Like most bloggers, as a starry-eyed freshman, I wrote a bio that has not stood up terribly well against the test of time. This isn't a criticism on how cringy freshman year Nisha ¹ was; people change, and people especially change over 4 years of college. What's cool is that I can now attribute the changes in myself and my interests directly to experiences that I've had at MIT, or people that I've met here. The delta in my personhood is literally entirely due to MIT.

So, as a fun exercise, I decided to go back to my freshman year bio and annotate it to see how MIT has changed me.

You can usually ² tell a lot about a person by what they get excited about. Not, “Oh yeah haha that’s pretty cool” excited - I’m talking wild eyed, ³ foaming at the mouth, “OMIGOD YASSSS” excited.

So without further ado, here’s a short list of things that I (figuratively, and ⁴ occasionally literally) foam at the mouth over.

Rewatchable TV shows. The ones that immediately come to mind are ⁵ Game of Thrones, ⁶ Rick and Morty, and ⁷ Pushing Daisies (I seriously watched Rick and Morty ⁸ Season 3 Episode 6 ⁹ something like five times within two hours of its release, like this is not a joke)

¹⁰ Rock music, movie/game soundtrack, and this ¹¹ Japanese band called B’z. My music aesthetic is best described as Sounds weirdly specific but ok¹²

A LOT of anime. For somebody ¹³ who claims to not be a weaboo, I watch ¹⁴ an embarrassing amount of this stuff

¹⁵ Code that compiles on the first try. AKA a blessing from the coding gods

¹⁶ Eight hours of sleep. ¹⁷ Or more, preferably

¹⁸ FINAL FANTASY 7. I may or may not have written ¹⁹ two of my MIT essays/one of my essays on the application for these blogs/literally my entire Common App essay on this game. ²⁰ Why? I’m still trying to figure that one out

²¹ Japanese language ²² (and food). Once upon a time I learned Japanese solely for the purpose of playing the aforementioned video game. This eventually led to some ²³ cool study abroad adventures in the Land of the Rising Sun.

²⁴ Dogs and ²⁵ cats. This should be self-explanatory

²⁶ Fall in New Hampshire. a. I'm weirdly passionate about ²⁷ raking my yard and b. ²⁸ I like everything pumpkin flavored

If I had to rewrite my blogger bio...honestly, I'm not exactly sure what that would look like. I would probably spend many MANY hours rewriting it. But if I had to just write one, right now, with no edits whatsoever, it would probably look something like this:

"Hey there! I'm Nisha, and somehow I got hired to spew all my thoughts out into the void that is the Internet. Some people think I'm super boring, and some people think I'm sort of insane. I like to think that I'm somewhere in between.

I'm from the great state of New Hampshire and unironically love fall colors, hiking, and the motto 'live free or die'. My primary character trait is that I'm utterly obsessed with the video game Final Fantasy VII, and everything in my life has found a way of tracing back to this. Other things I love doing are: struggling to stay proficient at Japanese, carefully curating Spotify playlists that I never end up listening to, making valiant attempts to actually learn a new guitar song, and waffling between a dozen Netflix shows before deciding to just rewatch BoJack Horseman for the eighth time.

I'm not totally sure what exactly I'd like to do with my MIT education in the future, but I think I'm just going to let my interests carry me wherever they will. That's worked pretty well for me so far - it got me to MIT, somehow, and that was pretty statistically unlikely to begin with. I'm glad that y'all are joining me on this quest and I hope that you'll be able to learn a thing or two from - or at the very least be entertained by - my posts."

Better or worse than the original? Let me know in the comments!