What Happens at Research Science Institute (RSI)

For being so well-known, what goes on during the Research Science Institute (RSI) program hosted by MIT and CEE makes it seem like the Really Secretive Institute. For all of the shenanigans that I’ve gotten myself into, I couldn’t be more grateful and happy to have been a part of our family of Really Sexy Individuals Rickoids - so that’s why my blog journey wouldn’t be complete without a blog post dedicated to all that went on during the chaotic weeks of RSI! Still though, out of the rules of RSI-code, what happens at RSI stays at RSI - but I hope this provides a glimpse into my amazing, not Repetitive Strain Injury, not Relative Strength Index, not RSI Refrigeration Services, experience at RSI ‘22!

But first, let me introduce what RSI is. In practical terms, RSI is a six-week summer research program run by the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE) and hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Basically, we live on MIT’s campus and have research mentorships in the Boston area for six weeks, all with an active social scene and all-nighters for the papers and presentations we have to turn in. This year, RSI had a 2.6% acceptance rate, so it’s quite selective, and it’s one of the most well-known summer programs in the world. I described my application process for the summer programs I applied to in this blog post here.

First-Week Lectures

In the first week of RSI, we had lectures in Humanities plus two electives that we could choose from a list that included Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Engineering, or Physics. Before the program, we were supposed to read the 1818 unabridged original version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Of course, that means it was an RSI tradition for students to start the book the day before RSI - and for me, I purposefully left the reading to the day of the flight in case I had a ton of wait time. It was not a bad decision, by the way, because my flight was canceled and rescheduled six times (long story). Anyways, Humanities was a required class for all students, and in the class, we discussed the impact and meaning of the book Frankenstein through discussions, lectures, and watching the movie “Young Frankenstein” (we all had some opinions about that). But also, as it was the first class of the day, there were a lot of tired kids sleeping in class. For my elective classes, I took Biology and Chemistry. Biology was about genetic mutations, evolution, and ecology in freshwater mussels and wooly mammoths, while Chemistry was about all different topics - from chemical structures and isomers to making hydrogels. While I did enjoy the classes, I think the professors may have been instructed to give lectures for an audience with a strong background in the subject, which is fair, considering that many of the students at RSI were some of the most accomplished high schoolers in the world in the field, but for me, it meant that any class outside of my domain was pretty much incomprehensible.

Mentorship

On its website, it states that students “…read the most current literature in their field, draft and execute a detailed research plan, and deliver conference-style oral and written reports on their findings,” which is a pretty good description of what the research mentorship is. My mentorship was at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, using confocal microscopy to observe the localization of a certain protein into the nucleus. Surprisingly, most students don’t have to attend their mentorships every day, and they complete the majority of their work at the Hayden Library. As a wet lab project, I went to my mentorship every day from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. 

As for the mentorships themselves, they seem to be a mixed bag. Firstly, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get a project that’s tailored to your niche - mine wasn’t, since my previous research was in microbiology and computational drug design, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Secondly, the mentorship can be quite varied. I think the mentors don’t really receive standardized training on what to do for mentorships, so the projects can range a lot. Some people had complete freedom in designing their projects, while others were a lot more incorporated into their mentor’s current work. However, I think most students did like their mentorships. I really liked mine, since the people at my lab were super nice and it was refreshing to explore a field different from the one that I had been studying for the past few years, so it was a good chance to explore which fields I liked. My project involved an entire week of me being in the confocal microscopy room for four hours a day taking images of cells, and then another week of me being in the image processing room all day, so there was a lot of listening to music, weird dancing in the room alone, and texting friends while waiting for images to load. I also loved having an off-campus mentorship since I got to explore the Longwood Medical Center area every day during lunch and try out all the different restaurants. There were other students near the area with mentorships at either Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, or the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, so I liked going out to have lunch with friends every day.

Student Life

Every week, all RSI students are given $215 in MIT TechCash to spend at a couple of select stores and restaurants. While they weren’t the most luxurious places, I definitely felt high on power to have hundreds of dollars to spend on anything I wanted. In the first week where I was at the MIT dome most of the time for classes, I usually ate at the Stratton Student Center, while some students went to the Stata Center for lunch. There were a couple of places off-campus where we could get food using TechCash, like Hmart and the restaurants inside, as well as Cambridge Pizza. So much can be bought with TechCash—you could live off of it if you wanted to. And naturally, every Sunday, I would have a TechCash spending spree with my friends, usually at Hmart, buying $200 worth of groceries and hauling it all back to the dorms by hand.

We were allowed to go anywhere we wanted within campus, but we needed a staff member if we wanted to go off-campus. (Of course, no one really listened to that… But anyways…) Definitely not speaking from experience here, but Boston and Cambridge are super walkable and easy to get around by public transit. MIT has its own subway station called Kendall, which means that you can get to downtown Boston via the Red Line. The bus was always chronically late. From purely subjective experience, I’m pretty sure the average time the bus was late was somewhere near 20 minutes. It’s still very easy to get around the city, though. I actually know the streets of Boston way better than I know the streets of any other city.

MIT Campus

First of all, it’s a pretty common opinion among RSI students - MIT campus can be defined as putting as many different-looking buildings in the same space as possible, which, in my opinion, does not look great. For all of our lectures and large gatherings, we went to the MIT Great Dome, which is about a 15-minute walk from our dorms. The hallways inside are nicknamed the “infinite corridors,” and let me tell you, that is so true. Even after six weeks of navigating campus, I still panic whenever I see a room number. The rooms are numbered nonsensically, and I still do not understand how to find my way around the dome. So, of course, the only answer is to always follow around the herd of other people. The place is gigantic and I have no sense of direction.

We lived in the Next House dorms at MIT, where basically the entire dorm was ours, except for a couple graduate students here and there. While many people hated Next for its lack of air conditioning and minimalistically furnished rooms, I actually really enjoyed living in the dorms. It was so much fun to live with friends and hang out with anyone you wanted at any time, and the first week was definitely filled with a ton of socializing and staying up at 3 AM. But it’s impossible to deny that Next House was basically a sauna, and it was often hotter inside than it was outside. The boys were on the fifth floor while the girls were on the third floor, but the rules weren’t really strict at all about going on different floors or where we should be at any time.

We were allowed to eat at the dining hall for breakfast and dinner, but it was at New Vassar, which was about a 15-minute walk away. So because of that, no one ever went to the dining halls. We basically only lived off of ramen noodles, microwavable foods, and, in my case, raw spinach for the entirety of the six weeks, or sneaking off campus for dinner.

Social Scene

Oh boy, the RSI social scene is… A lot. I personally only stayed very involved in the first week - then after that, I realized that not sleeping is not good for my functioning and productivity, so I went to sleep before midnight for most days, except the weekends. We have counselor groups, which are basically a group of around 12-15 students led by a counselor, which meet for bed checks and also compete together for counselor cup points. People really were fiercely loyal to their counselor groups, which was good and bad at the same time. My counselor group wasn’t super close, but many of the other groups were pretty exclusive and did everything together.

There’s a ton of gossip at RSI, and people talk A LOT. Rumors got spread incredibly quickly, there was some backstabbing, talking behind people’s backs - yeah, it got toxic sometimes. We also had cliques that followed a social hierarchy, so it was sometimes a very exclusive community. There were multiple times when I got fed up and overwhelmed by the social life at RSI and really sick of all of the drama. Of course, that’s not to say the community at RSI was bad - I definitely met a ton of people who I love a lot and made lots of great friendships along the way. From my best friends, I had people that I was super close with who were some of my favorite people ever. These people made it all worth it, and I love them so much 🙂

Now… A lot of people have asked me about the dating culture, considering there’s a ton of kids living together with similar interests and future goals. Unfortunately, that’s classified information. But yes, there definitely was love in the air…

Hell Week

This was the one thing I had heard of before RSI, and it’s the week where we grind out our final papers and final presentations, called Hell Week. For the record, I had never had caffeine (other than iced tea and one frappuccino when I was 12) or pulled an all-nighter (for academic reasons) before I came to RSI. And at RSI, I did both. Way too many times. Before the deadlines, I snuck out with my friends to the Hayden Library to try to work all night. Which involved lots of DoorDashing chicken nuggets, going chairing in the library, stealing sofas, and sleeping literally anywhere and everywhere. So many people pulled their first all-nighters at RSI, which, honestly, RSI tells you that you should sleep, but in reality, RSI does not encourage sleep very well with their midnight bed checks, TARP, and 9:00 AM weekend deadlines. I’m sure no one had a functional sleep schedule at RSI.

Despite all of that, we all managed to write our half-coherent papers at 3:00 AM while high on coffee, snacks, and RedBull. Hell Week was hell for my health and probably took five years off my life, but I’m still so proud of us anyway 🙂

I can’t even believe that it’s over. On the last day, I was with my roommate, complaining about how wrong it looked with my side of the room, where everything was just gone and packed up. And I just played the song that we both loved, and we started crying and weird dancing one last time. As I left Next House for the last time, I kept crying, because I just wished that it wasn’t over, where I could explore the city and sneak out to Boston with my friends anytime, stay up all night playing Paranoia, and have the weirdest sugar baby conversations with my roommate. In all of that, RSI is truly an experience. It’s crazy, unexpected, and contradictory, but it’s an experience that I’ll never forget, and I’ll miss everyone and everything so, so much. And that’s why I do research. To have these special experiences with amazing people, and I wouldn’t have traded this experience of living in our hellhole of a dorm for anything else 🙂