A Look Back

About a year ago, I became a student at the MIT Sloan School of Management. After graduating a few days ago, I’ve had a little time to reflect on the experience. There were some things that surprised me, some that challenged me, and plenty of things to learn. This post is meant to be a light-hearted reflection on some highlights of the year, from the places I frequented to the things I did in my free time.

Let’s start academically. As it turns out, being good at “math” and being an “engineer” are NOT the same thing. "Math” means proving theorems and understanding the theoretical underpinnings of concepts. Engineering just means you can figure out how to apply them to solve a problem. Proving a theorem to be true is a totally different skillset. I quickly learned this the hard way in the Fall semester.

There is also a large gap between what makes real modeling problems hard and what makes the math beneath the models complicated. There’s a unique challenge in taking a large, open-ended problem and deciding which methods to put together to solve it. In school, you’ll generally learn one set of methods at a time, and will rarely have the chance to think about how to put them together. The act of pulling together different sets of methods is where the art of modeling comes in. Solving the resulting mathematical problem is the science.

My Optimization class taught me many things. I picked up a few methods that help me frame all kinds of qualitative and quantitative decisions. I also finally got to the point where I sat in a math class and asked “when will I ever use this?”

That pushed me to take less technical classes in the spring. One of them is a course called “Power and Influence.” Here’s the gist. People in any organization have different interests, abilities, and beliefs. These things create a complex web of power dynamics that you have to navigate to be effective in any role. Being “right” isn’t enough to motivate action.

I also learned plenty of stuff outside of class. I frequented a restaurant called Clover Food Lab, which is like a vegetarian fast food spot with a few locations around Boston and Cambridge. They just did a lot of things well. The menu was delicious and constantly changing, with affordable but high-quality ingredients available via their locally-sourced philosophy. Everything they hand you is compostable. Their social media campaigns are great at keeping their customers informed and engaged. Overall, it’s just a local fast-casual chain done right.

In a similar vein, Boston is just a great city to live in. I lucked out on weather this year - I’m told it was a mild winter. There was something profoundly relaxing about walking across the Charles River into Back Bay, or taking the Red Line to the Boston Common and walking through the North End. Boston is the only place I’ve lived with an “old town,” and I happily spent many Sunday hours just walking around and taking it all in.

All of this made my move from Boston that much more jarring. Like students across the country, I moved when everything went online. Over the course of a week, I decided I was moving back to Texas, packed up what I could (while leaving a lot behind), and flew back to Texas. It was the most disoriented I’ve ever been. Somehow, the experience was simultaneously completely new but also shared with thousands of people across the country. There’s a great deal of irony that, in our quarantined isolation, we’re sharing in the single most shared collective experience the world has ever seen.

The abrupt move away from campus was made that much harder by the people I couldn’t really say goodbye to. The most surprising thing about my time in Cambridge was how much fun I had. Whether it was gathering with my classmates in the basement of my building for game night, playing Xbox with friends at someone’s apartment (or in the occasional E-51 study room), losing all of our IM basketball games in January, going to dim sum in Chinatown, or frequenting the memes channel of our Slack space, the people I met at Sloan really made it a great time. More than anything else, they are what I’ll miss about graduate school.

This post wouldn't fit on my blog if I didn’t try to include some takeaway for the reader. In this case, I’ll keep it simple: be present to the little things. While Sloan filled my resume with new professional experiences and skills, the things I did in my free time are what fill me with gratitude. If nothing else, this year has taught me that your happiness is not something you have to sacrifice to work hard.