JESSICA: Another thing I found helpful was attending office hours religiously. So in my schedule, I– at the beginning of the semester, I take all my classes and all the office hours, and I just put them in my schedule. And so I make sure that I don’t schedule anything that conflicts with office hours that I really need to go to.

And I’ve found that that’s been helpful because sometimes, I don’t need the help if I really understood what the class material was about. But other times, I found that if I’m really struggling or if I work through a p-set and I get to a certain point and I need clarification, office hours are a great way to do that. TAs as MIT are very supportive. And I’ve– even when I feel very dumb or very intimidated, I’m always like, it’s OK to look stupid in office hours so I can look smarter in the future, when I need the knowledge for an exam or in my career as apposed to acting smart now and then on the exam, I’m like, oh, I really did not know this material.

And so office hours are fun for me because, one, I get clarification on the material. But two, I also get to make friends with some of the TAs. Some of the TAs who helped me out in freshman year, sophomore year are also people that I’ve stayed in touch with because they weren’t just people who passed on knowledge to me. But they were also college students here who were relatable, in some sense, and who we had something in common at some point.