A Love Letter to MIT's Blackboards

As a new PhD student at Stanford there is much to love. And yet, I tremendously miss MIT's blackboards. In any job -- including research, most of the work is, inevitably, work. Implementing a new idea. Fighting with the computing cluster. Reading and responding to email. In some jobs, all of the work is work. But as a PhD student, and a researcher in general, there is a special kind of work that feels very different: the creative dance of figuring out the solution to a problem. The feeling of doing this varies by field, and even by subfield. Sometimes, you disassemble a problem, solve its components, and put them back together. Other times, you just write down your definitions and assumptions and stare at them for a while until an answer emerges. Still other times, you get close to an answer and then patch it until it stops leaking. I find this work to be both the most stressful and fulfilling part of research. It's stressful because it's important, hard, and unpredictable. You never k

As a new PhD student at Stanford there is much to love. And yet, I tremendously miss MIT's blackboards. In any job -- including research, most of the work is, inevitably, work. Implementing a new idea. Fighting with the computing cluster. Reading and responding to email. In some jobs, all of the work is work. But as a PhD student, and a researcher in general, there is a special kind of work that feels very different: the creative dance of figuring out the solution to a problem. The feeling of doing this varies by field, and even by subfield. Sometimes, you disassemble a problem, solve its comp