flâneur

Kate Xu

1 followers · 275 views

on the atlas — 4

highlights — 16

  • Here’s an equally important message: I saw the “perfect match” in a bunch of apps that we deferred. Please remember that we deferred a LOT of people who wholly deserve to be at MIT – folks who are passionate, who love life and the discovery thereof, who genuinely care about the people around them.
    There Is No Formula | MIT Admissions
  • It’s who you are that really matters. It’s how you embrace life. It’s how you treat other people. It’s passion. And yes, that stuff really does drip off the page in the best of our applications. It’s not anything I can explain – you just know when you read an application and a “perfect match” is there.
    There Is No Formula | MIT Admissions
  • It makes me think of the guy who fell in love with trains as a kid and worked so hard to include the world in that passion that Amtrak noticed and gave him a job before he could even drive. It makes me think of the girl who chose to commute an hour each way to attend a certain school, and the amazing friendship she developed with the bus driver that reinforced her dream of becoming a teacher. It makes me think of one girl’s amazing photograph of a swing and how that image says more about the world than any test ever could.
    There Is No Formula | MIT Admissions
  • Trying to define admissions with a formula is like trying to define life with a formula. It’s like trying to explain poetry using calculus. It would take the human component out of it, which is perhaps the most important part.
    There Is No Formula | MIT Admissions
  • “Success is to be measured not so much by the positions that one has reached in life, as by the obstacles one has overcome trying to succeed.”
    In Praise Of Holistic Admissions | MIT Admissions
  • This is why, incidentally, David put so much emphasis on making the most of your opportunities. Because we don’t care about what you’ve done so far as much as we care about what you’re going to do at MIT.
    In Praise Of Holistic Admissions | MIT Admissions
  • I think that most people intuitively understand this. I think that most people intuitively agree with the idea that the best function of an admissions office is to constitute a class of sufficiently prepared individuals who have a diversity of skills, experiences, knowledge, background, who can all learn from each other. That there is something important about considering things besides test scores and grades – things like teacher letters, essays, and backgrounds – in a holistic process.
    In Praise Of Holistic Admissions | MIT Admissions
  • A full 10 days of constant meditation created a barrier between the worrying and me. It allowed me to observe the anxiety more objectively. The whole process calmed me at a deep and inexplicable level
    My exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of Vipassana, silence and spiders | Health | The Guardian
  • I could manage my mind more than I realized. By doing so, I felt more in control
    My exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of Vipassana, silence and spiders | Health | The Guardian
  • Vipassana is different from mindfulness meditation, which focuses on awareness, or to transcendental meditation, which uses a mantra. Instead, it dictates a blanket command of non-reaction. No matter the pain as you sit, or the fact that your hands and legs fall asleep and that your brain is crying for release. You are instructed to refocus attention on the objective sensations in your body, arising and falling, as you do a scan of your limbs in a specific order. By doing so, over 10 days, you train yourself to stop reacting to the vicissitudes of life.
    My exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of Vipassana, silence and spiders | Health | The Guardian
  • With total calm, he told me to disassociate my panic from the pain. I was making it worse for myself by focusing on the hurt, which only magnified it for me. He told me to do my best, whatever that was.
    My exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of Vipassana, silence and spiders | Health | The Guardian
  • After the first three days of focusing on breathing, we were introduced to Vipassana. This involved sequences of long body scans in a specific order. Throughout, we were instructed to be aware of the sensations or pain we feel. By not allowing ourselves to react to what our bodies felt, we were training our minds to build a barrier against blind reaction. A simplistic example of the Vipassana technique: if your leg falls asleep as you are scanning your neck for objective sensations, your mind may wander to whether you’ll ever stand up again. You don’t move your leg to compensate. Instead, you …
    My exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of Vipassana, silence and spiders | Health | The Guardian
  • Studies have shown that people who are blind or deaf have heightened ability in other bodily senses. When the brain is deprived of one input source, it is capable of reorganizing itself to support and augment other senses, a phenomenon known as “cross-modal neuroplasticity”. I felt a small, temporary version of this phenomenon at the course. I could not speak or write, but my mind was whirring away at an alarming speed.
    My exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of Vipassana, silence and spiders | Health | The Guardian
  • By the end of the course, students often report feeling full body flow of energy during meditation
    My exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of Vipassana, silence and spiders | Health | The Guardian
  • Sometimes we hold on to what we fear and hate. While I still ache, that ache has less power over me. The distinction sounds slight but it has been liberating.
    My exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of Vipassana, silence and spiders | Health | The Guardian
  • Believing that doing your best isn’t good enough is dangerous. There is no perfect, and there is no objective measure of what “right” can be. The course reminded me that if you have a value system that thrives on making decisions with integrity, for the right reasons, doing your best is good enough.
    My exhausting meditation retreat: 10 days of Vipassana, silence and spiders | Health | The Guardian