Thank you! And yep, that's correct! Only problem is I'm hesitant to rip the binding because I don't have a sewing machine and haven't made my own bags before (I've hand-sewn other things, and I've used a sewing machine to make an apron, but I don't have one myself and wouldn't consider myself skilled). That's why I'm in search of tips for an absolute newbie in terms of how best to work with the fabric and with the preexisting seams. E.g., whether it's a bad idea to sew something directly into the ripstop.

Cal alum turned CMU grad here! Not sure about getting into Cal for grad school specifically, but I can speak to some related experiences. It’s likely to vary per field and per school, but by far the most important things across grad programs to my knowledge are LORs and faculty alignment/research fit as evidenced by both your statement of purpose and your prior projects (and possibly publications), and eventually, your interviews. In my field (connected to and partially within CS), depending on the faculty to whose labs you’re applying, publications are sometimes the icing on the cake and sometimes a requirement when you apply, but they’re likely to help, and publishing also helps you to meet others in your field by way of conferences (worth going to large conferences even if you didn’t publish something, if you have the means! you can sometimes apply for travel grants). Some programs no longer require or even take GRE scores, and the folks I’ve spoken with while applying, interviewing, and choosing between programs never emphasized GPA (consider that many grad students are coming from industry, although I know less about that path personally).

Potentially the most important part of an LOR is unfortunately whether the person reading it knows the person who wrote it. That can be a catch-22. But you can move in that direction by working with people to whom you have access whose research focus deeply excites you, as does that of their collaborators or former peers, and by meeting folks at conferences. A cold email almost never hurts (unless it’s right before or during the time when applications are being reviewed)!

Of course, the work you’ve done itself is incredibly important, as is the narrative you tie it together with. Research fit and networking shouldn’t reduce to doing what you think others will want to see—your own vision matters, and making evident what it is, why you care about it, and why others should join you in caring about it is part of writing a strong application. (That being said, I’ve heard many folks say that the statement of purpose is also just icing on the cake that strengthens the argument that the rest of your application makes, e.g., LORs.) Nonetheless, the work is accompanied by these many social and monetary (read: research funding) factors. Best of luck in applying!

Thank you! Do you mean something almost like MOLLE webbing, so there's a grid pattern? Or do you just mean two rows separate from each other?

Also, any tips re: sewing to ripstop? Any dos and don'ts?

They seem like it! Lots of cool projects. Crossposted !

Hi folks! New to this sub, but crossposting a question I asked elsewhere. I'm looking to make a very basic modification to an existing bag, but I'm new to these kinds of materials and to fabricating gear to begin with, although I have some basic experience with sewing and textiles in other contexts. Many thanks!

Thank you so much! I'll give it a shot. Hadn't heard of them before but sounds like a fun place. :)

Here’s a plugin I use that’ll do it! Some formatting and functionality is limited inside of the columns, but barely, especially if you’re just taking notes. https://github.com/ckRobinson/multi-column-markdown

That’s assuming you’re ok with the idea of extending Markdown a bit and losing some portability between applications in the process. I am, but it’s a trade off.

There are other plugins as well that offer in-note tabs (so you can switch between, say, 3 views in a dashboard), but I don’t think those are what you’re looking for. If you are, search for “tab” in the community plugins section and you’ll find some options.

Just here to say these words are beautiful. “Growing up” can happen in so many different ways across one’s life and it’s such a strange and enchanting thing. Cheers to an incredible and transformative pit stop.

Depending on how you want to organize things, you might also be interested in tools that automatically build hierarchy for you. Like others here, I also use Dataview for things like that, but if you want it in plaintext, you may want to look into some note organization methods that people use. Without going down the rabbit hole, I’d recommend just starting with MOCs (maps of content, or directories for all of the notes related to one topic, kind of like a folder structure that needn’t be specific to a folder). (There are other things like PARA and Zettelkasten, but they’re more opinionated ways of organizing notes than MOCs are; just a question of what you’re looking for, how prescriptive vs. home brewed you want that something to be, and how deep you want to go.)

If you want MOCs of folder hierarchies in particular, you might check out the Waypoint plugin (I again use Dataview in favor of this, but it might be helpful for you), or see this Reddit post  for a few more ideas.

I also recommend Strange New Worlds—it’s a plugin that offers an interesting way to navigate connections between your notes.

No matter what, like others have said, the easiest way to start is to just start writing and using wiki links (the ones with [[two brackets]]) to connect pages! That will begin to give you a good idea of how you personally want to organize things. I keep things somewhat flat folder-wise within a few categories, but only because I can create multiple non-conflicting hierarchies using links (e.g., a “parents” or “projects” property for a note that contains a list of links to other notes from which this one is considered downstream).

Also, if you have other Notion vs. Obsidian questions, ask away! I also migrated at the beginning of this year (from Notability + Notion, including all note-taking, ideation, and task management), and I’ve only ever looked back for collaborative projects.

Congrats! You won’t be too too far from the Bay. Highly recommend taking the Coast Starlight on Amtrak if you haven’t before—there are some gorgeous views along the way. Depending on where in Oregon you’ll be, it should be accessible—it goes up and down most of the West Coast of the US (albeit much more slowly than a plane).

I graduated a few years ago, too, and like others have said, I feel similarly… it was hard to move on, and Cal still holds a big place in my heart and was incredibly formative for me. It’s always nice to have an excuse to go back and visit, and depending on what kind of grad school you’re starting, you may even run into profs and old peers at academic conferences. Some student orgs also have alumni outreach programs that make it easier to stay connected while supporting other students. Either way, give yourself space to miss it and process that! It can be hard to have that space when you’re wrapping up quickly to graduate. All the best for your next chapter.

!flair Grad Student

Idk if this is helpful, but: I felt very similarly about an exam leading up to a major piece of writing. I finally looked back at a recording of that exam a substantial while later, and I realized that the constructive criticism was nowhere near as harsh as it initially felt (even though those feelings are valid!). It helped me scope down my work and I'm now feeling better about the work itself. If you can, give yourself space from that harsh self-talk! The feedback may reveal itself to be more helpful once disconnected from any bearing it has on how you feel about yourself (easier said than done, of course). It's impossible to think of every edge case or consideration beforehand, and now you're empowered with that knowledge to iterate.

Tasks is one of the main things I use Obsidian for. I do technically use the Tasks plugin, but it's really Dataview that powers my system. I've built some custom views for tracking tasks by "project," by the dates on which I want to work on those tasks (not for recurring tasks, but for tasks that may take a little while; I don't tend to have recurring tasks so I have no established system for them, but looks like others here have concocted something great!), and by deadline.

The thing I love about using Obsidian for tasks is that I can dump tasks anywhere, and no matter what, they'll be surfaced in the discovery view I've built for myself with Dataview and some JS + custom CSS. This also means I can easily query all of my tasks and do silly math on them for stats purposes. I'm sure this eventually will get slow--I'm somewhere in the ballpark of 600 notes currently over 2.5 months of use--but for now, it works beautifully.

I also love the automatic retention of hierarchies with Dataview's components. If I have subtasks, or notes as bullet points below a task, they get rendered in any lists I fetch.

How the system roughly works:

• I dump tasks anywhere, but I have a QuickAdd Capture set up to dump them in a daily list for convenience.
• Anything I want to appear globally across my vault I tag with #task for easy use with Tasks.
• I used to bullet journal, and I liked the flexibility of that system. I've added [-] cancelled tasks and [/] in-progress tasks with some custom CSS made easier by Tasks.
• In my daily page template, I have a Dataview codeblock that fetches all of the tasks that contain a link to that page in their on property, e.g., [on:: [[2024-04-19]]. It also renders a custom progress bar based on the number of assigned, completed, and WIP tasks I have for that day.
• To tag something as being for a certain project, I use [for:: [[That Project's Page]]].
• On each project page, I render all of the #task tasks that are for that project, and any other untagged tasks that are in documents that list project: [[That Project's Page]] as a property in the metadata.
• On a separate page, I render all of my tasks in hideable callouts by project, the number of days I've worked on them, their deadlines, etc., to make task discovery as easy as possible. I've pinned this to my sidebar for occasional glances (yes, this can get slow; I don't always have it open, but it's always accessible).
• I only ever explicitly use Tasks for automatic addition of the completion property and for querying tasks by their text content.
• I have a few other properties I'm still toying with, e.g., type in order to help me sort by the contexts in which I might work on something (a [type:: admin] task is likely to be fast or logistical, for example).
• I sometimes use Tasks's priority property, but I'm not sorting by it yet, since my tasks are "live" enough (read: frequently edited and posted to the next day) that I have little need to do this.

I ought to make a post about the system at some point, but it's still in development enough/tailored to my own purposes that I'm not sure others would find it useful or portable. If anyone's reading this, let me know if you would find that helpful!

Potentially unpopular opinion, but I'm considering using Obsidian to at least draft my master's thesis. I use LaTeX to write academic papers like others have suggested--it's very powerful, convenient, and many conferences offer LaTeX templates to make submission easier. Another plus: Overleaf, an online LaTeX editor, offers an amazing environment for collaborative academic writing (far better than Google Docs for this purpose imo).

However, writing in Markdown makes the process a bit more peaceful for me (less visual clutter syntactically, and I can link to ideas/themes that have come up during the research so as to integrate them into my thesis iteratively). I'm planning on making a quick workflow to export to both LaTeX (for collaborative editing + publication) and PDF (for easy reading + annotation) using Pandoc. If you're looking for a guide for something in that direction, here's a helpful blog article by Alexandra Phelan on using Zotero and Pandoc with Obsidian. Happy writing!

I think this is known as a statics problem (based on my outdated high school + college physics courses)! Statics examines how equal forces cause things to stay still. Essentially, if you isolate any of the points where the sticks are touching, you’ll see that they’re applying upward and downward forces to each other (gravity downward, normal force upwards, by proxy of the bottles holding them up). You can also look at this using torques rather than forces: if the bottles weren’t holding the sticks up on one end, the sticks would individually rotate in that direction, and if the sticks weren’t pressing down on the other end, then those stick would be free to rotate downward there as well.

Aw, they’re all so polite! All supporting each other and all that. (In all seriousness though, I find it so cool that you managed to rewrite a statics problem as something that sounds like an inductive proof—had never thought of it that way!)

This!! Even as a grad student, the journey away from external validation has been a hard one. But this place is most rewarding when you allow yourself to be free. MIT is full of wonderful people, absurd opportunities, and learning experiences. Move toward the ones that feel right to you, and work on things you’re passionate about, and you’ll have a great time. But try to prove yourself, and you may come to feel that it’s impossible to move forward. Although it’s often necessary to “pay dues” in life in order to get to work with someone or to find an opportunity you’re interested in, the “proving” happens automatically when you’re doing what you love for its own sake—though I recognize that that can be a catch-22.

The other thing to consider is that sometimes, just being in the room makes a difference. If you take someone’s class, or wind up having an amazing conversation with other students, the time you spend just existing with and learning with them may translate into an opportunity because you brought your full self.

Wishing you all the best—you belong here if it feels right to you!

Absolutely, and thank you! Glad to help in any way I can. :)

From what I’ve gathered, this seems right, yes! But as others have said, it really depends on how you want to use it, and there’s no one correct answer. Based on my experience using a lot of Dataview queries in my first few weeks, I’ve found that tags and properties operate a little bit differently than I thought they would, especially in terms of how you navigate and search for information. Here’s a rough summary:

• Links create connections regardless of file structure. They make it easy to see connections between specific, individual ideas across your whole vault. I also use them to create something like a folder structure, kind of like an MOC, so that files get clustered in the graph around some basic parent nodes (like “Cooking,” in your example).
• Folders specify where the files literally live, which is helpful for keeping things organized. E.g., I’m currently organizing my files by type of note rather than by project, and using properties with links to gather info across projects, while knowing that all of my meeting notes across projects are in one folder.
• Tags listed in a file’s metadata/properties are easy to search for (in terms of writing a query, maybe not in terms of runtime though), and are good for specifying types of things or themes that run across your vault. In the graph view, there’s an option to display tags if you want to, so you can use those as a form of organization visually as well. Where a link describes a specific connection, you might think of tags as describing general connections between themes rather than individual notes.
• Inline tags are slightly harder to search for, but function similarly.
• Properties/metadata allow you to list how specific values differ across files. E.g., you could list your ingredients as a property at the top of each recipe. Searching for files that have a property with a specific value is also fairly easy, although slightly more overhead in a Dataview query.
• Inline fields (also a kind of property, I think) are likely hardest to search for, but are incredibly useful for annotating things like tasks or writing out longer values for your properties. They describe information within a page, e.g., if multiple things comprise a page (as with tasks).

Of course, this is just my own interpretation, so take it with a grain of salt! They’re all just basic data structures, some of which are likely faster to access than others (e.g., folders and subfolders vs. tags and properties, since files within a folder don’t have to be “searched” for, per se, like the difference between an array and a linked list). You can use and connect them however you’d like, and some plugins even support different ways of thinking of those links (e.g., compare Dataview with Tasks with Projects with Zotero Integration with many, many others).