Friendship String Bracelets

I spent 1.5 years trying to make one for every person I knew at school. Ultimately, that proved to be somewhat of an unachievable task, but I ended up making about 190. I either mailed them off to people, or enthusiastically stopped them in the hallway to give them their bracelets.

Laser Cutting

Undergraduate Association (UA) Winter Craft Market 2024

The UA hosts an annual winter craft market.​ My friend Adelene and I laser cut a bunch of coasters, ornaments, plaques, and other gifts for Christmas!
(Event photos: Adelene Chan)
We made everything in Metropolis, which is one of the communal makerspaces. Adelene and I are both project mentors there! We may or may not have been laser cutting on a Thursday night til 5 AM.... but it was probably our most fun day of the semester.
More Jesus-related stuff:

He's always cooking, not gonna lie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Random Act of Kindness (RAK) Mini-Grants

MIT's MindHandHeart initiative offers RAK mini-grants (<$250) for community members to execute a project that promotes kindness! I applied for mini-grants in spring 2024 and spring 2025 to crochet a bunch of keychains and then mass distribute them in Lobby 10.
March 2024
​35-40 whale keychains
​Distributed with my friend, Cher
February 2025
​100+ ducks, fishes, and bears
​Made and distributed with 2 of my friends
The Esteemed Council of Ducks: (my crocheted magnum opus)
Giveaway Event on Valentine's Day, 2025:
(Event photos: Adelene Chan)
Other random crocheted things!

Calligraphy Cards

Hand-drawn Nametag Backgrounds!

I made about 380 for the kids at summer camp during 2024.

​For Cru's weekly large group meetings during the 2024-2025 school year, I made about 600 nametag backgrounds per semester.

Sewing/Quilting/Weaving

Clay

My cousin, Young, made half of these with me. He's the one who taught me how to use modeling clay.

Comics for Overthinkers :)

The drag-and-drop website service I'm using doesn't wanna show the PDFs, my apologies :(

Instead, here's the Google Drive folder with the comics!
1st page of Edition 1

Making MIT less dreary by adding art :D

Random Funny Stuff
GRAMMY trophy
​This was a loving/humorous gift that I spent wAYY too much time on 🤣, involving:
  • 3D printing
  • Hand painting, spray painting
  • A bit of laser cutting
  • Lots of super-glueing
  • Lots of protective coating 

​I erased the recipient's name in order to spare any potential embarrassment lol.
Uno reverse cards (model #1, #2)
I just switched around the filament colors to be Christmas-themed or classic colors.

"The Uno reverse card you gave me changed my life"  -- satisfied customer, 05/2025

My Favorite Meme Templates
(last updated summer 2024)

Prequels/Star Wars
Animated/Cartoon
Other Bangers
Meme Hall-of-Famers for General Purpose Use

About Me :D

my friend Gracie and I made this playlist of NF songs:
Hello!!

This is just gonna be a list of stuff that's kinda sorta maybe relevant. Hopefully there's something informative About Me in there:
  • I am studying computer stuff and brains at school. That makes it sound like I know what I'm doing - I really don't.
  • Korean food is a W
  • I love my little brother, who is bigger than me
  • I love my brothers at school who are basically family.
    • A lot of them are punks though and most of them have graduated, which is super great and kinda sad at the same time :,)
  • I like Star Wars a lot.
  • I derive joy from
    • giving out funny jokester items
    • executing lighthearted pranks
    • (clean) memes
  • Favorite books in the Bible to read, though all of them are cool:
    • Philippians
    • Job
    • 1 Kings, Chapter 19 in particular
    • 2 Timothy
    • 2 Corinthians
    • James
    • Ecclesiastes
  • Praise You In This Storm w/ Phil Wickham and Casting Crowns is a great song.​
First disclaimer:
OK - for this last part aBoUT mE, I've written, re-written, scrapped, transposed, reversed, projected onto different planes, and convolved it. It still doesn't feel quite right because it's hard to write these sorts of things with sounding cliché, soppy, disingenuous, or platitude-y.

I don't think I'll ever find this to be 1000% perfect. But I did my best and will settle w/ this for now!

Last disclaimer:
I stink at writing concisely. If you find lengthy walls of text to be off-putting, then I got good news for ya - this is a random website on the internet!!! that (presumably) no one is forcing you to read!!!! 🤩 🥳 😁 Therefore you don't needa keep reading if you don't waneww!! :)

But if you have decided to stay then this is MY ARTS AND CRAFTS PORTFOLIO and I'LL write WHATEVER I WANT for HOWEVER NOT-CONCISELY I WANT lsdkfsdljkfjlasd >:(

Personal Essay straight outta my heart/mind:

This is for my fellow MIT homies. I'm just 1 person, so understand that this is just 1 of many possible takes.
I really do love you guys and hope this is moderately encouraging to more than zero people.

School is hard. Life is hard. Stuff is hard all the time.

MIT people are great. I don't think we have a whole lot more/less problems than the average college student in America. Some problems are just commonalities that undergird the post-secondary education system -- problems that simply follow people anywhere and everywhere. What I DO think at least somewhat differentiates us from other student bodies, is... well, workaholism.

Of course, workaholism exists pretty much everywhere. But at least in my observations so far, MIT people tend to be more in denial as to whether the whole workaholic-ing thing is actually working. 

Which makes sense! A lot of us are used to fixing a problem by just brute-forcing it with more hours of grinding our teeth. More sweat, more hard work, more thinking power, more research, more "Me Doing Stuff" TM (C) (R) LLC.

So when hard stuff in life hits unexpectedly -- stuff that you can't escape by just working or thinking your way out; stuff like loss or grief; stuff like chronic pain or physical injuries; stuff like family crises; stuff like never-ending bad news; stuff like crippling loneliness or purposelessness -- a lot of us just frankly don't got the emotional muscles to handle it. That's when it kinda starts to suck to be an EngINeER. That's when you might wish you were good-er at other things. That's when your lifelong workout strategy of beefing up your brain while letting your emotional muscles atrophy doesn't really feel like the strat anymore.

I half kid, but if you've been there then you know what I mean. I can say this ^^^ with good confidence, because I myself know what it's like to be put through this exact same wringer. It stinked.

I'd like to say that I victoriously made it out to the other side using my marvelous capabilities, but that'd be lying to you. In reality, it was more like the Grace of God dragging me out of the wringer with some really kind people to help out along the way, as I figuratively kicked and screamed and tried to give up. I still got the literal scars, and I still don't live a perfect life cause only one Man ever did that and I ain't Him. 😅
​
I know that I wouldn't have made it without some of the right people just being in the right place at the right time. And if I was in control of time/space/matter, I probably woulda just let me be a bedridden potato for the rest of my life. Thankfully, I ain't behind the control board for the universe. Instead, I have been a recipient of divine Grace, even when I had done basically nothing to deserve it from the people around me at the time. It was a degree of compassion and self-sacrifice that was & still is mind-boggling to me - especially when you haven't been shown that kinda mercy and compassion before. I certainly hadn't done enough 'good deeds' to deserve that kinda mercy on a cosmic scale either.

As a fellow workaholic, it frustrates me to a ferocious degree when I "owe" someone for the massive help they gave me, but there's no opportunity for me to offer something back of comparable magnitude. In this "line of work/service," the only thing anyone can do is pay-it-forward. And that makes me wanna TEAR my HAIR out because I wanna repay the EXACT person who showed me Grace with the PRECISE AMOUNT that I owe them -- no more, no less.

But perhaps it's a good thing that paying-it-forward is my only option. I've spent the last few years trying to redeem my pain and lost time by passing on the unmerited kindness that was so graciously given to me. Sometimes, that looked like doing things for others that I knew were comforting for me, or sending kind messages to a person who's too bedridden to move. Or just sitting in silence with someone until their pain subsides.

Really, no one should walk through this kinda thing alone. If you ever find yourself drowning in despair, exhaustion, purposelessness, or whatever it is, and you need someone, then I don't care if my whole day's "plan" gets completely chucked out the window; this is an empirically verifiable statement when you examine my life for the last 3 years ;). There are more important things than work, such as you.

Maybe that sounds odd, but it feels simple enough to me: after having tasted amazing Grace, it's kind of impossible for me to not have the passion to show that same Grace to others.

I can't guarantee that things are ever going to be in my power to fix, or that things will work out the way you want them to. Any strengths that I have are pretty equally rivaled with the level of PTSD I intensely struggle with, even if that struggle mostly happens behind closed doors. There are a lot of "basic" things I used to physically be able to do to serve people, that I can't anymore because trauma kinda crushed it out of me. (I am acutely aware of this fact as I now return to this essay in summer 2025, which is a year after I first wrote it. There were things I used to be able to promise - like dropping what I'm doing and going anywhere at a moment's notice - that I've now had to delete from this essay because I can't promise them anymore; my body literally can't do it anymore. I am a very mortal, finite, and weakened human being.)

Sometimes, I won't even know what "helping" ought to look like because, compared to the grand-scale of the entire universe, I am a relative dumb-dumb. ​

Sometimes I will try everything I can think of but the only thing left to do is just sit there and cry with you.

But I will do the best that I can. 
There's a really poignant scene from The West Wing episode "Nöel" (Season 2, Episode 10). Josh Lyman is suffering from PTSD. His boss, Leo McGarry, orders an appointment between Josh and a doctor from the (fictional) American Trauma Victims Association.

The conversation in the video clip occurs between Josh and Leo after the appointment.

The point I'm making by including this scene, is that you are NOT the first - NOR will you be the last - college student to go through the wringer. There are many who came before you, and many who will come after you. 

I've fallen into the metaphorical "hole" that Leo talks about in the past. Sometimes I still do. But by God's grace, I have also made it out of the hole many times. You don't have to walk through anything without a friend. 🙂 👍

​This is at the top of the page as well, but here's my FB Messenger and school email (audreymh@mit.edu). Contact me any time if you need it
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