Leaning into the chaos

As I walked out of Killian Court this spring, diploma in hand, I felt as though I’d just stepped out of a hurricane. 

I’d done it all—I was part of teams that built a motorcycle and a laser cutter, and I wrote a novel, poems, and stories. I became a blacksmith and an engineer. I ended many nights hunched over p-sets, and many others surrounded by friends, hanging out in a lounge or dorm room, talking about nothing and everything. MIT had felt like a secret I was trying to crack, and it spat me out bruised but confident. It taught me that I can do anything. But I know that I couldn’t have gotten through my four years as an undergrad without the support of so many communities around me.

I found some amazing people at MIT. We stayed up until two in the old Cheney Room, back when it had couches you could sink into, and watched the lights glimmer on the Charles, just as I’d imagined in a blog post written during covid. We started a tradition of catching up on the week as we walked to parties, one after another—as many as we could fit into a night. One night we made our way from the big kitchen on B1 (my floor in Burton-Conner) to a black-walled hall in East Campus to the Media Lab (where grad students adorned themselves in glowing costumes). We ended in a room on B1, sprawled over every surface, stretching the night into forever.

2.009 STAFF

MIT pushes you to decide what really matters. They say you can choose one, maybe two things: your GPA, friends, or sleep. I had an unslakable thirst for learning, and my friends matter a lot to me, so rather than cling to a circadian rhythm, I chose to lean into the chaos. I lived on free food, of which MIT has plenty. I slept whenever I got a chance. 

And in that state, I figured out how much I could do. I double-majored in mechanical engineering and creative writing, and on top of that I took classes in blacksmithing, Irish folklore, and how to build a cleantech startup. I learned how to use machines, from cutting metal on the mill and lathe to welding it together to forming plastic parts the way they do in factories. I learned how to model, design, and test, and how to iterate with a team. I left an engineer.

I loved what I was learning, even as I pushed the limits of my ability. I’d fall asleep on the bus to Harvard, where I was taking a fantasy-writing workshop. Oftentimes I stayed up working in the Burton-Conner library so late that the mice came out of hiding and chased each other across the rug, skittering together and apart like the last moving pieces of my brain. 

I lived on free food, of which MIT has plenty. I slept whenever I got a chance.

I don’t regret it. Everything I did brought me in contact with new, passionate people and new ways of seeing the world. I met young writers at workshops at MIT and Harvard. The forge introduced me to metalsmiths in a range of disciplines, and we talked in bursts over the crash of hammers while our pieces heated up. I found an amazing mentor there named Collin, a graduate student in MechE, who recruited me to help build a motorcycle tractor and guided me on the path to grad school. 

I came to MIT determined to find the best way to use my skills for good, to help bend the arc of the universe toward justice. Professor Joaquin Terrones’s classes on race, queerness, and justice helped me find others working to create positive change, as did joining B1, my living community. I joined the Coalition for Palestine and Jews for Collective Liberation, and I engaged in activism with friends from all over campus. I met people working on so many issues—including fostering diversity at MIT and pushing the Institute to divest from fossil fuels. While figuring out what sort of clean-energy research I wanted to do, I talked with a dozen graduate students working on different problems in energy, cooling, and water. I’m so grateful to have found others invested in seeking justice and addressing climate change.

Team experiences also shaped my time at MIT. Nothing compares to 2.009, a product design capstone class in which my team built a laser cutter—a complex, multisystem product—in just over a month. We worked as long as the workshop was open; then we moved on to modeling, ordering parts, and any other tasks that could happen remotely. The all-­consuming nature of the project bonded us closely as a team. I also felt myself grow as an engineer as I led the development of the laser cutter’s electronics. I presented our final product prototype onstage, before thousands of people, in one of my most stressful but rewarding days at MIT. In the haze of work and pressure, it felt as if we were living a movie and we’d reached the finale. As our team stood in line and bowed, it sank in that we’d done it.

I love MIT’s openness—and its diversity. I loved being part of so many different communities, which brought out different sides of me. I could be an engineer, a writer, an activist, a blacksmith, and just a human being, all in the space of a week.

JAKOB DE RAAIJ

And now I’m doing it again. I’ve signed on for two more years at MIT as I pursue a master’s in mechanical engineering and work on green hydrogen. Graduate school doesn’t induce quite the same rush, and I don’t want it to consume as much of me. But I’ll put the hard-won skills I developed as an undergrad to good use. I’ve signed up for every club I have a passing interest in, and for a few weeks I’ll go to all of them, meeting new people and testing the fit. Then the grind will set in, and I will settle into the communities that best reflect who I am and how I want to grow. 

I’m excited for tomorrow. As a full-fledged grad student, I hope to be able to tune into my circadian rhythm again. But I will always keep making time for friends, seizing opportunities to try new things, and savoring each day.

Now a grad student in mechanical engineering, Amber Velez ’24 has joined the Latinx Graduate Student Association and is contemplating learning how to make jewelry at the forge.