lost or tangled at the bottom of tote bags!). I’m not sure whether this example speaks to anyone else really, but for me it’s a case where buying nicer things effectively addresses my personal anxiety over potentially forgetting my keys somewhere.

Another one: a friend-of-a-friend remarked recently how impressed they were by the food in Taiwan, which made me pause and reflect on my own experiences with Asian food. I think my personal impression of Taiwanese food was something more like “comfortable” and “familiar”, despite the fact that I only visited for the first time in 2024. but perhaps it’s fitting that I feel this way, since Taiwanese cuisine is often described as a fusion of native flavors with those of later waves of ethnic Chinese refugees and migrants from various parts of the mainland, as well as Japanese and western influences. growing up, I had a very limited understanding of the regional differences in Chinese cuisine, but I knew that the cute cafes in Rockville with the salt and pepper chicken were run by Taiwanese folks. to me, artificial mango flavored-boba and minced pork rice will forever be the flavor of childhood.

When I went back this time around, I only spent one afternoon in D.C., most of which was dedicated to exploring the National Building Museum. it’s funny that I’ve never been inside before despite having walked past it like a hundred times, but I think none of my friends were ever interested in going, and in high school it felt a bit weird and selfish to ask to be dropped off at the Metro station just to head downtown by myself. there was a new exhibit on called Capital Brutalism, which documented the construction of several famous examples of raw concrete structures in the Brutalist style in D.C. and their perception by the public. maybe because I grew up surrounded by outdated buildings in this style, it surprised me just how popular Brutalism was back when it was popular… of course, I can appreciate the efficiency of raw concrete and minimal facades, and yet growing up I don’t know anyone who liked the Metro tunnels or any of the number of stern offices housing some three-letter agency. still, when it comes time to decide whether to restore or rebuild, I would be sad to see all the concrete disappear.

P.S. by the way, my winter holidays-inspired hot take is that mulled wine is basically vegan and gluten-free meat stew sauce (i.e. without the meat and soy sauce). the logical conclusion of this line of thought is that you should serve mulled wine with rice, similar to the fermented sticky rice product 酒酿. comment below if you think I should (or absolutely should not) try making this!

I recently traveled to Taiwan again, this time for vacation. although I’ve recently been feeling a bit of travel fatigue, I’m glad I went, because it was a very different experience the second time around. over the first few days, I managed to revisit some familiar haunts: popular shopping districts, the 象山 “trail” (really just a long set of stairs on a slope with some nice views of Taipei 101), and a bouldering gym in Zhongshan which I remember was extremely traumatizing the first time, partly because the setting is fairly technical and partly because I didn’t bring shoes but got dragged there anyway by some other grad students I knew. it was nice to be able to return during less busy hours to witness the results of my climbing progression.

A quirk of Chinese is that there are different words for vacationing and traveling for work: 旅游 (lv you) and 出差 (chu chai).1 the language clearly matters, because to my parents, the two are unambiguously distinct; to me, both are traveling. I’ve found both types of travel to be very fun and rewarding experiences, though admittedly for different reasons. for example, it turns out that you can see a lot more of your destination when you don’t have a conference to attend... shocking, I know.

This time around, I also managed to squeeze in a rushed tour of a couple nearby spots and scenic areas in central Taiwan, including a half-day in Jiufen and a loop through Taichung, Sun Moon Lake, and Alishan Scenic Area. although I didn’t have a lot of time to relax and take in the vibes, I was impressed by the colors and the atmosphere of these places. it reminded me of a very classic art internet topic centered around imitating the feeling of Studio Ghibli films by copying Miyazaki’s watercolor palette.2 although Jiufen is sometimes said to have served as inspiration for Spirited Away, the main comparison that came to mind for me was between the mountain locales and the settings of modern 武俠 (wuxia) and 仙侠 (xianxia) -ish television dramas. in particular, the sunrise near Alishan swept me away to 水云天, the 仙人 (fairy?) realm setting in Love Between Fairy and Devil, which I had previously believed to be a totally unrealistic product of CGI but turned out to in fact have some grounding in reality:

One thing I’m more conscious of recently when traveling outside the states is the scrutiny of my origins. before grad school, I had never really traveled internationally but always thought of my Chinese level as embarrassingly mediocre, very much 不及格 and unpassable anywhere outside the U.S. also, among my high school circle, my Mandarin pronunciation was fairly standard but my character comprehension extremely average. for reference, many of my friends regularly read novels in Chinese. it came as a genuine shock to meet ethnic Chinese people living in Asia and to hear their impression of children born and raised in the states as being completely illiterate in Chinese.

But I guess we all have various preconceptions, and not all of them are totally inaccurate. at our homestay in 石桌, one of the staff asked us where we were from. these days I’m used to the polite response of surprise and compliments on my Chinese, but the staff member offered another anecdote about another group of Americans who had stayed with them just a few days prior. for context, although it’s possible to rent a car in Taiwan, the roads are narrow and parking is limited, so most tourists (both domestic and international) instead rely on the remarkably robust Taiwan Tourist Shuttle system. even in the mountains where we were staying, these buses reliably hit the nearby stop every hour or so. to get from the homestay to a popular sightseeing spot nearby, it was a short fifteen minute bus ride. but like other Americans,3 this group must have been a bit insane, because they chose to wake up at 4am to hike the two hour foot route instead.

All of this to say that at the end of it all, I’m very grateful for the mix of Chinese and American ideals that I suffered through in my upbringing, as well as the specific combination of life experiences I’ve had which have colored my personal outlook on life. I’m sure this feeling is partially cognitive bias, but I genuinely can’t imagine any other setting which I’d rather have grown up in, or a different group of people I’d rather have around. in the future, I think I’ll probably cut down a bit on travel, but I’d like to more seriously work on my Chinese penmanship and vocabulary, and to continue to cultivate the diversity of relationships in my life.

Good morning, wherever you are! as the year comes to a close, I’ve found myself obsessed with Rosé and her excellent debut album. I never really followed Blackpink as a group (or really any kpop girl groups), but it’s fascinating to see individual artists break out to form new identities outside of these groups. I’m especially impressed by the media buzz around this debut, which has more or less unanimously branded it as an “intimate” and deeply personal album (just try googling “rosie intimate record”…). not to say that I disagree, exactly, that it’s a bit different from the typical kpop dance sound, but to me the production felt fairly safe, if a bit nostalgic of late 2010s indie pop and a time when I was still discovering my favorite new artists through youtube playlist channels.

But this post isn’t about marketing, or the optics of kpop, or about whether I think music needs to be particularly innovative in order to be good (nah). it’s inspired mainly by Rosé’s interview in the New York Times, which poses her not just as an artist exploring her authentic self, but one who came out of a rigorous training program that was designed to produce “perfect” girls, and who still appreciates that process for making her who she is now. I’m sure the last part has something to do with optics, and what she can say publicly about YG, but it reminded me of some familiar narratives from other artists and writers about love of the craft. Taylor Swift comes to mind, along with the discourse around her beloved pandemic albums, which are still widely considered some of her best work in highbrow circles. I’m also thinking of Celine Nguyen’s piece on divine discontent, which she defines as a sort of propensity to constantly work on yourself and your art. she also claims that this tendency is an essential trait of everyone in her circles who has managed to find meaning in their lives.

I have some mixed feelings about Celine Nguyen’s thesis, not because I don’t personally believe in seeking out new knowledge or pursuing self-improvement, but because I’m not sure that it makes my life more meaningful or fulfilling than anyone else’s in any objective kind of way. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I don’t think obsession with self-improvement is very strongly correlated with feeling fulfilled among my own friends. and besides people who primarily generate creative work (be it art or original research) for a living are a tiny minority of the world’s population, so I’m a bit wary of synthesizing anecdotal experiences into prescriptive advice. (I also don’t think most of my friends envy my lifestyle or would choose it for themselves, and I don’t have much interest in convincing them to like or want different things…)

On the other hand, the description of building these habits does resonate with me on a personal level. I also think it’s probably true that a fulfilling career spent generating creative work requires some level of loving and embracing the technical aspects of your work, and the process of learning those skills. an anecdote: in high school, I woke up before 6:30 every day in order to eat breakfast and drive to the nearest bus stop, which I boarded before 7:15 in order to get to school before first period at 7:45.1 most days, I stayed after school to attend club activities, and would get home around 5:30 before starting on homework and cramming for contests. I usually slept around midnight, averaging between six and seven and a half hours of sleep, though I also sometimes napped on the bus.2

To my parents’ credit, they were very supportive of my physical and mental health, and at one point encouraged me to attend a closer school out of concern for my sleep schedule. however, I had chosen to enroll in my school specifically because of the STEM magnet program, and dropping out would mean giving up on the unique electives I was taking, my science bowl team,3 and the amazing community of people there who cared about math and science. I couldn’t imagine walking away from all of it, and even now I’m enormously grateful for my high school experiences, which put me through both the joy of learning about science and the necessity of putting time into mastering any subject. I no longer keep such an insane schedule (lol), nor do I think it’s sustainable, but like Rosé, I feel that the program opened up a part of myself and enabled me to grow into the person that I am now.4

Lately, I’ve been daydreaming about what’s next after grad school, and about where I’d like to live in the future. it’s a bit too soon for me to really miss undergrad, but I have to admit that part of my longing for the east coast is secretly a longing for the sense of community and belonging that I felt in high school. a friend recently asked, if I had children, whether I would try to convince them to pursue STEM and enroll in a similar school. but while I do feel that everyone should undergo some basic education in STEM literacy, I don’t think this is the real reason that I fantasize about moving back to D.C. in my mind, high school was a magical place not because I learned afterwards that the proportion of STEM PhD students among my former classmates was particularly high, but because I truly felt like I could pursue anything I was interested in. (aside from science classes and competitions, I also spent a good chunk of my senior year working on an AP Studio Art portfolio.5) ultimately though, I think my nostalgia might stem from a positive bias in my reflections,6 and I probably wouldn’t accept a job solely on the basis of wanting my kids to grow up on the east coast…

And by the way, I recognize the absurdity of discussing how and where I want to raise my non-existent children (who are not likely to come into existence anytime soon!), though again I blame the media. in particular, I recently came across this opinion piece, which presented a novel (to me) take on the tired topic of tiger moms.7 it struck me as a bold position not just because it so unabashedly defends tiger parenting, but because the author apparently feels very strongly about imparting “the dignity of work” to his children. although I don’t doubt his accounts of how he achieved success as a writer, I wonder to what extent anyone can truly change someone else’s preferences and character.

Of course there are some values and habits that I absolutely want to instill in any children I have, like being prosocial and kind and recognizing the good in other people while also setting appropriate boundaries for their own well-being. but these days, I think that the single most important part of my own upbringing was probably my parents’ emphasis on autonomy and forcing allowing me to make my own decisions. I only felt comfortable with continuously trying new things, and sometimes failing or being rejected, because I knew that they wanted for me to work towards a life I chose for myself, and I want my own daughter to feel the same way. no matter what, she’ll be the number one girl in my eyes <3

Recently I’ve been preoccupied again with this strange feeling of being stuck living between the past and the future. I was raised to think about the rest of my life, so I’ve always tried to make plans for the sake of my future self, while the only version of myself I’ve ever known was the one in the past. what’s worse than a breakup, you ask? for me, I think it’s living in limbo.

(What they don’t tell you: sometimes you fall headfirst in love when you’re young, and you rush on past but a part of it lives inside you forever, and one day you wake up and realize you still see the ghost of your past everywhere you go. after all, there’s nothing like the honesty of a first love. but you can’t tell other people, because they’ll for sure take offense, and also probably think you’re mildly insane. at least, that’s how everyone reacts when I confess that Amsterdam in mid-November makes me miss the east coast, because seriously? the winter is so dark and depressing and besides California has seasons too and they’re actually nice!1 and yet I haven’t visited once since leaving, and I don’t know if I’ll ever return.)

All of this to say that lately I feel like I’ve been forced to make a lot of decisions, and will continue to be in this position for a while, and I’m still getting used to the uncertainty and the temporary of it all, lol. I decided to pursue a PhD precisely because I wanted to have more control over what I would spend time on, and yet the older I get the harder it feels to stick to any sort of life plan. that said, I’m still in the middle of a transitional period, and it’s possible that I’ll come out of it in a couple years feeling very differently.

One thought I had recently: I feel like the major tension of being in my early to mid-twenties is that everyone is accelerating away from each other in our pursuit of our own lives, with a sureness that only a recent grad could muster. and yet most literature on this topic agrees that young people undergo one of the most important periods of personality formation between the ages of 20 and 30.2 so why is it that even though so much emphasis is placed on choosing a good school fit for the sake of letting yourself bask in the influence of the people there, there’s relatively little advice like this directed to college graduates (i.e. the me of a year ago)?3 but maybe it doesn’t really matter, maybe I wouldn’t have truly taken it to heart even if someone had shoved it in my face.

Still, despite my lack of real planning, there’s been some nice surprises about grad school—for example, it still amazes me that I just so happened to stumble upon my current group of grad school friends within my own cohort! also, it turns out that many of my worst problems in life are still self-manufactured, like the two weeks of jetlag (i.e. complete sleep schedule disruption) I endured after choosing to commute between Berkeley and Stanford at 6am for several days, before making the drive down to Lake Arrowhead in the middle of the night for IQIM retreat. hopefully I’ll be able to correct all of this after I return to Pasadena.

I’ll close out this post with two festive messages: first, an early Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate! I’m truly grateful for everything this past year has given me, and for all of the people who’ve witnessed me living through it—that includes you, too. second, I wish anyone applying to grad programs this cycle the best of luck. don’t hesitate to reach out if you’ll be in the area or if I can be of some help to you :)

While I’ve always appreciated writing as a way of forcing myself to carefully articulate my thoughts, it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve really appreciated looking back on older instances of my writing and recognizing how my views have changed (or not) over time.1 in honor of that, this post is broadly about school as it relates to the idea of personal development,2 as something of a foil / follow-up to my previous (very narrow) note on developing a research direction.

what do we go to school for?

I’ve been revisiting this question lately from a few different angles. one reason that it’s been on my mind is because I’m of the few among my circle of close friends who chose to go to grad school. a secondary reason is that I had the option to attend Caltech for undergrad, and chose to go to MIT instead. now that I teach Caltech undergrads, it’s hard to avoid drawing comparisons and imagining how differently my life could have gone. (also, it randomly hit me the other day that I’m now older, or at least in a later stage of my education, than every single college dropout at the time that they left school, lol.3)

To me, this topic also feels intimately related to discussions about “explore vs. exploit” or maintaining “optionality”. while I’m hesitant to generalize my experiences to other people, I think going to MIT for undergrad might have been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve already written an entire post on my undergrad experience here, but to summarize, I went into college very confident about what parts of STEM I liked, but not sure what I could do with those skills. in particular, I had seen a lot of online advice cautioning younger students and especially women against blindly pursuing a PhD. had I not received mentorship from the people that I met there, or fallen as deeply in love with science and the university as an institution, I might not have considered a career in research as a real option.

One very relevant aspect of my (and many other MIT students’) undergrad experiences which I haven’t really emphasized before is the institutional structures that make the student life experience possible. throughout undergrad, I was an active member of the Education Studies Program, which puts on events on campus for thousands of middle and high school students each year and has been around since 1957. I was also really fortunate to be part of discussions about climate in the physics department. in the same way that I don’t think I could have decided to pursue a PhD in theoretical physics without having tried out theory research, I don’t think I would feel anywhere near as strongly about the institutional aspects of science had I not seen for myself how the work that members of the MIT community came together to make initiatives happen.

life goes on

As of the last few months I’m no longer twenty-two, but the song lyric still resonates with me. life is a lot simpler when you’re in high school, and it’s easy to convince yourself that once you’re in college, you’ll have everything figured out. six years ago I felt as if once I laid out the groundwork in school and shaped the mold for the rest of my life, all I had to do was cast it and polish up the details. I understand better now that 1) I’ve always been too fickle and too much of a perfectionist to stick perfectly to a plan instead of continuously revising everything, and 2) very few people truly know what kind of life they want to live at eighteen, and most people who find something meaningful to do with their lives aren’t prodigies and can take a while to get there.

Relatedly, there’s apparently a pretty well-known effect in psychology called the end-of-history illusion, which is the observation that people consistently underestimate how much their personalities and preferences will change over time. when I was younger I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the alternative lives and possible versions of myself that I would never know because I decided to pursue a career in STEM.4 these days, I try to look forward to the inevitable changes and surprises in life, and the person that I’ll become.

work and life

A friend recently sent me this tweet on grad school, which I think is a pretty good distillation of everything else I’ve seen on the topic:

Even though I spent every summer in undergrad on physics research, jumping into full-time research as a PhD student still felt like a leap of faith. although I was still taking classes, it was clear that they were no longer my main focus, and I definitely like I had left the structure of school behind. but this is probably to some extent unavoidable, because training to become an independent researcher requires training to learn and work independently, and to evaluate your own learning and working, and so on. and despite constantly feeling like I was fumbling around, looking back on the past year I can now appreciate how much I’ve learned since starting grad school.

More notes from the first year: I’ve become a lot more comfortable with self-directed learning. (I used to be terrified of learning math on my own, and now I’m slightly less terrified.) I realized that my ability to get research tasks done is highly correlated with how much sleep I got and whether I’ve had caffeine that day. I’ve been practicing the art of deciding which talks to attend, and which to skip to grab food with other grad students.

research taste and chemistry (the novel)

If you’ve known me for a while, you might know that in high school, I was obsessed with Weike Wang’s debut novel centered around an unnamed narrator who drops out of a PhD in organic chemistry. there are a lot of narrative innovations and messages that I appreciated here which are tangential to doing a PhD, and my main takeaway from this book was on the importance of knowing what you want out of life. but the book also frequently references struggles unique to the process of learning about research, like the “jump” from student to independent scientist and the difficulties that the student faces in defining their own career path, which hits a bit closer to home now.

Relatedly, I recently came upon this blog post that I wish I had read much earlier (i.e. before I applied for PhD programs) and which aligns pretty closely with what I’ve been thinking about in this area. developing “taste” is highly personal and one of the central goals of a PhD, and committing to a certain research program and immersing yourself in its specific philosophy can feel weirdly existential.2

An anecdote: I originally decided to study physics in college after learning about the position-momentum space duality and its connection to Fourier transforms, and I still like to study topics related to underlying mathematical structures that describe connections between different concepts in computational theory and physics. this is convenient because there are lots of opportunities in quantum info theory at the moment, but when it came time to apply for PhD programs, I started to question how I knew I really wanted to be a physicist, as opposed to a computer scientist? had I really seen enough of quantum research to know that I preferred physically motivated problems? I decided fairly last-minute to accept an offer from Caltech Physics, and in the past year I’ve leaned into quantum dynamics. I talked to a friend in a similar field who also applied to a mix of physics and computer science programs, but who had studied computer science in undergrad and ultimately committed to a group in a computer science department.

other thoughts and reflections

I never applied to be a blogger for MIT admissions, but I did manage to get a guest post last year, which happens to be one that I’m still pretty proud of. upon rereading, I realize that the beginning of the post might sound a bit odd because I reference the admissions blogs as if the reader doesn’t know what site they’re on, but that’s because I originally posted this on my old Wordpress site. and of course because like many other applicants, I religiously followed those blogs in high school.3 while I don’t exactly look up to the undergrads as wise seniors anymore, I still really appreciate blogs as a means to take in different perspectives, and to me they’re a pretty special type of online space. I’m always looking for new things to read, so feel free to send recs!

One longer-timeline observation I made recently: among the people in my high school circle from both my year and the year above, I can count at least 10/18 of the guys who are now in a PhD program, but I think I’m the only one out of 15 girls.4 if you count med school programs which might include clinical research, the number is closer to 5/15. this might not seem surprising or statistically anomalous to an outside observer who’s familiar with conversations around DEI in STEM, but it’s worth noting that I was enrolled in a high school program that encouraged everyone to apply for summer research internships and actively tried to recruit girls who were interested in a variety of STEM subjects.

I remember that in my “exit interview” with the high school administrator, he asked me whether I felt like I had experienced any gender-related adversity, and I told him that I genuinely didn’t believe I had.5 and even if I were asked now whether the girls at my school had a different experience socially, or faced different expectations from their family, I might say that they probably did, but I wouldn’t be able to tell how exactly that translated into these different outcomes. besides, I also wouldn’t be able to give any kind of general explanation as to why the women I know who are currently in PhD programs chose to enroll in one.

Hey there! this is again a bit of an amorphous blog post with some different things I’ve been reflecting on. also shout-out to the grad student I met at the UMD physics open house last year for introducing me to the banger of a song in the title!

making friends

A few weeks ago, a prospective student who had been “very strongly considering Caltech” reached out to me about my experiences with the social scene here. this is a very reasonable and common question to be asked but truthfully, it’s difficult for me to answer succinctly because I’ve been thinking a lot over the two years about how I want to approach friendships. I ended up echoing a lot of the same things I heard when I was asking around a year ago, which is that (almost) everyone lives on campus the first year which makes it much easier to make friends in your cohort. which is true, but doesn’t necessarily reflect how I actually feel about my experience.

In part I think it’s inevitable that making friends who you feel understood by will get harder as you get older, especially if you move around a lot, because you’ll be around people who have less shared context with you. also, “growing up” and living on your own comes with a lot of personal responsibilities, including concrete ones like managing your finances, but also less concrete ones like figuring out how you want your everyday life to look. sometimes (pretty often, in my own experience) that results in spending less time and sharing less with your friends. while you might not truly be alone everyday, I think it’s easy to feel alone in making personal decisions. (but also, since I’m more or less finished with my coursework, I definitely spend less structured time around people in my cohort compared to undergrad.)

To put some of this into context, the majority of my close friends from high school and undergrad currently live in new york, with a handful in the bay area. at this point though, I’ve come to terms with having more physical and emotional distance in some of my friendships, and it really is fun to catch up with someone you haven’t seen in a while. I also genuinely appreciated the opportunity to make new types of friends in grad school, especially since up until the past year, I never really had close friends interested in math and physics who weren’t men.

Something that didn’t really sink in until I started is that my cohort here is actually pretty different from the one in undergrad. aside from being in physics, the demographics, life experiences, etc. of people in grad school aren’t exactly drawn from the same distribution. while I still like to get off campus sometimes and meet mutuals who aren’t in STEM, so far I haven’t really felt like my peers are “too” similar to me in the ways that I was afraid of. (this might have been shortsighted of me though, because I felt the same exact way about starting at MIT four years ago.)

the tortured poets department

I saw a tweet recently about how not being a fan of Taylor Swift was a huge barrier to making friends with other women. I showed it to one of my friends who didn’t grow up in the U.S. and (at the time) had never really listened to her music, who agreed with the sentiment. since then, another album was released, which is to say we got everyone together on the pretense of a listening party. the next paragraph will be a summary of my thoughts, feel free to skip if you’re not interested!

I’m not sure I’m qualified to really critique the album, but I was surprised that it was another tracklist filled with mostly mid/downtempo songs. I generally like synthpop, and I like a lot of sad music, so I also liked the album overall, but I felt confused after listening to it. I’ve seen some reviews that described the album as lacking “cohesion”, and while it actually feels pretty sonically cohesive to me and fittingly sounds a lot like the dark academia aesthetic playlists I see on youtube, I really don’t know how to feel about the messaging. I’ve always felt like the main appeal of her music was the relatable themes and strong female character types. there’s still some of that in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”, which is a great grad school anthem, and I can definitely appreciate an ironic reference to delusions of academic grandeur like on the title track. the smallest details of her personal life that she does share are also part of her brand, but personally I’ve always liked the relative lack of specificity and, simultaneously, the feeling of narrative progression in her first two pop albums. 1989 (and to a large extent Red) has always felt like a coming-of-age moment, and Reputation was a classic YA thriller about surviving the apocalypse and finding true love in the process. the new album doesn’t really read as a satisfying conclusion in the same way.

is learning supposed to be fun?

I’ve mentioned Angela Collier here before, but since then I’ve watched the new q&a video and her response to some comments reminded me of a discussion I had seen before in a class. (if you’re reading this and you want to learn physics, highly recommend her channel!) specifically, it was a response to comments of the form

How much value is [there] from going deep [into] physics vs watching a bunch of edutainment?

Her response was basically that textbooks and edutainment served different purposes, and that outside of course lectures, most videos aren’t intended to impart comprehensive knowledge about a subject. (also, that synthesizing knowledge through completing homework assignments or writing essays is very important for this process.) I don’t think this response is particularly surprisingly or controversial to academics, but I found it interesting partially because it echoes a discussion that came up in a class I took on education technology design. in many other areas of design, success can be measured more directly by self-reported user enjoyment, but in edutech enjoyment often appears to be kind of orthogonal to effectiveness.

At the same time, most academics that I know claim that they stayed in academia because they find the process of learning science and conducting research to be fun and rewarding in and of itself. also, anecdotally, nearly everyone on my high school science bowl team is also now in grad school. while at the time I understood very little about particle physics processes or the research that went on at DOE national labs which frequently come up in question sets, I think it’s helped to have built some kind of association between reading textbooks and getting hits of dopamine (lol!). personally, even though science bowl is a somewhat gimmicky format, I think these kinds of game competitions can be very effective forms of outreach for students who might not otherwise consider spending the time to learn about science.

qip in taipei

I attended QIP (Quantum Information Processing) for the first time this year, which might have been a mistake because it definitely raised my expectations, lol. it seemed like the conference organizers had gotten a lot of support from the local government for the conference, so they pulled out all the stops. everything took place at the Taipei International Conference Center, which is a really nice building next door to Taipei 101. we also got a custom IC card design, which was super cute:

Venue aside, I had a pretty good experience at the conference. I caught up with some of the people I knew from the Boston area, met a handful new people, and got some useful feedback during the poster session. also, it’s always very inspiring to learn more about other people’s work. as a side note, I think the QIP schedule tends to be pretty packed, with events from 9am-9pm every day, but I managed to adjust myself to the time zone enough to get through everything.

This was also my first time visiting Taipei (surprise, surprise) and I had a lot of fun exploring the city! I’ve been a fan of Taiwanese-style cafes serving street-stall-inspired fare for a really long time, since I grew up in Rockville where they seem to be abundant, and I had a great time sampling the Taipei food scene. (personal favorites include braised pork rice from a place near Taipei 101, and turnip cake from the Ximending location of 永和豆漿.) I was also dragged into a slightly insane night hike (basically a very long set of stairs) where I managed to get this picture of Taipei 101 just before the lights went out at 11pm:

dynamics vs. tempo

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how time seems to speed up drastically when I enter a new period of my life. (yes this is a bit of extended metaphor, sorry!) I’m sure someone else has written about this before, but for me one of the signs that I’m getting older is when music sounds faster and somehow “louder” than I remember it in my head. there are some sounds that I appreciate more now, and some that I wish I could listen to again the way that I used to. an example of the latter is “you are in love”, which is still one of my favorite love songs of all time but sounds so different from my memory of playing it on repeat back in 2019 (???)

I think being on quarter system at Caltech and transitioning to working on research full-time exacerbates this feeling, because it’s so easy for ten weeks to pass by quietly before you notice. a lot of my friends in my cohort are taking the same classes, like stat mech, and pore over the problem sets together every week, but I’m not enrolled in any classes with weekly sets this term. I made a new year’s resolution to try to reach out to someone and have one high-quality conversation each week, but between traveling and getting sick and everything else it’s completely slipped by.

Something that’s coming up, and that I’m genuinely excited for, is the open house for prospective grad students. open house season last year was very chaotic for me, but it definitely also forced me to reflect on my priorities and what I wanted out of grad school. I really valued having the chance to talk to current grad students, and it’s nice to now be able to do the same for the next cohort of students. (by the way, if you’re an admitted student reading this, especially in quantum information theory, feel free to reach out!)

learning math, again

This quarter I’m enrolled in a topics class which focuses on the connections between number theory and physics, taught by Prof. Matilde Marcolli. a lot of people have asked me why I’m taking this class, and while I’ll probably come with a better explanation later of why I appreciate the content, I think currently the answer is somewhere in between “math classes build character” and “it’s important for physicists to understand the foundations of their field”. I did struggle a bit in the beginning, since I didn’t know any algebraic number theory going in, but we built up the notion of modular forms from scratch, and it’s nice to now have seen it before!

A similar example for me is taking real analysis as a physicist. I admit I might be a bit biased, because (both quantum and classical) information theory are pretty heavily dependent on analysis, and I wouldn’t have been able to work on the kind of research I was interested in without it. but on the other hand, I would argue that I was only able to appreciate these topics because I was open to learning about techniques from analysis. I also think progress in interdisciplinary fields like quantum information often comes from applying techniques and ideas from other areas, which requires getting over the fear of reading math papers. (basically the real reason that I’m taking the class.) at some point, I want to feel more confident that I can read about almost any topic I’m interested in. (an extreme example: someone who gave a talk last year, and joked about translating obscure math papers published in French in order to figure out the computation.)

chinese new year

I think this was my third year actually celebrating CNY without my parents, since I didn’t really start organizing my own CNY dinners until the latter half of undergrad. It was also my first time celebrating with Chinese students, and it was really fun to hear about other people’s traditions, which are more toned down in the immigrant circles I grew up among. (notable example: salty tangyuan? who knew…)

I made 红烧-style sea bass this year, which is basically a whole fish braised in a sweet soy sauce mixture with ginger and other aromatics. I think this also might be my first time having this variation instead of the Atlantic striped bass that we usually got back in Maryland, but it turned out alright.

There’s a cliché that it doesn’t take much for people to feel like they’re doing okay, just a bit of constancy and routine, but I think it’s been pretty accurate so far. since leaving undergrad, it’s definitely taken more effort to build a good routine, but I also really appreciate everything that’s happened this past year.

First: I’m happy (read: a little shocked) to report that I’ve officially finished a whole quarter of graduate school. it definitely feels like the end of last year snuck up on me, and in a lot of ways I still feel like I’m settling into my new life. part of it is that I suddenly found myself with a very light courseload and little to no extracurricular commitments. I’ve always been drawn to a lot of different interests, and I think this is the first time that I’ve seriously attempted to focus on fewer things, which is exciting but also a challenging mindset to get into the habit of. overall, it’s been a really interesting year, and I’m glad to have a chance to sit down and reflect on some of these experiences.

catching up

A few weeks ago, I visited some old friends in New York. conveniently, the vast majority of my school friends live there now, and it’s been really interesting to meet some of their new friends, and to see how all of our lives have changed in different ways. (the mood, as an unfairly catchy pop song: “La La Lost You (Acoustic Version)”, by Niki. the question at every dinner table: “how are you finding New York? do you like your cohort, coworkers, etc.?”)

I think part of what I felt was nostalgia for when I was younger, but seeing old friends also pokes at the specific unspoken question of who or what else I could have grown to become. there’s a famous quote I came across in high school which states that you’re basically a linear combination of the people you spend the most time around. while that’s probably an oversimplification, I think it’s true that that surrounding yourself with people you admire is one of the best ways to grow, especially during the formative school years. I’m lucky to have had a bunch of close friends in high school and college whom I admired and whom reflected some of the traits I aspired towards in my own life, and I’m proud of how they’ve gotten to where they are now. I also appreciate that it was “cool” to be a little different and even weird in my school circles, which I feel like has contributed to building my sense of self.

new york, revisited

I feel like New York as a city is culturally tied to the idea of aspirational living, i.e. living in pursuit of your whims and ambitions. I enjoy aspiring, and I also like visiting the city, even though I have some qualms about living there long-term. my favorite place that I’ve lived (not counting staying somewhere just for a few days) is still Cambridge, but New York reminds me of some of the best parts of the northeast: the unpredictable weather and changing of seasons (flurries in the middle of the day!), the overlapping of old and new cultures and spaces and people, the functional public transit and accessibility of third spaces.

A thought that popped up is that high school and undergrad felt primarily aspirational to me, in the sense that the culture seemed to normalize looking forward to what’s next. that’s not to say that you’re not supposed to enjoy the process as well, but to me it felt like that wasn’t the main point. somehow grad school feels different, though it’s true that my own aspirations and priorities have shifted a lot in the last four years. funnily enough, my last extended stay in New York was in my freshman year of college, when I lived in Manhattan for a month-long “winternship”. it’s a bit ironic, but having the opportunity to explore different options and enjoying the corporate internship (where I worked with PhD holders who no longer used most of their domain-specific knowledge) was a large factor in convincing me to pursue a PhD in physics.

listening to taylor swift in 2023

A highlight of cafe-hopping in New York (in my opinion) is inadvertently eavesdropping on some of the conversations happening nearby. (it’s a bit like reading the Humans of New York page, but doesn’t require logging into Instagram :)) among other things, I overheard a group of friends discussing Time’s choice to name Taylor Swift as Person of the Year, and found it funny that one person claimed they were “actually upset” by the choice. the same person went on to describe what kind of people they would have preferred to see chosen, such as journalists covering pressing global issues, though they didn’t name any specific individuals. (when I relayed this story to one of my friends who doesn’t listen to her music, they pointed out that this group of people apparently knew Taylor’s name and had strong feelings about the choice, as opposed to the various nameless individuals they claimed to prefer, which was evidence of her impact.)

Personally, I don’t have a strong opinion on who should have been picked from Time’s short list. (I like a lot of Taylor Swift’s discography, though it’s not the majority of the music downloaded on my phone.) however, this conversation reminded me of another one specifically about her name. I started to listen to her music when I was ten or twelve years old, after being introduced to it by my cousin, and remember debating her merits as a singer and businesswoman with my parents while convincing them to buy her cd’s at Target. my parents were convinced that a lot of her success was in her marketing (which, actually, is fair), and that Taylor Swift must be a stage name since it rolled off the tongue so well. as far as I know, though, Taylor is her birth name, and in an old Rolling Stones interview, she revealed that her parents had very intentionally picked a gender-neutral (and presumably nice-sounding) name in order to aid her potential future endeavors in the corporate world.

Aside from general disdain for Time magazine catering to the forces of capitalism, I’ve seen a lot of recent discourse around these kinds of revelations about Taylor Swift’s family and their consideration for her career (even if picking a good name probably isn’t the most impactful example, it’s weirdly symbolic!), and their implications for her success. but I think disregarding her actual songwriting skill and portfolio is also besides the point—it’s possible to recognize a person’s hard work while also acknowledging the luck and privileges they were afforded. (the same can be said of e.g. Mozart or da Vinci, and similarly, I think it’s important to celebrate the significant achievements of various scholars, many of whom come from families with a high level of academic background, while also asking that academic institutions provide opportunities for students with less privileged backgrounds to succeed.)

I do like the narrative that Taylor spins for her cover story—or at least, I find her take on hard work and the risk of taking on the world very satisfying. if nothing else, I think finding meaning in work is similar to finding joy and content in daily tasks and going the motions of life, in that it makes your everyday experience qualitatively better. I’m still figuring out what I want my life to look like in grad school, but I’m excited for the next few years.

the misti experience

I want to summarize some of my thoughts on MISTI, which is basically an umbrella term for MIT’s experiences abroad programs. To be completely honest, I had no idea if I would ever enroll in an exchange program up until I applied in January. I knew vaguely what these programs entailed, and had been encouraged by a high school mentor to try it out if I had the opportunity, but as I alluded to in the previous part, I had barely ever traveled before college and honestly wasn’t sure why I would ever want to sacrifice academic rigor for it. Also, while some of my friends at MIT had participated in the Global Teaching Labs (GTL) program which is takes place during IAP (our Independent Activities Period, or January term), I felt as if I had missed the window since I chose to do an internship during my freshman year IAP, and then the pandemic happened and any thought of traveling basically vanished. It was only in the midst of my summer-before-grad-school-plans panic that I saw a MISTI-Israel advertisement in my inbox that I decided to give it a shot.

the burning question from everyone (myself included at times) was, why Israel? Again, if I’m being honest, I think it was only because of that email advertising the program, because it specifically mentioned the possibility of scuba diving and doing research on the Red Sea as well as the fact that the opportunity was open to graduating seniors. Some of my friends who’ve known me for longer might know that it was a high school dream of mine to work on something related to marine biology or marine science in general. I participated in both Science Bowl and Ocean Sciences Bowl throughout high school, and although I love all of the natural sciences, my first love was and will always be earth and space science. So it felt like a sign when I saw the email in the midst of my pre-grad-school angst, never mind the fact that I knew relatively little about Israel.

to MISTI’s credit, I felt that the program did a a good job of pushing us to engage with the cultural and political issues. For various reasons, prior to the program I had never thought deeply about the establishment of Israel and subsequent conflict in the region—I never learned about it in school, and despite how common it is for Jewish teenagers in America to go on a birthright tour, I knew very few people who were invested in the debate until the apparently shift in left-leaning coverage in the last few years. While I wasn’t keen on the consulting aspect of the pre-program requirements in which we were assigned to work with a startup or other organization in the region, sometimes in an area completely out of our expertise, I deeply appreciated the emphasis on multicultural perspectives throughout the trainings as well as during the MISTI tour. Although the status of MISTI as an official MIT organization meant that we weren’t allowed to enter the West Bank or cross the border into Egypt, the program coordinators brought us to meet Palestinian speakers and other people living in the region with complicated experiences.

notably, we were also barred from participating in political demonstrations. In the last few months, mass protests have taken place in response to a proposed judicial overhaul which would effectively remove several checks of power exerted by the Supreme Court over Israel’s legislative body, with some polls back in April indicating around in 1 in 5 Israelis having participated in the demonstrations. Since I was based in the residential area of Eilat, I actually saw very little of the protestors personally, but the significance of the issue hung over some of my conversations with Israeli scientists, and probably for good reason. Whether or not Israeli actually requires the approval of the U.S. and Western powers to maintain its hi-tech1 industry and economic power, I think it’s pretty clear that political sanctions affect the exchange of ideas and the livelihood of individual scientists, even from local examples like the discontinuation of MISTI-Russia and the investigation of MIT professor Gang Chen, before charges were finally dropped due to inability to meet the burden of proof. Having lived and worked in Israel this summer, I do feel a bit more concretely now the reality of the potential impact on both collaborative efforts and fieldwork. Despite everything going on right now, it’s hard to deny the incredible beauty of the region’s ecological and geological features, and I’m lucky to have been able to see it for myself.

living and working in eilat

as I mentioned before, all of my work took place in Eilat, a little resort town at the southern tip of Israel. The thing about Eilat which struck me as soon as I arrived and moved into the IUI apartment was how much it looked and felt like LA, only smaller. Literally, as in the mountains are closer to the beach and the town is correspondingly scaled down. As Israel’s only access point to the Gulf of Aqaba, a tiny finger of the Red Sea, Eilat is delimited by the Taba border crossing to the west and the Yitzhak Rabin crossing on the right, with less than ten miles in between. In a sense, the town carries the dual role of a vacation destination and a port city, and is correspondingly full of tourists and duty free shopping catering to Israeli and international tastes alike.

due to the limited (need for) infrastructure, the layout of Eilat is pretty minimal: the touristy “Hotel Area” block is limited to a small area near the Jordan side, with the central bus station and residential areas located to the northeast, a few blocks up the main boulevard. The closer to Taba, the smaller the extent of human disturbance, and, as everyone says, the better the snorkeling. The IUI is located less than two miles from the Egypt border, and has its own private section of beach, which felt pretty luxurious! As it turns out, I did not end up scuba diving or collecting samples as part of my internship, but I did snorkel and dive for fun, and it was magical. It’s hard to beat the colorful scenery of a tropical coral reef community, and the Gulf is one of the few places remaining where the corals have kept going strong in the face of rising ocean temperatures, seemingly because the species present there are adapted to warmer waters to the South in the Red Sea.

my own assignments comprised mainly of computer vision tasks that were relevant to the data processing pipeline for ongoing work in the lab, including underwater color calibration and working with the GelSight system for characterizing organic and inorganic surfaces. I’d previously worked on other projects where I similarly updated previous data processing pipelines for new experiments and adapted tools for use in Python, so I was able to get started pretty quickly. Unfortunately, due to how my timeline worked out, I only spent about six weeks working in the lab, so I didn’t have much time to explore new ideas or ways to improve upon their existing tools. I did, however, learn a lot about the state of the field of computer vision, and was extremely impressed by the open-source tools and documentation that were available. Really cool stuff, I’ve never had the patience for large coding projects before but maybe someday I’ll also take the time to learn how to write better software!

one thing I was pleasantly surprised by was the postdoc I worked with, who prior to joining the lab had pursued a PhD in theoretical computer science. It was refreshing to chat with someone who had started with a similar undergraduate background as mine and made several career transitions, and overall eye-opening to see the range of backgrounds (both academic and cultural) among everyone at the IUI. Truthfully, I think I’ve always been a bit anxious over academic and career achievements. In high school the only “success” stories I ever heard were those of linear career trajectories, which is partly why I had never pursued an internship in marine science before despite how much fun I had studying marine biology for Ocean Sciences Bowl. Working at the IUI was a really rewarding experience, and surprising a very validating one. In my last week, the postdoc commented that he had missed discussing math, echoing my own thoughts, right after we had figured out a puzzling mathematical feature related to one of the lab’s projects.2 While I understand now that hardly anyone’s personal or professional path is truly straight, and there’s always a possibility I could change my mind about a career in science, I felt relieved and newly convinced that I had made the right choice to go to grad school.

as for the lows, I have to confess that I found Eilat a pretty difficult location to live, even though it was less than three months. I know everyone always says this, but I really didn’t understand how much of a difference it really makes to like the place you live and work until I lived and worked in Eilat. It’s a truly beautiful place (for anyone visiting the region, I would definitely recommend making the trip down if you have time!), and I’m glad I got to experience it, but food-wise it was awful. That’s not to say there were no good restaurants or grocery stores, but there was relatively little variety, all of the Asian restaurants were catered toward Western tastes, and it was shockingly difficult to find the materials and ingredients to make the kind of food I was used to eating: crispy eggs, over easy; or drunken noodles, tossed over medium high; or really any kind of homestyle stir fry. The real ones know I spent an entire week sourcing a stainless steel frying pan! I’m still not sure why it was so hard to find, but at least I know I’m not crazy because there are other people with the same problem finding stainless steel cookware in Israel e.g. 1, 2. My lifeline was the Russian supermarket a few blocks away, which always had a decent stock of imported fruits and other international goods.

I think it also deserves mention here that weekends in Israel are different from nearly everywhere else in the world, as in the work week is Sunday through Thursday, and Friday and Saturday are off. Bus service is also heavily reduced on Friday afternoons and Saturdays, to the extent that it felt even more difficult to get around town without a car on the weekends as it did in LA. On the other hand, the (in my understanding heavily subsidized) intercity bus system in Israel is pretty special, and when I didn’t stay in on the weekends it was fairly easy to travel to Tel Aviv, or Mitzpe Ramon, or even to the Dead Sea beaches by bus on Fridays. At some point I booked a bus ticket back to Eilat from Be’er Sheva for about $6.70, which would be hard to match in the northeast or mid-Atlantic region of the U.S.

closing thoughts

as I alluded to in the previous post, I think that living and working in Israel was a really important experience for me, despite not always being a particularly comfortable one in the day-to-day, for the pretty broad reason that it challenged me to examine my sense of identity and the way that I related to other people. In the past, I often glorified the idea of self-awareness, but in a sense it’s an impossible ideal: to strive on one hand to know and understand your own interests, to resolutely make the best decisions possible for yourself and others you care about, yet on the other to remain open-minded, to adapt to new information and perspectives, to bow humbly in the face of your own ignorance. I don’t think I’ve ever been as acutely aware of the tension between these two as I was this summer. Before living in Israel, I had never felt homesick, and it didn’t even cross my mind that I might someday live in a place that made me physically uncomfortable. At one point, I told a friend that I found the food “non-ergonomic”, which I think is technically an appropriation of the capitalist concept of squeezing out productivity from workers, but still feels applicable here.

despite these programs being marketed as a rite of self-discovery, I think my experiences abroad are most aptly described as a process of self-affirmation, received during a time when I’ve had to make choices which I’m told would shape who I am for the next few years. I know I’m incredibly fortunate to have had so many opportunities to explore before making an informed decision, and (at least for the next five years or so) to live out the dream of my sixteen-year-old self and get paid to study theoretical physics. And if I had chosen to spend this summer differently, perhaps if I had allocated myself more time for writing up pedagogical notes or polishing my senior thesis research, then maybe I would have something more concrete to show for it, or happier news to share. But I also think that in every version of this past summer, I would have tried to find the same kind of affirmation for my choices, which probably, deep down, was what I wanted most before starting grad school.

p.s. as an update, I’m flying out to LAX next week! Currently I’m wrapping up some loose ends and getting back into physics. I find it hard to focus on work in airports or on the plane, but I do like to pass the time by reading. Let me know if you have recommendations for all my upcoming flights (novels, short stories, self-help, blogs, investigative journalism, arXiV drops etc. all welcome)!

this post is the first in a two-part series, in which I want to document some of my experiences and longer thoughts surrounding international travel, homesickness, and summers before grad school. I’ll start with my reasoning for undertaking all of this travel: for those who’ve known me for a while, you might know that I spent a long time debating what I wanted to do with this summer. There’s a lot of conflicting advice out there—for many people it’s the last time for a long while that you’ll ever have so few responsibilities in your career and personal life, which makes it the perfect time for a break. On the other hand, grad school is a big transition, and it makes a lot of sense to ease into it by moving to the area and starting your work early. I don’t believe in making your work your entire life, but I can definitely see the advantages of having a head start. A third option I considered was to find a better paying job (compared to undergraduate research assistantships!) and to save a bit more money before grad school. I still think all of these choices would have been really sensible, which is probably why I found this decision so difficult.

ultimately I chose to take a bit of a break, and to pursue something different from what I had done in the past. I knew that I wanted to work on something no matter what, and by chance came across a MISTI email advertising research opportunities on the Red Sea. Miraculously (or so it felt), I was accepted as a summer intern at the Laboratory for Computational Optics and Light in the Ocean Realm, affectionately shortened as COLOR Lab, where I’ve been working for the last two months and a bit. I also thought it was convenient to merge MISTI with my other international travel plans, and took a bit of a detour through Asia before arriving in Israel. Looking back, I feel like this was a great choice, although I strongly believe that I would feel the same way had I gone with either of the other options. I’ll reflect a bit more on this later; for now, I’ll summarize my first (extremely busy) week, which comprised my journey to Israel before settling into Eilat.

pre-travel

I want to preface my experiences by saying that this was the first time in my conscious life that I had ever flown internationally. Technically I traveled to China and back when I was about two years old, but prior to this summer I was totally clueless about the differences between domestic and international flights. For the most part I think this enhanced my joy at experiencing everything for the first time and made it a more valuable experience, but I also almost missed one of my flights due to not giving myself more room for error to make it to the airport in time to check in.

I am thankful that I decided beforehand to only bring one carry-on, along with a backpack and travel pillow. I ended up acquiring a few new items in Israel, which I’ll have to cram in (fingers crossed) so I can bring them back, but the first two weeks were so hectic that I was glad I traveled relatively light so that I didn’t have to lug around a giant checked suitcase. Other than packing, which was also part of the process of moving out of my apartment, I felt like I didn’t really go out of my way to prepare. I did end up buying a new camera, a secondhand Fujifilm XF10, which is now my favorite travel companion and which I’ll probably write another post on later.

tokyo

we budgeted three and a half days in Tokyo, so it was a bit tricky to figure out what we wanted to prioritize seeing. It was also rainy season in Japan, which made me a bit anxious since I didn’t want to pack a raincoat just for those few days, but it ended up only raining for a few hours total during our trip. We stayed in Asakusa, which aside from having lots of good food was fairly quiet at night and a relatively easy trip to and from the airport with a direct express train. Some other things in Tokyo that stood out to me, in no particular order:

• breakfast at the only place nearby open before 8am, Cafe Tomorrow Asakusa

• a surprisingly good chashu taiyaki + yama-budo (mountain grape) ice cream from this one stall on the corner of the street

• TeamLab Planets, which was better than I expected and the best-executed example of an “interactive art exhibit” I’ve seen

• kitsune soba at Gensoba Roan, a little out of the way but worth it to experience Shimokitazawa, which reminds me a little bit of Brookline with its small shops. We visited on a rainy evening and like most of the Google reviewers were the only tourists there. The staff came out to tell us there was a thirty minute wait in Japanese, and I managed a very, very shaky response. The food was good, but I think the cutest part was the handwritten note they brought to our table after we had finished our noodles, explaining how to drink the soba water. I grew up drinking dumpling “soup” after every celebration dinner, so this felt like a perfect end to our night out

• making it to the airport with just about ¥3,000 (roughly $30) remaining. It turns out some changes to the IC card system had been implemented just before we arrived, making it very difficult to get one as a foreigner without a Japanese bank account or credit card, so we paid in cash basically everywhere

overall, I really liked visiting Tokyo, and could definitely see myself returning or even living there for a while. I especially noticed and appreciated how clean the city was, which made the streets feel very comfortable despite being very narrow by American standards. And Asakusa is beautiful at night—practically begging to be shot in Kodak Gold 200 (this was shot and edited digitally though):

singapore

I only spent two and a half days in Singapore, since one of the main reasons I visited was for the wedding of a friend-of-a-friend. I spent the second day finding ways to entertain myself, since most of the people I knew were in the bridal party and I wasn’t. Instead of min-maxing, I decided to relax and go with the flow, which meant getting some reading in but not having time to visit Marina Bay Sands and soak in the infinity pool. I did indulge in some simple pleasures:

• the Gardens by the Bay, which are spectacularly well designed. I’m proud to say I’ve now visited the largest greenhouse on Earth!

• Hainanese chicken rice, which definitely lived up to my expectations—a pretty high bar since I also love other poached chicken dishes like saliva chicken (口水鸡)

• Tea Chapter, a tea shop where they teach you the gongfu tea ceremony (工夫茶) method of brewing tea. We tried their signature Imperial Golden Cassia, which is a lightly fermented and fragrant oolong tea, and which I liked more than the other Chinese oolongs I’ve tried before (mainly variations of Iron Goddess)

• lots and lots of fresh fruit, courtesy of my hosts. If anyone knows where to find green guava in the U.S. (especially near Pasadena), please let me know!

concluding the East Asia leg of my trip and leaving for Israel was a bit bittersweet, in part because I didn’t know many people in the MISTI program to start out but also due to other factors that were difficult to articulate before living in Israel: for various reasons, Tokyo and Singapore felt fairly comfortable and also somehow familiar, even though I had never visited either place before this summer. In hindsight, this might seem obvious—the flavor profile of the food was relatively similar to what I grew up eating, and because I’m also of East Asian descent, I never received any remarks on my ethnicity or weird looks from people on the street. I was only asked where I was from once, in a casual conversation with the nail tech who did my nails for the wedding, perhaps because she was surprised by my English or Chinese accent, or some combination thereof. Living on my own in Israel was a very sharp contrast, and for that reason I think it was a really important experience for me to have. At the same time, I’m glad that that I started with the (for me) easier-to-navigate East Asia circuit and not the other way around in my international travels.

I’m back from senior-thesis-graduation-requirements purgatory and finally alive again! Though I haven’t updated my CV yet, I’m happy to report that I in fact managed to graduate (!!) last Friday as a bachelor of science in physics and mathematics from MIT. I’ll be traveling a bit over the next few months and spending some time with a computational imaging lab at a marine science research center before I start a Ph.D. in quantum information at Caltech in the fall.

a well-known side effect of graduating is getting roped into a lot of conversations and reflections not only on our time throughout college, but also our identities as an adult. For me, my personal identity is heavily linked to what I've spent time on over the years, including my academic pursuits and my experiences in STEM, and how that intersects with other aspects of my life. I know some people might object to letting your work define yourself, but I think I’ve always found a lot of meaning in my academic pursuits (along with my relationships with other people, and hobbies, and other things). I wanted to take this time to write a longer post on this topic before I inevitably get busy again. I’ll first remark that I’ve already written up a piece on my academic experiences at MIT (checking off my bucket list item of publishing a post on the admissions blog!), which might be worth reading for additional context. However, the goal of this post is a bit different, as it centers around more personal feelings and childhood reflections and basically everything they warn you not to write about in a statement of purpose.

I’m sometimes hesitant to voice my beliefs about the gender gap in STEM or my personal experiences of gender, and I tend to think thoughts like “I can be a better public advocate when I’ve gone through x”. “x” might be grad school, or a postdoc position, or a real job, some firsthand experience of what it’s actually like to be a financially independent adult with real adult hardships working in STEM. While this might not be false, the fact that I didn’t mention gender at all in my post about studying math and physics at MIT, despite taking on leadership roles in the math and physics student societies for women here, as well as benefitting a lot from the women in physics mentorship program, strikes me in hindsight as just a little dishonest, and I think I want to be more direct going forwards.

there’s a couple of underlying reasons for my (not totally conscious) omission, one being that when I was younger, I truly didn’t think that gender should play a role in my or anyone else’s career decisions. While I had generally been open to having children, or at least having the option to, and I knew it was pretty taxing, many women around me had continued working even after they had children. In some circles, it’s common for toddlers who have just been weaned off of breastfeeding to be sent to live with their grandparents for a while, in my case over two years. (As a disclaimer, when I mention families in this post, I’m mostly referring to Chinese immigrant families, which is the demographic group I’ve interacted the most with.) Looking back, I think that having two working parents who split a lot of family responsibilities, including taking me to the library and looking over my homework, probably set me up for a fairly gender-neutral conception of adulthood (more on this later). It wasn’t until college that I began to think through some of the contradictions in my beliefs around gender.

the reality is that despite their legal and financial freedom in the U.S., women (and other underrepresented minorities) in many STEM professions still face prejudice in both their professional and personal lives. There’s a lot of more informed opinions out there on this topic, including the Alice’s Adventures in Numberland blog, written by mathematics professor Alice Silverberg, as well as scholarly publications, see exhibits 1, 2, 3, 4. I want to note a caveat to how these issues are presented in news articles and abstracts; in physics-speak, society is a pretty complex system with many types of interactions, so any one metric or computation is bound to be somewhat reductive.

my parents, to their credit, shielded me from this discourse for nearly eighteen years of my life. While like many immigrant parents they initially envisioned a career for me in either law or medicine, in high school they let me join any classes or extracurricular activities that I wanted to, and crucially never made me feel as if I couldn’t achieve success or happiness in any field, least of all because I was a girl, though they often warned me that I would need to work hard. I’m incredibly grateful for their support in this regard, and I can only imagine how difficult it would be for me to study physics if they had a different opinion.

on the other hand, this blinded me for some time to the fact that not everyone is raised in the same way, and that for various reasons, people who are brought up as girls are just not expected to be interested in the hard sciences and engineering or, in the case of many friends, are even outright discouraged from pursuing STEM. Here are some other salient examples:

1. in a recent conversation with my parents, they told me that they had initially been a little worried about me choosing to attend MIT because of how many netizens on Wenxuecity (the premiere online community for Chinese immigrants in the U.S.) described MIT as an “especially tough environment for girls”. They were supportive of my decision, but at the time I was confused why they weren’t as excited as I was, and it had stuck with me for a while.

2. over the past few days, I met many of my classmates’ parents at graduation events. Upon telling one that I would be attending grad school in physics, she seemed surprised at encountering a “girl who liked STEM” (the literal translation of the title of this post, and its inspiration). Although I don’t think she had any ill intent, I was a little taken aback by her surprise, as if I had to justify myself.

3. in high school I browsed the depths of the internet for blog posts and forums for women in science, fairly quickly finding advice such as to have kids during the latter half of your Ph.D., since there’s such intense pressure afterwards to get a tenure-track position. Thinking about this advice now that I’m about to start a Ph.D. feels pretty insane—could I really take care of a young kid while moving around for a couple of postdoc positions? Might I also have to rely on my parents and the metaphorical village to help? Would I really be ready to have children just three years from now???

I realize that what I’ve described here is incredibly anecdotal, and should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Also I know many women who pivoted out of the hard sciences into something else like medicine or project management, and I want to make it clear that I don’t think this kind of choice is wrong. I believe that the majority of people who make this kind of choice are genuinely interested in their new field and find it more personally fulfilling. Plus, if they’re happy and feel engaged in their current position, I’m not sure it makes sense to feel sad or “mourn” other hypothetical versions of themselves or the childhood dreams they had about becoming an astrophysicist. But given that even the women who stay in STEM often say that they’ve faced resistance because of their gender, I think it’s important to acknowledge how important sociocultural factors are in science and how societal expectations play a role in turning girls away from these fields.

I want to confess another reason for my complicated feelings, which is that I’ve never felt very attached to any gender identity. Again, I think someone else on the internet has already explained this feeling: eight years ago on this day, just before I entered high school, Vihart released a video on identifying as “gender agnostic”. Vihart is amazing for so many reasons, such as explaining lots of things really clearly, but this video in particular has always resonated with me and, after going back to it multiple times, has clarified the way I thought about gender. I had always sort of thought that that gender didn’t actually matter, but I learned from Vihart that not everyone shared this belief.

importantly, this wasn’t the first time I was ever exposed to discussions about gender and how it might intersect with my experiences, because I attended a middle school STEM program and participated in MathCounts and knew very vaguely that less girls did math for some reason, and that this statistical anomaly mattered for college applications. But I didn’t feel out of place just because I didn’t look like a boy, and I believed deep down that the gender divide was a bit arbitrary and that other people felt the same way but just weren’t willing to admit it. It’s not just that I don’t care about outward appearances or fitting in, because I do feel really out of place in some settings where there aren’t any other people of Asian descent. I was also aware of same-sex relationships before this, and had somehow convinced myself that most people were attracted mostly to personality and therefore not exclusively to a single gender. There’s other examples too, though many of them involve the personal details and lives of my friends.

the video also included the following line of reasoning which almost perfectly describes my later experience:

And it was too long, not until I was in college, that any actual trans voices made it across my radar, and I realized this was not just a theoretical curiosity from far away, but something people actually do. Real people go through all this trouble, and for what, gender? The only conclusion that fit the facts was that indeed, gender is a thing. Maybe it’s culturally created, or maybe it’s biological, or maybe it’s something else, but it’s definitely real. And if it’s real when trans folk do it, maybe it’s even real when cis folk do it. In understanding that gender identity is a real thing, I also understood that I don’t have it.

like Vihart, I didn’t personally know any openly transgender people until the end of high school or the beginning of college, so this part didn’t really stick with me until later. This is probably also a part of growing older in general, but I’ve internalized at this point just how dissimilar different people’s experiences can be.

while this realization was extremely enlightening and helped me become more empathetic toward other people, it’s occasionally made me feel guilty or confused about how I present myself. I’ve written a couple of diversity statements for different applications, and have usually felt pressured to write about how presenting as a woman and pursuing physics have affected my perspective. I don’t think I ever outright lied, because my interactions with other women and under underrepresented minorities really have moved me to care more about accessibility and opportunities for equitable outcomes, and overall I find a lot of meaning in teaching and mentoring. I’ve also been asked about my thoughts on gender and physics by personal and professional acquaintances, and always feel embarrassed answering since I don’t know whether I can really speak to the experiences of most women. I’m not sure if I’ve “suffered as much” as other people who are for example women (in a stronger sense), or transgender, or gay. At the same time, because I was brought up as a girl, I think that I was probably taught many of the common expectations e.g. looking out for myself around men or prioritizing family. Looking back, I can also point to instances where my peers treated me differently because I presented as a girl—just because you’re not aware of something, it doesn’t mean that you can’t be affected by it.

to close, I’m happy at the moment to continue presenting outwardly as a woman, as a student, and as a scientist, and not really using labels for myself outside of that. I don’t have a strong attachment to the first, but I’m also not repulsed by it. (Plus I’m pretty short, so it’s hard to buy men’s or unisex clothing unless I go to the boys section.) Moving forward, I’ll continue to prioritize teaching, mentoring, and advocacy work alongside all of my other interests, academic and otherwise. I especially want to work on being a better listener and mentor, and to try to understand the needs of younger students, which in my own experience is sometimes more important than sharing the same identity—almost all of my own mentors have been white or white-passing men who spoke English as their first language. But I’ve been awfully lucky to have had some really good ones.

p.s. happy pride month :) For Boston-area friends, pride parade is returning this weekend for the first time since 2019, which is pretty exciting!

there are a few possible reasons, like the expansion of other academic programs at MIT (Nuclear Engineering! Comparative Media Studies!), obviously increasing the appeal of a more flexible degree option. At the same time, the student body seems to have drifted over the last decade towards computer science and the tech industry. According to national surveys, the majority of physics majors are now entering jobs after earning their undergrad degree—and about fifteen percent of all physics majors go into computer engineering and IT work immediately after graduating. Maybe spending your senior spring hunkering down over a giant essay isn’t so appealing when no one will care about your physics coursework after you graduate.

but most of my friends who are starting their PhD in the fall aren’t writing a thesis either. Some of them have multiple papers already, and don’t think a thesis will add much to their CV. Others thought it was a hassle to get in the paperwork for what seemed like an old-fashioned formality. Which maybe begs the question, what exactly is the point of an undergrad thesis? Whereas a PhD thesis signifies the development of a significant and original body of work, undergrad research is usually pretty directed, and half of it might be getting assigned readings by a professor or grad student. What does an undergrad have to say that is meaningful and original? Will anyone ever cite an undergrad thesis (lol)? Rather than go work more on my own thesis, I’ll take the chance to procrastinate and take a stab at this question.

I think that growing up, a lot of us were trained to ask “what’s the point?” (or even, “what’s the thesis?”) of everything we read. Nearly every essay I’ve written for a class asked me to analyze the structure of some book or passage, or its influences and connections to other notable works, or how the author used language to achieve a specific effect. I can’t remember the last time I was asked to write about how I engaged with the work, or about the beauty of a certain section of prose. Maybe when we were tasked to attend a play in my acting class?

it’s possible this is just because subjective prompts are difficult to grade. It might not be fair to penalize a student for not resonating with the themes of a book, but it’s pretty reasonable to judge everyone on the basis of whether they can research and convincingly identify Biblical references along with their intended meanings. At the same time, we practice analyzing the same kinds of pieces over and over, books or short stories or plays or movies or sometimes opinion essays and news articles. I think this trains us to identify the value of a written work within the text itself, while we often take the broader context, e.g. publishing propaganda or selling a form of entertainment, almost as a given.

I have a qualm with this mindset, namely that I think essays with a central thesis or agenda to sell are… perfectly normal. I really like reading pieces that give me some insight into someone else’s experiences, even if they’re messy and don’t tell me what I should conclude. Sometimes writers produce work because it’s their job, but a lot of the longform stuff I read these days are written by people who just like finding or maintaining connection online, and I’ve found it helpful to keep an open mind towards why people choose the topics that they write about.

similarly, I think everyone who writes a senior thesis probably has a slightly different reason for doing so. It might not be completely “for fun” (which is my default answer), but then again I wouldn’t be pursuing a career in science at all if I didn’t find it fun to some extent. Though I can’t find a source to back this up, I’ve heard that the tradition of the doctoral thesis comes from the days when circulating papers was more difficult, so your results would only be printed and published in a volume after you completed a book or thesis dissertation. Nowadays, it’s much easier to follow and cite standard-length papers, so no one expects other people to even read through their PhD entire thesis. According to my advisor though, I could also consider writing chapters containing a pedagogically-flavored review of some of the topics I learned about, and publishing those chapters on arXiv.

all that aside, there’s something to be said for compiling a volume of your own work, and I think my senior thesis will at least be useful for me to reference when I’m looking back on my years in undergrad. As an MIT alum who is now an art director for a skincare brand put it, digital portfolios might be trendy now, but there’s nothing like seeing a giant PDF that someone curated and sent out into the world (I’m paraphrasing).

as a side note, I find it crazy that I’m getting to an age where I’m forgetting a lot of the things I’ve learned before in school, but maybe that’s a sign that I should write more of my thoughts and ideas down before it’s too late. Here’s to (almost) graduating!