semester review, part 2
18 December 2019
There are 168 hours in a week. Per my last post, on average, only 26 of those were spent on going to classes or doing classwork, but these are “focused” hours. Assuming that I am around 75% focused on doing classwork on average, this means around 35 hours net time spent on academics. This still leaves a whopping 133 hours though. What did I spend those hours on?
Sleep
~60 hours
I got more sleep than I thought I would. In fact I slept well for most of the semester——the only exceptions would be days before an essay is due. On one hand, this is quite surprising: I didn’t really get enough sleep last year at Hotchkiss, and it seems like MIT should be more intense than Hotchkiss. On the other hand, this makes sense: the first class I usually go to starts at 1pm each day——I can sleep at 3am regularly and still easily get 9 hours of sleep. (I think my average sleep time actually ended up being around 3am) Also, since there isn’t really anything scheduled except a few hours of class each day, I could take lots of naps on days when I woke up early or went to bed late.
As you can probably see, I wouldn’t say I had a sleep schedule that’s anywhere near healthy though, and I should definitely try to make it better. There have been quite a few times I tried to “set back” my sleep time by sleeping early (i.e. 1am) one night, but often I would end up sleeping at 3 the next day anyways, oof.
Food
~15 hours
Someone on MIT Admissions once blogged that MIT dorms are in a “food desert” relative to their urban location. I agree. I live in MacGregor. Except for dining hall food (which is meh and expensive), the nearest place to get food is … Zephyr on the Charles, a restaurant in the Hyatt Regency Cambridge. I’ve never been there; can’t really comment on it. Based on google reviews, it’s expensive and not really good. After that it’s MIT’s Student Center, which is definitely, definitely known for its selection of great food. (It’s cheap though, I’ll give that). Any other place is at least 900m away. Normally, the result of this is that students would turn to cooking, except that I was too lazy to cook. I ended up surviving my semester with a combination of cereal brunches, free meals, eating out, and frozen food, which was fine I guess. I should cook more next semester though.
UROP
"10 hours"
MIT has this program called UROP, for Undergraduate Research OPportunities. Essentially, an undergraduate student could arrange a “research job” with a “mentor”. The “research job” can be anything from an actual hands-on research to … well … a boring lab worker I guess. The “mentor” can be a professor, a graduate student, or a research lab, or whatever——the possibilities are uncountable. (Although many UROPs might not be actual research, I think they are still valuable experiences though.) The nice thing about UROP is that there are so many of them that there would be one you want to do, and also that it pays.
This semester I did a UROP on information theory. It was theoretical work, which was pretty interesting as most UROPs are more experimental. It was also closer to the “real research” side on the researcher-to-lab worker scale, which was nice. In the end I didn’t really prove anything new, which was quite expected, and anyways I think it was time quite well spent. I haven’t decided if I want to continue this next semester or try a more experimental UROP, we’ll see.
HMMT
~6 hours
The Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament is held by Harvard and MIT undergraduates twice a year, once in November (the hard contest), and once in February (the harder contest). It is currently under fire for several reasons.
This year I am one of the three November Problems Czars; we were in charge of writing and selecting the problems for the November test as well as holding problem-writing and test-solving sessions. It was a great experience for me. I might say more later——the HMMT is worth a full blog post.
Badminton
1.5 hours for half the semester
For my first PE class here I chose Badminton, something I liked to play in my free time back in Thailand. The class was fun, but it was pretty short. We only met twice a week for 40 minutes each time, and only for half the semester. This is a big change compared to prep school life which included something like 8 hours of sports a week, and a return to Thai high school life of 1 hour of sports a week. In hindsight I wish I was forced, or forced myself, to spend more time exercising because, well, I haven’t really been exercising at all. Another item to add to my “improving self-discipline” list.
This leaves around 40 hours a week which I conclude must have been spent on random activities ranging from mindless redditing to playing Minecraft to walking around Cambridge. I think that’s fair, and I don't really have anything in particular to reflect on.