0100. I Got In

tldr: ~4 years and 2 months ago…

It was ~9:05am, December 14, 2019. A week earlier, I had gotten the email from MIT saying that early action decisions would be coming out the following week at 9:14am PST. I spent rest of the week trying to figure out the special meaning behind 9:14. Fun fact, there was no hugely special meaning. The decisions were just coming out at 12:14 on 12/14, which I would’ve realized had I been on eastern standard time, but I was not.

In the email I had gotten the week earlier, the admissions team suggested that we made sure we knew our username and passwords still, so that on the day of we wouldn’t be scrambling trying to figure out whether or not we got in. Even though they had recommended we check our login, I didn’t, because for all of my applications my senior year, I used the same username and password (plus or minus an exclamation mark or some other special characters).

Anyways, so it’s ~9:05am, PST, on December 14, 2019, and I think to myself: this would be the perfect time to check my login to make sure it still works. So I go to the decision portal and throw in my username and password. Instead of being greeted by some “Congrats! You remember your username and password! Check back in in ~9 minutes to see your results!” screen, I instead saw a screen that said (roughly): if you click *this button*, you will see your admissions result.

But surely that screen couldn’t have been right. It was like, 9:07am. Decisions wouldn’t be coming out for another 7 minutes. Surely if I hit this button, right here, that tells me that if I click on it I will see my results, it will just take me to a screen that says “Gotcha! Wait a bit longer.” So, I click on the button. And instead, I saw a screen that said I was accepted early action to MIT as a part of the undergraduate class of 2024.

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I wasn’t? Exactly??? Stressed about admissions stuff when I was applying to undergrad. This isn’t completely true– I was anxious for what was to come after high school. The uncertainty of it all, like “where am I going to be for the next four years of my life” and “am I prepared for that place not to be Fresno, California” stressed me out. But when it came to applying places like MIT, I guess I never really saw it as a realistic option. In fact, up until I had gotten the acceptance to MIT, I was pretty hardset on going to UC Berkeley. I even had the branded Converse to prove it.

This isn’t to say I didn’t hope I would get into a place like MIT. I fully did. I just thought it was too far out there. What helped, to some extent, was my ignorance. I simply didn’t know about the different subreddits of undergrads asking about their chances of getting in somewhere. I didn’t know how much math I didn’t know that others already did. I didn’t know that many people who even applied to MIT. I was just happy that I was finally (hopefully) going to be going to college to get a degree in mathematics; where I was going to be getting that degree was ultimately out of my hands my senior year.

You apply, and then there’s nothing more you can do. (Well, besides continuing to do well in your classes so you don’t drop out your senior year of high school.)

Looking back on it, MIT really felt like a lucky break. I had been working hard for God knows how long, being told that one day my hard work would pay off, but I never really knew what that pay off would look like or when it would be coming.

Then, December 14, 2019 happened.
And I felt my hard work pay off.
And then I realized

Oh fuck. Do I even know what hard work is?

Because I knew MIT was going to be the hardest I had ever worked in my life, and my undergraduate applications would hardly be the last time I applied to college.

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To put it lightly, I’ve worked really hard for the past four years. On the one hand, because I wanted to do “well” at MIT, whatever that means. On the other hand, because I knew I would be applying to graduate school one day. I hoped my hard work would pay off.

Last semester, I applied to mathematics graduate programs across North America (only one of which is outside of the States, aka University of British Columbia in Vancouver). There’s a lot I want to say about this process, and I will write these things down in some later blog post(s).

But for this post, my (0)100th post on https://yet-another.blog/, I just want to make an announcement.

10 days ago, at 1:34pm EST, Februrary 2, 2024, I was accepted into MIT’s graduate program.

Dr. Paige Bright.
I quite like the sound of that.