I work on visual and written communication about math, science, and scientist culture. I draw for fun every day, and I have written for MIT Admissions and MIT Technology Review and have illustrated MIT outreach publications.

My Writing for the MIT Admissions Blogs

If you’ve met me before, it was probably on the MIT Admissions blogs. Here are some of my favorite blog posts that I’ve written:

Meltdown

October 29, 2012

There’s something to giving everything and always falling short. Eventually we’ll walk out with a deep understanding of our fields, a fantastic tolerance for failure and late nights, and raised expectations for ourselves and for humankind. Someday, we’ll look back on these four years as the best years of our lives and the foundations of the kinds of friendships that can only be formed with some suffering. But right now, IHTFP […]

[read about it in WBUR]
[read about it in The Tech]
[read about it more in The Tech]
[read about it in Slice of MIT]
[read about it in MIT’s Social Media Hub]
[read about it on MediaShift]
[read about it in Portraits of Resilience]

An MIT Underwear Exposé (and Sorting Hat)

April 11, 2016

A lot of socializing at MIT happens on the dorm mailing lists. One of my favorite mailing lists is Burton-Conner’s, not because of the content of the mailing list (I’ve never been on it), but because of the excellent barrier to emailing it: it is tradition, a very important rule, and a sign of respect to sign emails to the Burton-Conner dormwide social mailing list with the color of the underwear you are wearing […]

[read about it on the cover of Metro Boston]
[read about it in The Boston Globe]

Hilbert’s Third Problem (A Story of Threes)

February 24, 2015

I want to communicate the following things I have learned about math: Math is an incredibly diverse field, not a single path, and you may or may not have gotten a chance to actually see all the many branches in high school. Math is a human and even political field, in which a single problem can connect people across centuries. Math is not memorization—in fact, the human subject of this blog post chose math specifically for that reason […]

More (and more and more and more)

Here are some more of my favorite blog posts that I’ve written:

And here are some more blog posts:

(The full list is here.)

My Art for MIT Admissions

I’ve gotten to create a lot of illustrations for MIT Admissions, including some of the art that appears in (!!!!) physical mail, (!!!!) the web site, and (!!!!) the application itself. Explore and see what you find.

My Writing in Print

“Stress Test”

MIT News section of MIT Technology Review
June 25, 2024

Born just before the turmoil of the Warsaw Uprising, biologist Elizabeth Sajdel-Sulkowska ’67, SM ’69, ScD ’72, has returned again and again to the theme of stress […]

“Data, data, data”

MIT News section of MIT Technology Review
June 29, 2022

For computational biologist Bonnie Berger, SM ’86, PhD ’90, the explosion of new genomic information offers a gold mine of opportunities […]

The First-Year Experiments

MIT News section of MIT Technology Review
December 27, 2019

On a September Sunday night, Katherine Huang hunkered down in an empty Building 5 classroom to tackle her reading from 11.401, a graduate-level course in urban planning, and write her choose-your-own-adventure story for CMS.618, a comparative media studies course geared toward juniors and seniors. But tucked into her new beige tote bag, Huang—a member of the Class of 2023—also had p-sets from her first-year biology and mechanics classes. This may seem like an unusual schedule for an MIT student’s first semester. But MIT first-years—and the Institute itself—are experimenting […]

Digital Joy

MIT News section of MIT Technology Review
October 24, 2017

Claude Shannon somewhat famously built an electromechanical maze-solving robotic mouse named Theseus. But readers of his first biography, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, may be surprised to learn that he built juggling robots, a 35-foot-long swing, and a squadron of unicycles as well. He also invented a flame-throwing trumpet and Styrofoam shoes for walking on water […]

The Nth Annual Python Bee

MIT News section of MIT Technology Review
April 25, 2017

The first problem is straightforward: find the minimum value in a list in less than three minutes. The first contestant calls Python’s min function, to laughter from the audience. For another problem, a contestant finds the median of three integers by taking their sum—to a collective gasp—then subtracting their minimum and maximum, to cheers. Of 11 contestants, five pass round 0 […]

Melting Down, Building Up

MIT News section of MIT Technology Review
February 22, 2017

I spent my teens reading about p-set sunrises and grand academic adventures on the MIT Admissions blogs, scouring Popular Science and Technology Review for news of the scientific and technological progress that served as their backdrop. At my MIT interview seven years ago, I said I wanted, like the students and scientists I’d read about, to be broken down and rebuilt. And that’s exactly what happened in my time at MIT […]

REX = MIT 101

MIT News section of MIT Technology Review
October 20, 2015

A group of MIT students are wielding power tools in the East Campus courtyard, building the world’s steepest wooden roller coaster. It’s a project designed to impress the freshmen—and get them building something awesome before they even set foot in a classroom. The roller coaster—which starts with an eight-foot vertical drop at a 90° incline—is a highlight of Residence Exploration week, now known as REX […]