A letter from Jun 29, 2025

I hope you’re having a ridiculous amount of fun right now, whether that means building, coding, researching, art, leading, founding new stuff & collapsing on your bed post-burnout, or just lying in a dark room watching videos you’ll regret in the morning. I hope August onwards looks... right. Not perfect, not even ideal, just right. I’d say, “I hope you got into MIT,” but let’s be real, that line carries the weight of a small planet. You know why. If you didn’t get in, you know exactly how stratospherically hard it is. If you did, I trust you can appreciate my realism disguised as sarcasm. Either way, wherever you are or aren't going, whether it’s a place you dreamed of or one that surprised you, I hope you’re not just surviving, but actually living. Learning. Laughing. Building. Growing. Maybe failing gloriously and getting back up, too. I hope you can explain transformer architecture without squinting at notes or mumbling about “positional encodings or something.” I hope Echo is no longer a prototype buried under TODOs but something real, tested, maybe even loved. I hope the screen reader addon doesn’t crash anymore. I hope your name is on at least three published papers, ideally ones you're not embarrassed by. I hope you're still best friends with Aadit, Anika, and Taknoor, two whole years of chaos and constancy. I hope you didn’t lose touch with Kriday, Saarvesh, Nidhi, Neha, Manasvi, Sai, Kashvi, Adeetya. I hope you surprised yourself with some new, jaw-dropping extracurriculars you never saw coming. I hope your boards went well. 90%+ is all I care. I hope you’re happy. Not just fleeting happy, but peace-in-your-bones happy. I hope you’re better at emotional regulation. & still relentless. I hope you’re under 64kg. I hope your PCOS is more balanced, that you’re moving your body, eating things that love you back, and maybe even sleeping regularly. (Wild thought, I know.) I hope you’re reading this from the same laptop I’m writing it on, battle-worn, covered in fingerprints, and still your second brain. I hope your prefrontal cortex is no longer pea-sized. That you’re not “ready” for everything, because readiness is overrated, but that you’re still curious. I hope you never lose the thrill of trying, building, questioning, failing, loving, and doing things just a little before you’re ready. And above all, I hope you’re still learning. Still surprising yourself. Still chasing hard things, and chasing them well.