Updates

I plead guilty for not putting up a single post since coming to grad school. There hasn't been much I have felt compelled to write about and for whatever I have felt for, leisure has been scarce. Now that I think of the past, I never wrote in solitude. If I ever gave the impression of being a lone thinker trying to arrive at the truths of the world by being violently original, it was probably a farce that my subconscious played with me. It was a farce that thankfully did not consume me. Whatever I have written, it is with people in my mind - people I know, people I love and people whom I can feel at home with.

MIT has been a good experience till now. With the exception of the heavy academic workload that can sometimes stress one out, I love every part of being in this wonderful campus - the infinite corridor, the libraries, the free food, the coffee shops, harvard square, the charles river and downtown Boston. I hope it gets better with the semesters to come.

My research area and advisor have been finalized (almost). I would be working in what my group refers to as 'Computational Immunology'. Broadly speaking, the work would involve using theoretical frameworks rooted in statistical physics to understand adaptive immune response in organisms like you and me. In the immediate future, that would involve two things- learning a lot of physics and learning a lot of biology - I'm looking forward to both.

Social life took a sharp change from the IIT setting and it looks like it has equilibriated once more. 'Change', as it is understood, becomes less prominent as one gets older. The only constant companions I am looking forward to at MIT are the corridors, the bookshelves and the pebbles on the riverside. The others will come and go, take a part of me and leave me a part of themselves.

A lot of memorable things happened this semester beyond academics - Sailing in the Charles with Varun while the weather was still kind, the wonderful Clay Memorial lecture at Harvard on the life of Euler, the de-stressing 4$ movie screenings on weekends (A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather and Forrest Gump), Henry V, 'Into the woods', MIT rendering of Beethoven's Eroica (where I return from to type this post) and the wonderful trip to Purushottam's at Baltimore.

The semester's about to end in a couple of weeks. My near and dear ones in Cambridge will leave me alone to face the winter's wrath during Christmas.