geesebot:

Graduation schmaltz and gratitude.

The next chapter is looking bright, and I’m incredibly excited. Even if I don’t always transition well, I know I will grow to love my next destination and the people I travel there with. But… at present, I’m feeling a little sentimental, a little sad. You’re always sad to leave a place you love.

Before I leave, I have some debts to repay. I owe so much gratitude to -

Some amazing tutors, professors, and TFs, in particular:

  • Josh Reyes and Chris Leighton, two phenomenal house tutors
  • Dave Charbonneau, who passed on his fervor for planet-hunting
  • David J. Malan, for whom I hashed out a spellchecker (get it? ha, ha.)
  • Joe Blitzstein, whose lectures I attended with admirable regularity despite sitting in confusion for their greater majority
  • David Brunner, who helmed the one and only economics course I enjoyed
  • Walter Johnson, whose class renewed my sense of academic curiosity, made me like history, and reminded me what learning felt like (senior spring, better late than never, yeah?)
  • Meg Caven and Dylan Nelson, two of the most capable TFs I’ve had

Some equally amazing friends, with whom I staged six-figure fundraisers, detected exoplanets, and whipped the over-eagerness out of ten Zhejiang freshmen; and the ones I forced into casting me in a musical and into taking an architecture class with me.

I will take chicken and beer nights with me always.

What I will miss most, though, is looking out the door of my plain, sunset-facing single and seeing my best, best friend. Late night distractions from paper-writing, pizza pizza pizza, MarioKart + Smash, diagnosing medical/emotional/computer problems, the Soup… Keri, you have made my college experience, you’ve made this place my home, and you I am most grateful.

(Photo credits: Some of my favorite things on campus and in Cambridge - the quote on Emerson, the words above Dexter Gate, the Clay Telescope, and the view from Harvard Bridge near MIT.)

This is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. I’ve started several responses but have been unsatisfied with each, so I’ll just say that I’m going to miss Giselleachu like no other.