21 lessons over 42 days
August 17, 2024
Perhaps some of these lessons will come to be helpful, while some others are generic or written for the sake of fun. Whatever the case may be, hopefully it’s at least entertaining.
Lessons
1. In the end, everything is going to be okay.
2. The people are irreplaceable.
3. Be kind, especially when you don’t know what’s going on.
4. Caring about your work gets you 90% of the way there.
6. If you don’t know who you are, see who you gravitate towards.
7. Physics can be applied to biology???
9. When there’s no risk of reputation, it’s easier to be yourself.
10. Portugese tarts and egg tarts are not the same.
11. Always have at least one trusted person know where you are.
12. Live through curiosity and doing things because they’re funny.
13. Good matcha is not supposed to taste like grass!!!
14. Overdosing on try not to laugh videos gave me a good poker face.
15. Have a friend who will challenge your ideas to its core.
16. Explore places to their limit.
17. Find people who you’d call your foster family.
18. See people in different contexts.
19. The difference between being ignored and loneliness is…
20. People typically don’t say things for the sake of politeness.
21. We carry a bit of everyone in us.
1. In the end, everything is going to be okay.
Move-in day was swarmed with anticipation and anxiety of what was to come in the next six weeks. What would the dorms be like? Who would I meet? How would I make the most of this experience? At this point, I had already been in Boston for two days, but I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to call it home for the next six weeks.
At the time, a lot of my friends were in the area, but at different camps/occupations. I had a sense of security that if all really went wrong, I had people to fall back on. But it was also rather symbolic that they were all in Cambridge–separated by the Charles River, I couldn’t call them my lifeline. I had to break from the cocoon and fend for myself if it came down to that.
2. The people are irreplaceable.
And therefore, it’s important to put yourself out there, especially in the first few days. Go to every social event that’s provided, because everyone else is looking for friends. Whenever I met someone new, I would ask for their Instagram or some equivalent. Friend groups form
The material is nicely packed into the camp, but it’s possible to find on your own. It merely serves as a platform for bringing people with similar interests together. Everyone here went through the same filter–
I found that making friends there wasn’t too difficult. I believe that people don’t actually judge you for things, and if they do, that’s not the right group of people to hang out with. If you make eye contact, smile, and wave at people, they’ll remember you at some point, and boom, a friend is made!
3. Be kind, especially when you don’t know what’s going on.
I first saw this on someone’s Instagram about me. It’s from Everything Everywhere All at Once, and from a pivotal scene that
I had spent the morning alone, which felt a little strange. Really, I was afraid of repeating the same mistake I had made two years ago at another summer camp, during which I had isolated myself from everyone. I felt super appreciative of RA and MR, who extended an invitation to stop by the FitRec. It probably didn’t take much for them to ask, but the gesture meant a lot to me.
4. Caring about your work gets you 90% of the way there.
Our neuroscience professor was the 🐐. He’s so vibrant, hilarious, and genuinely cares about the subject. His passion was infectious. He could talk about anything and it would be interesting. Attaining knowledge isn’t the hardest part, because the knowledge itself is already out there. It’s getting to care about the knowledge and how it’s applied that’s difficult.
5. Curiosity masks fear.
It’s surprisingly exhausting to go through two massive events in one day, but this was also evidence of growth for me–for the entirety of both, I wasn’t afraid to be myself. Before, I would isolate myself, merely listen to others, and probably shut down, but this time, I let myself have fun. I went in, curious about people’s backgrounds and what kind of people they’re like.
Which reminds me of a piece of advice I heard, prompted by the question, “How do you start a conversation with a stranger?” It’s to approach the stranger with curiosity–there isn’t a motive in mind, no trying to get information out of them or a favor to ask. Just curiosity, and that’s enough to drive a conversation forward.
Another example is when we conducted wet labs with crickets and worms. I despise bugs, especially the former–the unpredictability of crickets makes me uneasy, and I don’t enjoy the feeling of worms. But being in a lab setting sparked my curiosity, which overrode my phobia of bugs. Somehow, I was even deemed the cricket exterminator.
6. If you don’t know who you are, see who you gravitate towards.
Sometimes, it’s easier to psychoanalyze others rather than yourself, maybe because evaluating others creates some distance. Biases that we hold so close to our identity can also prevent us from seeing ourselves as we are. The friends I got closest with reminded me of close friends at home: people who challenge me, people who must exhaust all resources and opportunities, people who don’t worry about fitting in. It was my way of seeking familiarity in the unfamiliar, and perhaps why I felt very little homesickness.
7. Physics can be applied to biology???
Never would I have expected to see AP Physics C: E&M rise from the ashes, rewired in my memory as a relation between electrical circuits and a phospholipid bilayer and its ion channels. The battery is ATP; wires are the phospholipid bilayer; capacitors and resistors are ion channels. All this, coupled with Ohm’s law, inspire the Hodgkin–Huxley model, an amalgamation of conductance, gating variables, membrane potential, and “mysterious units.” Essentially, the model examines voltage dynamics across the membrane through a set of four differential equations. It was really, really cool.
8. Become good at sprinting.
This skill is quite useful when 1. You’re running to shelter because of a torrent or 2. Trying to catch curfew. The second case happened to occur more often, and it was especially useful to be able to sprint up six floors in under three minutes. Imagine yourself in this scenario: It’s Fourth of July at the Charles River Esplanade, and you’re watching their fireworks show. You’re also someone who comes from a much smaller, quieter city. Notably, Boston is a much wealthier city than where you’re from. Granted, you’re going to want to optimize the amount of time watching the fireworks.
And this place is quite far from the dorms, and so when a massive horde of people are also coming back from various places and are all trying to take the elevator to their floor (mind you, these elevators are also massively slow and have a maximum capacity of
9. When there’s no risk of reputation, it’s easier to be yourself.
I first realized this on a spontaneous trip with AD, StratfordJames, and ellipsis to Newbury Street–I was free to be myself and could say whatever came to my mind.
Part of the reason why I had trouble opening up in previous environments was because I already had a reputation–a feeling that there was a model I created that I had to fit in, this model being quite different from the way I am now. But I also realized that no one really holds models of other people in their mind. Essentially, I was fitting myself into a model that I thought other people held, when it’s really my creation.
But with no reputation, I could start fresh, and it was easiest to be fully authentic. That led me to challenge my previous perception and ask, “Well, why can’t this be possible in a place where you do hold a reputation?” It’s the fear that other people will notice and point it out, but is that necessarily bad?
10. Portugese tarts and egg tarts are not the same.
They look almost exactly the same, except Portuguese tarts look like they’ve been torched a bit on the top. Egg tarts are much softer in consistency and are less sweet. Other than that, they’re quite similar–it’s interesting how the two were created independently, but they’re almost the same.
Another fun fact: lactose free milk is just milk with a Lactaid in it! Not me thinking that the lactose was physically extracted from the milk before 😭
11. Always have at least one trusted person know where you are.
Okay nothing especially bad occurred, though there were a couple security issues that I won’t go into detail about. During one of them though, we basically walked through the area right before the threat arrived (or maybe the threat was already there and we didn’t know). So we were literally minutes or meters away from disaster.
Not to scare people, but it’s generally a good idea to be expected by someone. It’s also a nice feeling to know someone is just a phone call away.
12. Live through curiosity and doing things because they’re funny.
This is similar to a previous tip, except for an added element. Also, it doesn’t necessarily have to be based on fear. It’s merely a driver for new experiences. When there’s an option to stay with the mundane or try something new, sometimes I just think, “It would be funny” and
What motivated this tip was an opportunity to provide a video testimonial for the program. I was interested, but what made me take the leap was a little “it would be funny” when I was thinking about the
13. Good matcha is not supposed to taste like grass!!!
My first matcha was at a Peet’s Coffee. Well, perhaps they’re only supposed to specialize in coffee, and I’ll also admit that my memory surrounding it was
Perhaps it’s also the association that I form with matcha that makes it sweet. It was some matcha KitKats from H-mart, opened up on the staircase of the CDS. We (CW, SL, CG, AD, SY, AC, EZ) struggled over the Harvard CS50 course, but we were together.
There are some places in Boston/near Boston that serve incredible matcha and matcha-flavored items, namely, Taiyaki NYC, Maiko Matcha, and Kyo Matcha. This revelation was quite similar to my exposure to what good tacos actually taste like. The first taco I ever had was at Taco Bell, and that alone should tell you enough.
14. Overdosing on try not to laugh videos as a child gave me a good poker face.
Back in elementary school, I would binge Vines and try not to laugh compilations on YouTube because they were funny. I do regret the amount of time I spent on this, but the past is gone and written as is. I didn’t expect this to be useful later on.
15. Have a friend who will challenge your ideas to its core.
And that’s how you’ll know whether you hold these ideas true to yourself, or whether you’re a vessel of other people’s ideas. I was quite surprised to see how much could come out from a simple “why” or “how,” uncovering deeper branches of thought, eventually reaching the axioms. Even then, those were challenged and
16. Explore places to their limit.
We didn’t know when we would ever come to Boston again, or if we ever would. As a result, we exhausted as many places as we could go in
17. Find people who you’d call your foster family.
These people are a rarity. I found people who I could fully express myself around, and who would also challenge the ideas that I held so closely to my identity. These were people who I could also go on random, spontaneous adventures with–it could literally be the basement of a random building, and we could still find something interesting to do.
Even though we came from very different backgrounds, I think what ultimately brought us together was a thirst for intellectual expansion. We did not let a place go unexplored the same way that we wouldn’t let a corner of our mind go unexplored.
18. See people in different contexts.
One of my biggest fears is judging people too quickly and having them misrepresented in my mind because I’ve only seen them act under a certain context. It’s a fair assumption that a person would act similarly under other environments, but people are also more nuanced beyond some first impressions.
So again, with that approach of curiosity, I like to see people in different contexts before making a judgment. I remember that someone said you can really tell what someone is really like if you go on a long walk with them. Walking is a repetitive activity, so talking is the only way to relieve boredom from repetitiveness. The second aspect is that walking can get tiring, which can activate how someone acts under stress. And even though this is a mild form of stress, it still tells a little about what someone is like.
I think you can also tell what someone is like by watching them drive. It’s kind of similar to walking, but there’s sometimes instances where the driver has to act impulsively. Evaluating someone’s impulses is a way of reaching someone’s axioms.
19. The difference between being ignored and loneliness is…
…that loneliness is not having anyone to ignore you.
I don’t even remember how we got to this discussion, but they both feel the same. There’s an emptiness in the heart that feels like it can’t get replaced. It reminds me of a friend’s playlist that went, “when you lose something you can’t replace … now you’re just a stranger with all my secrets,” which plays into one of my biggest fears: losing people I deeply care about.
Actually, I’m scared of a lot of things, like bugs, of falling, of the inevitable doom of our existence. But with losing people, I don’t know that I can rely on myself to keep it together. My track record says I can, but it doesn’t feel that way when it occurs. It feels like breaking
20. People typically don’t say things for the sake of politeness.
Sometimes, I disregard a compliment someone gives because I think that it’s said for the sake of being polite. The problem with thinking this way is that it discounts the scope of your achievement, and hence, messes greatly with self-esteem!
Someone challenged my idea by asking me to imagine my thought process when I give other people compliments. I indeed don't give other people compliments for the sake of politeness. So why would I turn around and expect others to do that?
21. We carry a bit of everyone in us.
For me, now I climb down the stairs two at a time, take piano breaks, actively try not to be
Alluding to a poem I wrote a while ago, it’s interesting to see what mannerisms friends pick up from you, because those are likely what make you stand out. They’re so influential that other people naturally pick up on it. But it’s also interesting to see what you pick up on, and also to bring these little mannerisms home. Because for me, I might not know how I’ve shifted from before versus after the camp, but other people would.
Finale
A supplement to the next section, if you wish.
Actually, the title of the blog post is a lie. Count 21 facts, yes, but the camp falls just short of 42 days–just short of the meaning of life. No, I didn’t expect this camp to answer all my existential crises, but it addressed a lot more of them than I expected. But there’s still a lot left undone, left unsaid.
I still clearly remember the last lock I observed, all its pins falling into place as the key slid out. After that, the Mauraders (StratfordJames, ellipsis, and I) got their last ever boba from Boba Tea & Snow Ice House. As I cracked the straw through the plastic layer, its pop echoed. I heard the first pin fall.
The next morning, it was still dark. We thrived at night. It would be the last night we spent together, because we were leaving in the afternoon. We looked at our colored lenses that we collected from the astronomy tower: StratfordJames's red, ellipsis's blue, and mine yellow. I never got to see what they looked like together. I visited ellipsis’s 天堂 with her one last time, in the bitter cold. Through the wind, I heard the second pin fall.
Later that morning, I would step out of the Warren dorm for the last time. It was eerily empty, like the first week. Someone else would write their story here. It was a funny place–mostly funny things happened here. But it was still home. As I closed the door, my suitcase rolled over its sill, and I heard the third pin fall.
Cut to the poster symposium, where they served some of the best food that we ever had in weeks. I was leaving immediately after, so there was no time for closure. Cut to leaving, which was a +1 count to the number of times cried this month. I took the green T with ellipsis, and it was zooming through the stops abnormally fast. The doors clicked shut, departing Park Street. The final pin fell.
And as the plane took off to Phoenix, AZ, I watched the blurry red, blue, and yellow lights shake like glitter had come down from above. I wondered if I was dreaming, the key sliding out in the real world.
✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧
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