The Masochist's Institute of Technology » Site updates

Summer plans (2010 version)

Vivian Lee — Fri, 28 May 2010 01:30:35 +0000

Career and networking

Internship with Unica Corporation
Learn more about finance
Attend networking events

Dance and other performing arts

Practice for Dance Revelasian Expo
Take classes in ballet

Personal development and errands

Redo wardrobe
Care more about things that matter and less about those that don’t
Sell stuff from room to make money and get rid of things! stuff purge!

Websites and online

Get Vivian-lee.net online

Asian Dance Team

Summer rehearsals
Summer workouts daily
Completely redo website
Create members’ area
Audition logistics for fall
Book fall rehearsal venues
Purchase fall costumes and props
Lighting design with Jason
Create fall promo materials
Create preliminary program document

Portrait of a Lady in Melodic Sequence

Vivian Lee — Fri, 07 May 2010 19:59:42 +0000

Introducing my newest [revived] hobby: translating songs!

While I have a difficult time expressing my deep emotions in concrete words, there is fortunately a medium of expression that can explain fairly well my general views in every day life: music. The combination of lyrical beats, intricately-written lyrics, and ornamental piano riffs are somehow always able to characterize my thoughts to a T.

On Portrait of a Lady in Melodic Sequence (yes, it’s named after the novel by Henry James), I will share various lyrics with you all that describe my innermost thoughts, principles, and values. If you have the time, definitely check out the songs themselves, since the music is every bit as much a part of the experience as the gorgeous lyrics (provided in both the original and usually very mangled translations). Please enjoy =)

Click to visit Portrait of a Lady in Melodic Sequence!

Website creativity block.

Vivian Lee — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:24:00 +0000

I have been trying unsuccessfully for the past two days to come up with a design for my website.

I’m not quite sure what’s happening; back at the peak of my web designing phase (2007-ish?), I used to come up with ideas left and right. However, I haven’t even been able to sketch out any plans at all. My creative juices are definitely running dry. So instead of sitting around whining about it, I tried to pinpoint the cause of the problem… and succeeded.

What’s different between my past designs and my current design? They’re for different purposes! My past designs were largely for my website collective. You know, all those animanga sites I used to own back in the heyday of fansites… all those one-page dedications, colourful fanlistings, the works. My website collective was like any other one out there: the generic five categories (which I called the “me-you-network-site-exit” format), the lists of cliques and “adoptables” and fanlistings, the “sister sites” and “affiliates” and “link exchanges”… which were really all link exchanges in the end, once you thought about it.

Yeah, that was fun while it lasted. But right now my site serves a different purposes – it is an expression of myself not only to the informal world of my friend circles, but also as my front to the professional world. It’s hard to make a design that is both innovative and fun AND business-like. It’s even harder when I can’t use the colourful animanga scans to which I once clung. I’m basically forced to choose between crappy stock photos or my own photography… which [usually] doesn’t turn out fabulously…

It’s one thing to design personal sites. It’s another to design business/company sites. Fortunately, I have experience in both.

Unfortunately, however, a professional personal site falls somewhere inbetween these two distinctions. And honestly, I am clueless as ever.

Return to blogging

Vivian Lee — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 04:43:26 +0000

I’ve realized in the past few weeks that I haven’t blogged at all these past few months. I’ve made an average of probably 2 posts a month, and even so, they haven’t been particularly informative, nor have I made a conscious effort to achieve the goal of this blog – to give insight and advice on college life. Thus, with the beginning of the new year, I’d like to heavily return to blogging (which kept me afloat freshman year).

One of the things that I’ve always wanted to do is create a blog centered on networking practices. However, I don’t have the time nor the energy to manage more than one blog, so I will speaking more about it here. Social engineering and networking are tactics that intrigue me beyond belief. It is amazing that our connections are such important keys to get us somewhere in life, and I feel that to not take full advantage of them quite a waste.

So important I found this principle, that I spent an hour changing my blog to a new title (“Outshine”) and rearranging my posts so that only the professional, advice-based ones were visible. I had planned to continue personal blogging by setting all of my personal posts to private. After a while, though, I realized that this setup completely violated the reasons why I love blogging so much – to tell others about my life! As such, here I am, back from the grave of MIA bloggers, to once again share my extremely strong thoughts with the world.

A couple of things to which you can look forward:

My amazing Portuguese class
The lessons you learn from skating
The importance of planning ahead (especially with events..)

Hello world!

Vivian Lee — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:01:40 +0000

Cliched introductory post titles aside, I welcome you to the student life and advice blog of Vivian Lee, a current undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (though I and others are of the belief that the administration is simply in denial that the M really stands for “Masochist,” hence the title of the blog). Here, I’ll focus on several key items:

Insights into the classes, research, and other college-related events
Advice and tips for getting the most out of your studying time
Anecdotes of my journey through classes from 8.012 to 15.301 and everything in-between
Personal productivity and self-rectification activities that I believe truly help
Interesting reports of daily student and socialite life, literally a 10-minute walk from Boston

I’m super excited to be able to offer my insights to readers across the globe, be they fellow undergraduate students, or high-school freshmen, or parents. Hopefully it makes significant contribution; be sure to spread the link to your friends as well – the more I can help, the happier it makes me!

If the “about the author” page is a little too cut-and-dry for you, I suppose I should also introduce myself.

The name is Vivian (call me Vivi if you’re so inclined), and at the time of writing I am a rising sophomore at MIT studying EECS and Management Science. What does this mean? That simply translates to:

“During the day, I sit around in lab and play with circuits and snippets of code, while at night I’m meeting with fellow classmates to finish financial reports for our latest business project.”

In my spare time, I run the MIT Asian Dance Team (which I also founded), sing in the MIT Concert Choir, and run my international Internet-based singing organization. By now one should question how MIT students manage to fit all that into their schedule and still have time remaining to sleep, eat, and have fun. I will calm your nerves my assuring you that it is very feasible. All one needs to do is learn how to run on 5 hours of sleep every night, in addition to having decent time management skills.

I suppose if you’re here, you wanna learn all my MIT-bred secrets. So without further ado, I urge you to subscribe to my entries and join me on an insider’s glance of college life at one of the nation’s top universities!