Freshman year: On falling down, over and over again
Lessons from trying to be that charming, doing-everything man
Jojo Placides–The Tech
It was Aug. 23, 2025 when I packed my bags and traveled from innocent, coastal Maine all the way to Boston, Massachusetts. “Finally,” I had thought to myself, straight from years of working my ass off in high school. “I can finally wear that badge of honor and call myself a student of illustrious MIT!” I stepped forward with optimism and hope for the future, unable to see what lay ahead but excited anyway.
“Here it comes,” I whispered. “Here comes the rest of my life.”
Then came orientation week, the first day of classes, Pumpkin Drop, Halloweekend, Rocky Horror, IAP, a New Hampshire retreat, iFair, first-year formal, and finals week. Thousands of pages of psets, lecture notes, reprimands, and emails to S^3 flew by. Hundreds of faces, some eager to see me, some not. The friends I made, then the friends I lost.
The moments in between. How the dark, sacred night enveloped street lights after long rehearsals in the theatre. How the slush and salt on the gray road echoed the hopelessness of finals week. How rime blanketed the Charles River and how streaks of fuschia lined the Esplanade.
At the beginning of freshman year, I tried to be the charming, doing-everything man who never really stays in the same place. I ran for vice president of the Class of 2029 student council. I made music. I painted murals. I did theatre. I learned the electric guitar. I wrote several Tech articles. I made films. I took up photography. Everything under the sun, basically.
When I look back at freshman year, I see a whirlwind of memories, events, faces, scenes, you name it. All this time, I had begged for the hands of the clock to just stop and give me some rest, even for a second. And yet here I stand, at the end of my first year, already a quarter of a way through my journey at the Institute.
And yet in being the “charming, doing-everything man” came the biggest realization of my life: I don’t know how to do… any… of this. I’m just a big, clueless, floundering idiot.
In trying to be the man that does everything, I didn’t feel like I did anything well. In the midst of all the great guitarists who can perform the solo from “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin or “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, I couldn’t hold a candle, only hardly putting together a barre chord. In the midst of all the phenomenal actors in theatre, I could barely deliver (or even remember) a line or a monologue.
And my average day at the Institute was never that of someone who was at the “top of their game.” On an average day, I’d wake up at 12:14 p.m., hair as messy as fractals, having missed around three lectures already. I’d enter 5.12 (Organic Chemistry I) visibly disheveled, armed only with a notebook and a lousy pen, while everyone else with their neat iPads had already learned the mechanism for hydrohalogenation.
Whenever my friends talked about events and clubs they were excited about, I’d be sitting on the opposite side of the table trying to decipher lecture notes with a billion vague terms. Whenever they talked about how displacement current affects Maxwell’s equations, I’d stare at them, confused, still behind learning what “Maxwell’s equations” even were. Whenever I tried to crack some problem about reporter genes or Dijkstra’s algorithm, my friends called it trivial because they covered it in the recitation that I slept through.
On top of these things, I’ve been rejected by many organizations this year, even more so than last semester (I wrote about it in a previous article), whereas everyone else got accepted to prestigious consulting groups and great UROPs.
Overall, I’ve learned from freshman year that I don’t think I know how to live. Every day is a battle to be fought while, for others, each day seems like a walk in the park.
So… is that it? Have I fallen off from the ambitious, all-star champ I was in senior year of high school? Have I squandered my one chance of showing everyone what I’m made of?
If you can relate to anything that I’ve said, then it’s my pleasure to tell you that you’re definitely not alone in feeling this. Three things to end this on a positive note.
One: don’t be too cruel to yourself. You may have ended senior year of high school with all As, but you haven’t “fallen off” when you’ve ended this year with a couple Bs and a couple Cs. Ask yourself this: would junior or senior year you really survive what you’re going through right now? If those past versions of yourself wore your shoes, they’d disintegrate within a day or so. Therefore, in a sense, you are currently probably the best version of yourself. Moreover, at the end of the day, we’re all teenagers trying to find our way in the world, failing and stumbling along the way. Did you really think you’d have it all figured out at such a young age?
Ultimately, you are still the person who fought tooth and nail to get you to the high doors of MIT. You are capable of the most unimaginable things, and you’ve already proven that when you made it here, whether you expected it or not. So be grateful to yourself!
Two: it’s a mere illusion to think that everyone around you has it all figured out. Here’s a big revelation: nobody knows what they’re doing! It’s easy to forget that your peers are only one or two years ahead of you. Often, the ones who appear most “on top of things” are the ones who can hide their problems the best.
You never know if the person who always seems to be ahead of you in problem sets — whom you’ve idealized — is also struggling with finding a UROP. Or if the person who’s doing world-changing research is struggling to keep up with their classes or social life.
Three: the best kind of student is the salvage man. Those who can recover themselves from perceivably hopeless situations are often the ones who succeed the most. To me, people who bounce back after falling hard are always more impressive than those who never fell in the first place.
Because a basic fact of life is this: everyone falls down inevitably. In the great halls of the Institute, there’s no shortage of falling down to be had. The more you familiarize yourself with the feeling of fucking up, the more you’ll bounce back when the times get rough again.
In a way, if you’ve struggled heavily this semester, then you’re doing something right. If every day was a brutal battle to you, if each pset is a mountain to climb and each midterm is a volcano to jump over — if you’ve survived this semester with nothing more than a bloodied head — then you’re more ahead than you think.
So wear that blood on your head as a crown of honor. You’ve toiled, you’ve lost sleep, and you’ve almost lost hope. But through it all, you’ve made it to the other side.
You have the privilege to look at yourself in the mirror. Despite everything, it’s still you.
Entering MIT, I thought I’d get it right from the get-go, being that charming, doing-everything man. But I tried a billion things and failed at almost all of them. In such a large, diverse, and busy place, I’ve made myself look like a fool. And yet comfort comes from knowing this: the rest of my life still awaits me, and with it, comes a lot of chances to get it right.
So, in the next three years, who knows? Anything can happen.