As an MIT undergraduate I'm fortunate enough to have served on the Committee on the Library System (CLS) from Fall 2016 to Spring 2018. It's been an incredibly empowering experience--having my voice being treated as an equal in the committee, and having my suggestions taken seriously. The faculty and staff in CLS have modeled for me how to be supportive and inclusive, and how to listen. Here is a reflection on those two years, for the committee, for future undergraduate representatives, and for myself.

CLS is an institute committee of faculty, staff and students (two undergraduates and two graduate students) meant to provide the perspectives of all of these stakeholders on certain projects and policies of the MIT Libraries. Some of the topics we've discussed include the Libraries' new mission, vision and values statement (including a statement on diversity), the renovation of Hayden Library, and implementing the recommendations from the report by the Task Force on the Future of the Libraries. The Libraries has so far asked this committee about the needs of our respective constituents (for me, the undergraduate population), how our constituents would react to decisions like the implementation of certain technologies in the Libraries, and if our unique perspective gives rise to any suggestions for the Libraries.

CLS isn't a lot of work; the bare minimum is that you show up to the monthly meetings and read or skim the background material that is sent out before each meeting. It's pretty interesting and inspiring stuff too; you learn how the MIT Libraries probably does way more than you ever imagined (subscriptions to music streaming services, data management services, copyright law advising, ...), the nuances of making data-driven decisions to benefit library patrons while protecting their privacy, and how the Libraries is fighting against the forces of inequity in knowledge and education (e.g. through the Open Access Task Force, another institute committee I'm a part of). And you get to interact with many warm and welcoming adults who are eager to hear your opinions, such as Chris Bourg, director of the MIT Libraries; it's been a real pleasure working with her for two years in two committees. The Libraries cares incredibly about student well-being, and relentlessly reaches out to students to find out how they can help students even more. They are very hungry for student input, which is where you could come in, by giving your input, as part of CLS or otherwise, or talking to your friends about the Libraries!

Thank you all for believing in me at every step, so that I could begin to believe in myself. It is no exaggeration to say that because you all believe that I can change the world, I end up believing that I really can, which makes it more likely that I'll actually go out there and do it. Please continue to believe in and empower students, whose self-confidence often gets crushed by the overwhelming demands and pressures of MIT.

It has been a great privilege to work with all of you. You have always treated my voice as an equal, which I took one year to get used to! The MIT Libraries has defined for me what a collaborative, supportive and inclusive workplace could look like. I will remember this community fondly and treasure our relationships even after I graduate. The most uniquely useful parting gift I can offer may be my reflections on MIT, and what I have learned about students and the libraries so far.

It's a shame that I have to leave MIT after accumulating two years of perspective on the Libraries, and four years of perspective on my fellow students--that I must leave when I am the best positioned to give back. Since Fall 2016 I've made it my job to understand the relationship between students and libraries, and what it could be. It was clear from day one how much students could gain from your expertise and resources, yet how little they knew of it. The other direction seemed trickier. I've pondered for a year and a half these questions:

1. What can the Libraries learn from students?
2. How can we increase student awareness and engagement with library resources?

One tentative answer to the first question emerged while I prepared the "Hidden Libraries of MIT" tours of student club libraries. The Libraries might be inspired by how students build communities around collections. Each student library is not simply a collection; a community of students, alumni and sometimes even the broader Boston community have organically formed around it. For instance, the MIT Lecture Series Committee has held public movie screenings since 1950. The collection and community have enriched and sustained each other through an expanding web of activities and social interaction, often with a long history. From this foundation emerged a sense of identity. Don't take my word for it, ask anyone who toured those student libraries! MIT's respect for student autonomy has allowed these communities, cultures and traditions to flourish in living groups and clubs. At a time when the Libraries are reconsidering how their collections are best preserved and used, might student communities offer any insight? If you entered these spaces as an equal to students, you might glean a few clues.

Here's one answer to the second question: if the Libraries helps students satisfy their deepest needs, then students will surely take notice. But what are their needs? Here are some word clouds are derived from students brainstorming about how to improve the MIT first-year experience in the Designing the First Year course. Two major themes that have arisen from interviewing students are major exploration and advising.

Many students find a lack of information about potential majors, and can be unsure of what they're signing up for, or feel trapped and funneled into the circle of popular majors. In my opinion, one of the greatest anxieties plaguing MIT students is around not finding one's passion or "path in life." Other students enter MIT laser-focused on one major and could benefit from more exposure. Could the Libraries help MIT students find their place in MIT, broaden their horizons, and forge their own path ahead?

"Advising" is a multifaceted need, but one relevant component is the need for authentic and meaningful interactions with faculty or staff. Deeper than that, I think MIT students need to feel that there are adults who care about them, who listen and empathize. Unfortunately, they do not necessarily get this from academic advisors. However, I realized from working with library staff that if only students could get to know you as people, they would feel your warmth, empathy, welcoming nature and unfaltering care for students. They would be inspired by your dedication and teamwork, just as I have been. How could the Libraries help students get to know its staff as people, and not just as service providers? The Hidden Libraries tours were my attempt to bring library staff into student communities to facilitate such interactions.

I guess I don't really have solutions; all I can suggest are "kernels," or starting points. Actual solutions are far beyond my expertise and stay at MIT. But from what I've seen, if any department of MIT were able to understand and collaborate meaningfully with students, it would be the MIT Libraries. I find consolation from my trust that the Libraries will continue to listen to students and do the best it can for them. I wish you all the best!

Photos: Jonathan Sachs, MIT SHASS Communications

As an MIT freshman I was 100% sure that I would study math, but I mused about how funny it would be if I dropped all that for theater or some other drastic switch like that. Well, that didn't exactly happen, but over one and a half years I've discovered and developed an unexpected interest in acting.

This November, I acted in my first-ever play: Everybody, an existential dark comedy about finding somebody to die with you. This contemporary adaptation of the fifteenth-century morality play The Summoning of Everyman inaugurated MIT's new theater building (MIT News). Its underlying narrative appears in many cultures: a journey towards death, in which the protagonist learns that they cannot bring their possessions and people with them—except for one, which teaches them what is most important in life. I learned so much from my director Anna Kohler and my wonderful fellow actors!

Here is a (private) clip from my performance, followed by a reflection on the creative process as an actor.

 This is an exploration of some interesting parallels.

One might say that the categories of geometry and algebra cover most of mathematics. I think most mathematicians see them not as categories but as different ways to see the same object. Time and again, geometric intuition uncovers hidden dimensions in algebraic objects: the algebraic geometric of elliptic curves, as well as the standard practice of studying a large set of functions by considering each function as a point in a "function space," serve as ready examples. On the other hand, geometric spaces that we're interested in, such as the fabric of space-time, or crystal lattices, often have underlying symmetries that can be encoded as algebraic structures which afford us a compact, high-level language to state and prove far-reaching claims on the properties of the geometry.

Why are these two viewpoints so effective, so illuminating, so incisive? If we see geometric intuition as an extension of our human capability for spatial visualization and reasoning, then I'd say that's a pretty fundamental source for geometric intuition—an internalization of our everyday visual and tactile interaction with out environment. What about algebra then? We could tie it to our faculties of language, which associate meanings to symbols or strings of them (literally called a word in group theory), communicate that meaning, and process the information in the symbols by manipulating them. We really do have a "language of algebra." So the first parallel goes from geometry and algebra to spatial reasoning and linguistic ability.

But I like to go even further, rise higher in abstraction: is there any more fundamental difference, or similarity, between our faculties of spatial reasoning and language? How about space vs. time? Obviously geometry is space. If we think of multiplication in algebra as composing transformations one after the other, such as the linear transformations in linear algebra (Cayley's theorem guarantees that we can view any group as a transformation group), then algebra is a form of "discrete time travel."

What about other fields of math? If geometry is space and algebra is time, then perhaps analysis is change, and topology is connection.

I'm honored to serve as the undergraduate representative on MIT's Task Force on Open Access. Some have asked me, "what is open access?" Among many things, Open Access (OA) aims to make research free to access, distribute and build on top of. One might call it a "Creative Commons or Free Software movement for research." This post gives a brief overview, but I'd be excited to answer your questions about anything OA!

Mainly because the majority of scholarly peer-reviewed articles are published in academic journals, ~75% of which with charge steep subscription fees (i.e. "toll access") [1]. In 2016 the MIT Libraries paid over $6 million to give MIT affiliates free access to some subset of journal articles [2].

Some facts: The research community submits articles, peer-reviews them and serves on editorial boards, all for no pay from publishers, with university salaries from mostly public funding. Toll-access journals do copy-editing, formatting, marketing etc, but make disproportionate profits: Publishing giant Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36%, more than Google, Amazon or ExxonMobil [1,3]. Most subscription revenue comes from publicly-funded university libraries, whose budgets grow much slower than subscription costs. Small universities and research institutions, especially those from developing countries, are most vulnerable.

No, it can cover research datasets, course materials (like MIT OCW), digitized print work, source code, images and much more. For example, the Open Science Framework aims to make transparent and provide OA to every aspect of the research cycle. Science and humanities face similar issues in OA. OA can include all forms of content like novels, movies, software etc, but it's focusing on research because researchers want to distribute their results for free.

Besides ensuring your current and future access to scholarly publishing, access to the fruits of research should be expanded beyond the elite institutions that can barely afford the steep journal subscription fees, to developing countries, to precollege classrooms, and to non-researchers such as journalists and policymakers. That would be more equitable, and would accelerate innovation in science and the humanities.

I welcome you to learn more about OA by reading or attending conferences, and contribute to OA projects like the aforementioned Open Science Framework and Right to Research, or even organize an open access hackathon!

Jean-Claude Guédon's article "Open Access: Toward an Internet of the Mind" introduces the history, landscape and nuances of OA quite well. If it seems long, just read the bullet-pointed history starting from page 8 to see how we got here.

My interest in art led me to take the Introduction to Art History course at MIT. I learned the most by thinking very hard about the essay assignments, one of which asked me to analyze the importance of authenticity in art--if it is important at all! We were to look at the case of the 17th-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn, because it had been notoriously hard to figure out which paintings were actually made by him. I spent way more time than necessary contemplating the issue and putting my thoughts together. Prof. Kristel Smentek, who taught the class, gave comments on drafts of this essay that guided how I developed it further. The essay recently won the Kelly Essay Prize for Excellence in Humanistic Scholarship. I hope you find it an intriguing read!

Check out the other amazing art pieces in the Jaffa Museum's abums below! Vincent Floderer's haunting "sea creatures" fashioned out of crumpled paper are some of my favourites.

(This post is for prospective freshmen enrolling in the Massachusetts Institute Technology. I wish I knew all this early enough, so now I'm telling it to you!)

Origami? Folding bits of paper? You mean that children's pastime? It can't possibly be of any "real" use, right?
What if I told you that origami has been applied in space technology?

The 6th International Meeting on Origami in Science, Mathematics and Education (6OSME) was held in Tokyo University in August to help origami researchers, artists and educators share their ideas on the connections between origami and a wide range of other fields, including applications in theory and industry.

Back in 2010 I tinkered around with 3D graphics, and I learned how to use OpenGL, a 3D graphics engine, with the only language I knew well, Haskell. Eager to try it out, I embarked on a project to build from scratch a molecular graphics engine, because cool images of molecules always impressed me. Below are some snapshots from the program Hmol that I wrote:

Hmol is publicly available via Github under the GNU GPLv3 License (details in the Licensing section at the bottom).

I distinctly remember finishing much of the development during my exam period—no classes and no homework, so lots of spare time!

Grab a milk or juice carton and there's a fair chance you'd find that it's from Tetra Pak, a Swedish company that focuses on food packaging and processing solutions. A few months ago Tetra Pak invited ten people from around the world to a package design workshop aimed at brainstorming an improved design to one of their commercial packages. I qualified through their "Can You Fold It?" competition, in which contestants had to dream up a simple but creative way to close the end of a cardboard tube—which is basically what package manufacturers have to do.

Image from "Can You Fold It?" qualification phase

Tetra Pak's pioneering product was the Tetra Classic®, but probably more familiar is the Tetra Rex®.