I also used activities outside of the lab to help make me feel valuable in other ways. I started working as a fellow for the ODGE here, and that was super fun. The– one of the first things I worked on there was writing articles for MIT news on graduate student accomplishments.
So I would get to meet graduate students across different departments, and talk to them, and learn about their research, and what they were doing here. Being able to actually produce an article that would go up online, and being able to see that, it would– it made me feel like I was doing something that was working.
And so I think having that sort of outside thing that can make you feel successful, at least in some way, it didn’t even have to be like a big success, but just little successes, I think, was really nice as well. And then in the latter years of that I worked on– I got to work on the committed to caring campaign, where we recognize professors for good mentoring.
And so that was also just super enriching, when I would get to see the posters of the campaign I helped work on hung all around MIT. And so I think those were both valuable things because not only did they make me feel like I was doing things outside of the lab, like I could define myself in other ways, but they were also at MIT, so it just connected me to MIT in a different way other than the lab.