A photo posted by Cecile Lu (@cissyartcafe) on Mar 20, 2016 at 8:38am PDT

Hey guys. I have a confession to make - I'm secretly a hoarder.

Well, not to the extent that I've seen some people be, but I've always collected things. I collected pens and notebooks as a kid (who am I kidding, I still do) and for a while during my pre-teen years I collected empty Kleenex boxes and toilet paper rolls with the intent that I'd make something out of them. I did, with a few of them, but the rate of my collecting was far greater than the rate of my making, so we had a cupboard full of random junk that I was very stubborn about not throwing away.

My dad eventually threw them away.

Now that I'm in college and living in my own space, I'm astounded at how I manage to find nooks and crannies to hide all my things when I really don't have very much storage space. Things just collect over time; random junk that you keep convincing yourself is important or has too much sentimental value to throw away.

On the other end of my hoarding tendencies is my anxiety over messy spaces. I don't mind other people being messy, but I can't really handle messiness in my own living space (this comes from my dad. You know, the guy that threw out all of my Kleenex boxes because he's like this too?) and so once in a while I'll go through my stuff to clean up and reorganize.

I love reorganizing. Nothing brings me more joy - well, except food, and sleep, and Hera, and... - than to find designated spaces for each and every thing and to keep them there. I am the kind of person that gets annoyed when the can opener turns up in a drawer different from the one it's always lived in. I am the kind of person that likes to have all my pens categorized and my wires and cables sorted into little zip lock baggies. I am... well you get it. I like things to be neat.

This past weekend I took on the task of reorganizing all of the junk I have in my room. I haven't tackled my closet yet (I did a couple months ago, and will probably do so again sometime in the next few weeks) but I did get rid of a garbage bag full of stuff, and a bit more. I got rid of so many papers (because why will I ever need my tests from freshman year again?) and pens that no longer write that it felt so liberating. I reorganized my bookshelves so that everything is more compact and now my collection of wrapping stuff - like boxes, and tissue paper, and other random knick knack that people need for christmas wrapping - is no longer homeless and strewn on the floor but actually part of my bookcases, with its own little section.

The hardest part of all of it was convincing myself to throw away some models and some modeling materials. While throwing out pens and papers had been easy, I have formed an emotional attachment to all of my architecture studio models and their associated things. It's not hard to be attached like that - after all, I did spend many hours building all of these models and all of them have very specific memories attached to them - mostly of being really tired, but also of those professors and experiences. Many of these models I look at and see the hours I put into it, and it always seems like such a waste to just... throw it away.

I threw away three models. I threw away three models that were associated with my last studio, a studio that thinking about still gives me headaches and makes me feel like a panic attack is coming. I threw away the last portion of the model that I had spent over 48 hours nonstop sitting and gluing and folding and crying over, and taking it out of its place to throw it away hurt because I still remember all of the pain from that class but throwing it away also felt so good. It felt like I was liberating myself from the demons of that class and I know I'm being totally over-dramatic but that class, god, that class really, really was awful. The final project was a good one - one that I'm almost proud of, maybe - but the journey there had been so awful. I suppose part of me will eventually be grateful because I learned to be stronger from it, but I don't think I've had enough time pass to look back and not have feelings of resentment rise up within me.

And after it was all gone - the trash taken out, permanently outside of my home - my room felt so nice and clean and good to be in - not that it hadn't been nice and clean and good to be in before, but it's better now - and I can look at that section in my bookcase that once housed three models which reminded me of a horrible experience and smile because it now houses wrapping paper, and paints, and canvases, and happy things still waiting for me to work on.

Plus, it's nice to know that I won't have as much to throw out when I eventually move out of this apartment.

Are you guys also hoarders / collectors of random things? Do you ever go through times of just wanting to clean stuff and throw stuff out? Let me know!

Every January of a new year, I like to reflect on the past year. Especially now that I'm going into my last semester at MIT - yes guys, I'm graduating in June and I am all sorts of excited! - it seems like a very appropriate time to be reflecting on not just the last year but also my time here at MIT.

Is there anything I would've done differently?

1. Would I still have come to MIT?

Sometimes I feel really resentful of being at MIT, which I then follow up with feeling really ashamed for it - how many people dream about coming here? There have been multiple times where I have thought back to my senior year of high school and which colleges I could have gone to - I could've gone to McGill, probably still have had a good time without being as ridiculously stressed all the time and possibly had better job prospects just because the application pool in Canada is quite a bit smaller.

But would I have come out with as many stories and would I have been as strong and resilient as I am now? Probably not.

Was it worth it?

I don't know.

I tell myself the friends and the connections that I have now are certainly worth it, but frankly I don't quite know. I have endured the lowest moments of my life so far here, and it really sucked. On the other side of things, would I appreciate the sanity that my friends offered me as much had I not endured those moments?

2. Would I still have studied Architecture?

For the first three years at MIT, I never questioned my choice to study architecture. MIT has a wonderful architecture program. The majority of our professors really do care, our studios are interesting, we're required to take classes outside of architecture design in order to have a more well rounded education. I have learned so much about iterative design and about problem solving and I have exercised my spatial reasoning ability to the max. I have been praised for my work fairly consistently and been asked to be part of the archives every studio semester, without fail. I have a ridiculous work ethic - my professor for my last studio said that often I would make life harder for myself in order to create more beautiful work - and I am efficient and organized enough to do more complex work and be part of more clubs than many of my peers and still sleep.

And yet, this past semester, I began to question that choice.

Architecture at MIT doesn't seem very employable. Just go check out the career fair - every company is looking for course 2s (Mechanical Engineers) or course 6s (EECS). It's disheartening, although the types of companies that come to the career fair aren't necessarily the same as the ones I want to work for. At least, that's what I told myself, time and time again, until this year when I actually began to look for a job so that I could, well, be employed after graduation. Since I'm looking primarily in non-Architecture fields such as UI/UX design and product design, it feels like maybe I should've studied something different. When I first came to MIT, I truly believed that Architecture was the only major that fit my abilities and the only one I could've succeeded in, but now I have no doubt that I could've done well in other disciplines as well.

I suppose if anything, Architecture really helped hone my self-confidence.

I think if I could do it again, I might try to double major - I formed bonds with so many people and learned so much in Architecture that I can't imagine giving that up, but there's still so much that I'm curious about in other disciplines that I just didn't really have the time - or make the time - for.

I'm trying to do that now, since I'm done with studios, but I'm running out of time.

3. Would I have handled my social life differently?

To be completely honest, I don't really have much of a social life. I don't like to go out and I don't like to party because I prefer the comfort and the quietude of my room. Pretty much the extent of my socializing with my friends - who I love, by the way - includes eating things, making things to eat (and then eating those things), and watching something on Hulu or Netflix. Despite my reluctance to go out and party with them, I think they still love me and appreciate me - and certainly I would not have survived MIT without them. (Thanks guys. I love you and you mean the world to me.)

I do think that some extent of my reluctance to go out with my friends was financial - I just didn't want to spend the money - and I think if I went back I would be less hesitant to do things with them and more willing to spend the money for a nice meal or for drinks. I think I missed out on a lot of time because I was too much of a scrooge, and that's the main thing that I'm trying to improve on this year. I have to keep telling myself that it's okay to spend small change on small happinesses.

The other part of my social life comes from the groups I am part of on campus - my dance group, ADT, and Dramashop.

One thing for sure - I would've joined ADT much earlier instead of waiting until sophomore spring. I have always regretted not getting more time to spend with some of my choreographers - I have a massive girl crush on one of my choreographers my first semester, which was also the semester she graduated. It was very sad. I also have varying levels of girl crushes on most of my choreographers. I can't help it. They're all so cute and so talented.

Apart from that, ADT was also my solace away from the craziness of studios and Architecture. It was a place I could escape because literally no one else in ADT was Architecture Design and everyone was focused on learning the dances. There were some days at MIT where I got out of bed solely for ADT, and I couldn't be more grateful for having a group of people like that there for me, whether they know it or not.

4. Are there any resources I didn't take advantage of at MIT?

Yes. So many yes's. MIT has so many resources and cool things for students to do and I really didn't take advantage of any of it, and I regret it so much. The main resource that I should've taken advantage of - and didn't - is MIT's MISTI program.

MISTI is basically a program where you tell MIT where you want to go in the world and they find you an internship and pay for you to go there. It's a program where you travel abroad. For free.

I know. I know! Anyone who knows me knows that I love traveling - I've been to 18 countries and I want to go to more and also all of them again because there's so much more still to explore - and MISTI would've been perfect for me. The only problem is that, apart from Israel, I think, you have to know the language of the country, and at the time I didn't try hard enough to figure out how to take French with my schedule. I am taking French now, and I could theoretically still do MISTI for this coming summer... but I'm kind of planning a Europe backpacking trip anyway.

5. Are there any ways you would've chosen to spend your free time differently?

I've always been a crafter and a maker. When I was little I used to collect our empty toilet paper rolls and kleenex boxes because I wanted to make things out of them - to the point where I had filled an entire cupboard with these useless boxes. My dad finally threw them out after I went to high school, and I'm pretty sure I threw a fit.

When I was in high school I picked up crocheting, and that really blossomed at MIT. Crocheting was an easy, mindless, fast project that I could do when I was too stressed out to focus, and I could make all these cute toys with them! It was a lot of fun, and I could do it in my bed. But when I spent all my free time crocheting and knitting - things I could do in my bed - I stopped painting.

I'm trying to pick it back up. I still see so many more colors in everything, and I still have an eye for color and design and layout. Skills like that, things you're born with, you don't lose. But I'm rusty. I'm less comfortable that I used to be with a brush and a canvas, and I'm less accurate in my sketches than I used to be. It's depressing! I used to be fairly good and now I'm not satisfied with almost everything I paint or draw.

There isn't really a good traditional arts program at MIT and without classes forcing me to exercise those abilities, I let them slide. Now I have to spend more time working to regain those abilities - I wish I hadn't stopped painting in the first place, but I think it'll be like riding a bike. A little rusty at first, but it'll come back with some practice.

Is there anything you would've done differently last year or in the past few years? Let me know!

There's less than 5 more weeks of the fall semester (!!!) which means it's time to start thinking about all the final projects. We just got the constraints for the final project for my Advanced Visualisations class, and I thought this week's blog post could be about exactly that.

For a little background, I took this particular class because I thought we were going to be able to do a lot of animation. Unfortunately, this was not so much the case - we explored a lot of different ways of visualizing architectural projects, but less so storylines and characters.

It was no surprise, then, that the final project had to revolve around an architectural project (existing, non-existing, a studio project, etc). However, I had already thought about this project and how I wanted to make an animation about a little girl and her pet, and I was really disappointed at first because I thought that my dream wouldn't come true.

During class, while I was desperately thinking about how I could come up with a way to showcase a building while also doing the animation that I wanted to do, I was able to come up with a storyline that I think will work.

I will be using a studio project from two semesters ago (read about it here) which was a fitness center that was all about manipulating a user's view. I think this works well because it will be a fun project to showcase, but also because I have the model for the surrounding area, which will help introduce the project. The building and surroundings will be 3d rendering, but the people and characters will all be 2d. A little girl will be walking her puppy down the street when suddenly, the puppy hears something from inside the center and decides to take off into the building. The little girl will then have to walk through the entire building to find her puppy.

I think this way I will be able to showcase the building (as the little girl explores it in order to find her puppy) while also doing a fun, cute animation about a girl and her pet as I wanted to do previously. The little girl will obviously be my little sister, Hera, who I already have a character designed around, but we don't have a puppy so I'm not sure what to model the puppy off of or what to name it (I did recently come across "Fifi" as a puppy name which I think sounds adorable).

Here are some of the inspirations I have looked at which helped me come up with my idea:

Both of these shorts show characters who explore different situations - the little blind girl who explores the city in her own way as she finds her dog, and the dog in Feast who explores life, food, and human nature. Both of these shorts will be helpful for me because I can learn about different styles of animation and explore what I'm more comfortable with, while also showing me how I can tell a story with minimal dialogue.

All in all, I'm super excited about this project and I will definitely update you as I work on it! Even though my professor said that the final project was "small" I really want to do something above and beyond, especially since I think it will be a fun addition to my portfolio.

What are you guys working on? Are there any projects that you're excited about?

So approximately a quarter of the semester has already gone by. It simultaneously doesn't really feel like we've been in school for long, because of the snow days we ended up getting, and feels like we've been in school forever. I can't wait for a real break - just three more weeks to go!

Confession time: I did a dumb thing and overcommitted, again. Silly me thought, oh I'm only taking 3 classes this semester, I can fill all the extra free time I'll have with fun things like dancing all the guest performances.....and jobs. Except I didn't think about the fact that my biggest time crunch is and always will be studio, and I am still taking a studio.

And by the time I realized, I was already committed and I'm now technically working 4 jobs. 2 UROPs (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program), one with John Ochsendorf, who's a professor in Civil Engineering (course 1) and Architecture (course 4), and who's possibly the coolest person on the planet (shh don't tell him I said that), and the other a continuation of the UROP I've been doing with Meejin Yoon. Which, by the way, is super awesome because that project I worked on kind of over the summer? Yeah, the Collier Memorial? Its being built and I get to see it happen.

I'm also babysitting a 15 month old boy 3 times a week for an hour each, and tutoring about once every two or three weeks.

Just so you know, no one should ever do this.

Just no.

Don't do it.

All of it is pretty fun, some more fun than others, and I get to make bank, but I don't have any time, at all. I wake up at 8 every morning and sleep at 1 or 2 every night, which seems like a fair amount (6-7 hours? College students can survive on that, right?) but the lack of sleep adds up. Just Sunday, my friend took one look at me and asked me if I had lost weight.

The last time she saw me was the Sunday prior.

Oops.

On the other hand, my classes have been going fairly well:

French II is surprisingly more difficult than I thought it was going to be. French I was a breeze, and I kind of assumed the second course would also be fairly simple. Wrong. Grammar is hard, and the fact that the only two languages I speak, English and Chinese, have approximately zero grammar at all doesn't help.

Also sometimes I get French confused with weird Japanese phrases that I know, which is probably the strangest experience ever. The languages are not similar at all.

Psychology of Gender and Race is super awesome, just as I thought it would be! I'm taking it with one of my roommates, so it gives us something to talk and laugh about as we trudge through the snow on our way home every Thursday night at 10 pm. Also, people are really uncomfortable talking about intimate things - not meaning intimate stories about themselves, but intimate things such as clitorises and penises and piggy-piling - in the class, which makes it infinitely more entertaining.

Last but not least, studio. My biggest nightmare. We've been working for the past month on a mapping exercise, where we study a certain aspect of our site in depth and quite literally map it out. Our review was last Friday, and my professor decided that I should redo the entire thing over the weekend to reflect the critiques given, which was good in that now I have a stellar map that shows what I want it to show and conveys multiple layers of information, and bad in that the review was over and I really didn't want to draw more lines.

To quickly walk you through the board, this is the same area of the Back Bay / South End area of Boston (the red-outlined and shaded section is our site) shown in two axonometric views and in a top view. The line type corresponds to the type of infrastructure it depicts (city fabric, turnpike, orange line, and commuter rail), the thickness corresponds to the amount of traffic frequency the infrastructure averagely receives (the thicker the line the more congestion, basically), and the lengths of the line corresponds to the width of the roads.

I also have two sections - one with buildings and one without - next to the axons to depict the two layers of infrastructure that goes on around the site.

I guess that's what I've been up to lately, busying myself with a bunch of stuff and getting not enough sleep to make me sufficiently happy! How have you guys been lately? Comment below and let me know!

Now that I've had one of each class that I'll be taking this spring semester, I thought I'd recap my first week (more like semi-week) of the spring semester. Long story short, I'm taking 3 classes, one of which looks like it's going to be - let's just say, a loooooong semester - and the other two which look like they'll be loads of fun.

Bet you can't guess which one looks like it's going to suck butt.

Studio, or 4.024, or 4.115:

This is the only class I'm taking this semester that's within my major (the first time this has happened since freshman year!). So far we have been given a mapping exercise, where we look at different aspects around the site given (such as traffic patterns, history, wind pollution, etc), but we haven't actually been given our project yet, so basically literally everyone is confused about what's going on.

So far, the professor has given all of us a pretty terrible first impression - she doesn't pay attention when we present our ideas to her, she talks over everyone, she goes on ridiculous tangents, and she's just rude. I really hope it'll get better as the semester goes along.

French II, or 21F.302:

It's French 2 and my professor is possibly the cutest person ever. We've had two snow days and she emailed us saying that she hopes we're staying warm, drinking hot chocolate, and watching French films. (I have been staying warm but I haven't been drinking hot cocoa or watching French films. I've been watching a ridiculous Korean reality TV show and reading Le Petit Prince and sleeping.)

Psychology of Gender and Race, or WGS.228, or 9.75:

Honestly, I took this class because I needed to fulfill my HASS-S requirement (I tried to do this once by taking 9.00, or Intro to Psychology, and I gave up on it because I hate memorizing) and because my friend strongly recommended it. But I've only had one class so far and it looks really good! I'm actually really excited about it, despite it having an exam to look forward to at the end of the semester....


Unfortunately, I can't really say much more about the classes because I've only had a couple sessions of each (or in the case of WGS.228, only one) because of the snow! Boston has been in major shut down and I haven't left the house at all, save for one trip to the grocery store today. And rehearsal later, I guess, for ADT.

Speaking of which, I'm super excited about it because I got into the dance I wanted to get into!!!

How has the snow been treating you? Are you in school? What classes are you taking and are you excited about them?

As promised, photos of my models! Quick recap - the project fits within a site and is a subtractive exercise where I "stabbed" the site with rectangular prisms in the direction of the 4 view rooms - no viewing, ground viewing, horizon viewing, and sky viewing.

Architecture is pretty well known to be a universally time-consuming and difficult major - I remember when I was still looking at colleges, my friends and family and even college tour guides would ask me if I was sure I wanted to do Architecture because I would most definitely not have a life outside of it.

I think one of the most satisfying feelings I've ever had so far in my life is seeing something that I worked on come to life. And no, I don't mean come to life in a model - I mean legitimately, in real life, usable, workable structures.

Originally this post was going to be about the World Cup finale and Peel Play Olé Olé (my body is still fighting off the sodium bloat, embarrassingly enough), but a very one-sided conversation about cherishing opportunity (and not being money-driven) with my very Asian parents will be taking the limelight today.

This past weekend was pretty calm and uneventful, especially for being Fourth of July - my friend, Andrei, invited me to have dinner with his host family (bison burgers!), I had a picnic with Julie, Stephen, and Elaine on the Commons on Saturday, and I grabbed lunch with Andrei on Sunday (Cinderella's!) - and when the week started, I got switched to the Audi Project at work.