MIT: Enriched Engineers

Earlier this year, I had a great conversation with a prospective Harvard student. He wanted to study engineering, and he was excited about Harvard's emerging School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. I asked the obvious question: "If you want to study engineering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, why aren't you applying to MIT?" His answer was a thoughtful one: he wanted to go to Harvard because he liked the range of students around him. He was attracted to the notion of having classes with poets and philosophers and chemists and violinists. "I don't want to be around just engineers," he said.

Luckily, this student then visited MIT and saw what it's all about. No one at MIT is just an engineer--they're artists, musicians, actors, athletes, writers, and designers. And they're also spectacular engineers. The culture at MIT is all about fostering creativity, so there are tons of opportunities for performance and writing and dancing and playing. MIT is known for being the elite place to study engineering and science, but it's a place for people who know that the best scientists are also tapped into the beauty and fun of an examined life. That is, to create great inventions, you have to have a creative sense of how those innovations will perform in the real world with real people.

MIT students are enriched engineers--exactly the kind of classmates this student was looking for. I'm proud to report that he'll be a freshman at MIT this fall.

What I love most about the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--MIT for short--is the spirit of the place. MIT is all about collaboration and innovation, and they're about doing it with a sense of humor. MIT is famous for its "hacks", or student pranks. Some of the hacks are the stuff of legend: MIT hackers once disrupted the annual Harvard-Yale football game when balloons spelling "MIT" rose from beneath the playing field and flew away. Many hacks involve the university's iconic domed Building 10. The university is proud of these traditional pranks: find a complete list of hacks over the years at the hacks website here.

MIT has a wide range of programs that speak to this sense that no one here is limited to just one thing. True, the core of MIT is the celebration and exploration of math and science, but the university is committed to enriching those pursuits with strong programs in literature, history, foreign languages, and public policy. One of the strongest and most popular programs at MIT is the program in Science, Technology, and Society, an interdisciplinary area of study that combines cutting-edge lab research in technology with coursework that contextualizes that work. MIT students don't just study how their work will impact their discipline; they study why their work is important and what it means in the greater context of the history of science and the culture where their work will be used. There's an exciting attention to intention here--MIT students are known for following their why's as far as they possibly can.

MIT's undergraduate admissions office has long been a leader in how to do things right: their admission website has remarkable tips for every applicant, no matter where you apply, and I highly recommend that you check it out: http://www.mitadmissions.org One of my favorite aspects of the site is this entry on the work-play balance at MIT and the student blogs.

Oddly, the other thing I love most about MIT is their rejection letters. They're short, but they're more honest and personal than the standard form letter that comes with most thin envelopes.

Dear X,
We're sorry but we will not be able to admit you to the class of 2014. Really: we're sorry that we have to turn down so many impressive applicants like yourself, and we know it's our loss. Best of luck next fall wherever you choose to go. We know you'll go far.
Sincerely,
MIT Admissions

Frankly, those words are a LOT more comforting than a couple of paragraphs about "the most competitive admissions year on record" and "many qualified applicants are not admitted each year" and "thanks for the application fee". MIT even gets rejection right: any college that rejects you is missing out on all of the great things you could have offered them as a student. That's a hard thing to keep in mind as disappointing letters arrive, but it is exactly the right spirit in which to receive such letters.

Again, that's part of MIT's true thought leadership: they just know how to do things right. Whether it's how to handle college admissions or how to engineer the ultimate creative space, MIT just gets it right. It's an extraordinary place to work hard and play hard.