MELISSA: Another thing I have struggled with a lot is my perfectionism, because sometimes I feel like I need to make a decision for the rest of my life. But, really, I just need to make a decision for now. And in the past, when I thought about having to make a decision for the rest of my life, it just made me kind of paralyzed and to have decision paralysis kind of. Because when you have so many options, especially at MIT, it can be easy to feel like you don’t know exactly what you want to do and like you don’t know which is the perfect choice to make.
And so when you think about it like that, it’s really easy to just be frozen by all the choices that you have and have this fear of misoptimizing your choice and your path. But reframing it and retelling myself that I just have to do a decision for now has really been liberating, because it’s made me realize that I don’t need to think about what I want 10 years in the future. And I just have to make a decision right now, given the information that I have and given what I currently want in my life.