The end of an era

One week from today will be the official end of an era for me. After nearly 23 years, more than half of my life, I will no longer have an account with MIT.

My MIT email address was my first "real" email address, at least in the sense that I can no longer remember definitely just what my high school email addresses actually were: you'd have to dig into the prehistory of AOL or old shareware repositories to find that information. I signed onto Project Athena in August of 1996, was indoctrinated into the joys of "mh", and began my tumultuous undergraduate career.

I stayed at MIT for 12 years as a full-time member of its community: four years as an undergraduate, one as a Masters student, one in a strange superposed state of both Masters and Ph.D. programs, which mightily confused the registrar's systems, five more years of purely Ph.D., and then a year of transitional postdoc while I figured out what to do, ultimately departing for my current employer of BBN in 2008.

Self-portrait as a postdoc, in my old office in Project MAC at MIT CSAIL

Even after leaving, however, I maintained my affiliation and strong collaborations. In the first couple of years, I was actually also still running the same MIT projects that I had been running while I was still actually employed there, and so of course I was always on campus to meet the students who were working for me. Other collaborations started up thereafter, and one way or other, it tended to be the case that I was working on campus at MIT at least half a day in every week. Keeping research affiliate status for me made a lot of sense for all involved.

Back in those early post-departure days, I used to still be much more involved as an alum in student group activities as well.  One of my long-running joys, which I still miss, was running live action role playing games with the MIT Assassin's Guild. More regularly, however, I also continued to be a volunteer librarian with the MIT Science Fiction Society, and every week would spend two hours as the on-duty librarian holding open the worlds largest publicly browsable collection of science fiction. I needed my card and my affiliation to be effective at those duties as well, and I enjoyed them much: the Assassin's Guild as a heated activity of creative passion and adrenaline, MITSFS as a cool oasis of two calm hours of mostly only reading.

When I followed my wife to Iowa in 2013, however, the actual "showing up on campus" part stopped happening. I resigned as a librarian, and I'd already mostly stopped writing and playing games, as new parenthood and professional travel began to squeeze that time more and more.  My collaborations have continued, but with me no longer actively on campus or needing special access to resources, there's not as much point in having me still maintain an active affiliation.

Sometime last summer, my affiliation failed to renew, and I didn't notice. When I got my account deactivation warning, I pinged the collaborator who'd been sponsoring me, but neither of us got around to following up. And really, the fact that it just wasn't making my triage list as "important" any more was the sign that it was time to let go.  I'm no longer an active alum, and I don't need a research affiliate status to be an effective remote collaborator, after all.

And so, over the past two weeks I've been packing up to go electronically. I've redirected my non-BBN mirror of my professional webpage away from MIT and over to GitHub. I've copied over all of the material from my old Athena account (finding and revisiting some amazing old memorabilia in the process). I've even gone through every email received at the old account in the last year and switched over all the ones I cared about. I'm as ready as I can be to let go.

Goodbye old friend, old email address. I never like to truly let anything be gone, but I'm not there any more, and at least I've still got my alum account.