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 This will be an evolving blog post. I wanted to publish my first thoughts on this subject at this moment as a first benchmark since I've just graduated from high school. 6/10/2026 Every sector uses AI. There's no point in resisting it. If you're not using AI, you're behind; it is as prevalent as a calculator yet orders of magnitude more powerful. At this point, it is more important we embrace it than shy away from it. I was surprised when I attended the MRS Spring 2026 conference that there seems to be more mixed opinions than I originally thought. The common complaints seem to be a lack of data and the lack of physics-embedded models. Yet agentic models can scrape the literature for more data than we can imagine, and RL closed loops such as those used at Periodic Labs and Radical AI embed real-time physics principles and experimental data with predictive models. We need researchers who believe in AI in every sector to bring these new ideas and understandings to she...

 i've developed the best process to maximize efficiency when the to-do list seems endless. every sunday night, i opened my planner and chronicled a mental summary of major deadlines (from shortest term to longest term) daily deadlines: write down assignments that i'll need to work on every day. deadlines that occur this week: block out time to work on those assignments on monday and tuesday. deadlines that occur next week or later: choose a few less populated day to start hacking away at long-term projects. monthly goals: write down as an optional goal to finish part of the project by the end of the week. this process has two major benefits. avoiding cognitive meltdown. if i kept a running checklist of items every day, the list could seem very long. as a result, a) i could feel overwhelmed and therefore unmotivated to even start. b) if i do start, but i don't finish a majority, i feel dejected because of the lack of dopamine that comes from chipping away at the ti...

 Nearly everyone would say perfectionism is detrimental: an impossible trait that perpetuates cycles of self-doubt, a futile goal that prevents us from truly learning, a dull lifestyle that degrades the joy of making mistakes. I mostly agree, yet there are caveats. I'll start with my journey with perfectionism first. Perfectionism, or at least my version of it, was something I definitely dealt with throughout high school. I've thought a lot about where this comes from, and I feel that I have extracted somewhat of a reason: a constant search for identity. In nearly every social situation, I used to find myself with a need to defend my identity; I was rarely proud of what I could already do. For most of my childhood, I remember being a competitive year-round swimmer. I was athletic and good at school---that's pretty much it. So when I began to meet people with cool interests and passions in middle school and high school, it was natural that I wanted to have those cool inte...

 At the end of Mean Girls , Cady realizes that we are all not as different as we originally believed---everyone is just trying their best in a chaotic world. The closing scene of that movie has played in my head ever since I saw it in 10th grade and has become one of my personal mantras. This idea is the root of empathy. Guys, empathy is a superpower!! It's rarer than you might think and more draining than you might have believed---but it's also rewarding (I hope). People are ubiquitous in our life. We are social creatures; we require people beyond just emotional fulfillment but for survival as well. Yet different people engage with others differently. On my last day of high school, some people chose to put in earphones and watch a movie during class whereas others played music and socialized with their friends for the last time. But both are valid. We are all different, yet we are all significant. The way I view people has always been my greatest strength and weakness. An i...