MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

By Kim D. '09 Meghan is a freshman, and she is considering majoring in Aerospace Engineering (course 16) or Mechanical Engineering (course 2). She's been playing soccer since she was 4 (!) and is one of two goalies on MIT's team. Her profile on MIT's site also lists plenty of achievements, including lea...

By Jess K. '10 Thank you, MIT... I am hugely honored to be here. It's always been a dream of mine to visit the most prestigious school in Cambridge, Massachusetts." Obama began. Cheers. Hold on a second. Certainly the most prestigious school in this part of Cambridge, anyway."

By gillooly@mit.edu (Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office) Sipser also says that “the P-versus-NP problem has become broadly recognized in the mathematical community as a mathematical question that is fundamental and important and beautiful. I think it has helped bridge the mathematics and computer science communities.”

At last Friday's Energy Night at the MIT Museum, Dr. Keith Collins described his approach to fighting global warming with all the gusto of a really good insurance salesman. But Collins, who graduated from MIT in 1970 with a degree in political science, wasn't actually selling anything. He w...

By Yan Z. '12 Gender imbalance has never influenced my experience at MIT. I'm a bit startled by your (Lulu's?) numbers, since at least half of the Physics majors I've met are women. Granted, I spend a lot of time around Undergraduate Women in Physics, which is perhaps not a representative sample of the ge...

By Laura N. '09 The class is called The Product Development Process (or something like that, but who really cares? just call it 2.009 like a normal person) and all of the seniors in Mechanincal Engineering are split into teams, which are identified by color. (So there's Blue, Orange, Silver, Red, and of co...

By Cristen C. '10 I don't like robots. Well, most of them are okay. The ones which for some reason look like people (vain creators perhaps?) creep me the heck out! But I'm sure if anyone is learning a lot from robots, it's my (perhaps 'geekier') peers at MIT....

By Matt McGann '00 Still, Trevor Zinser says he was unsure he could get into MIT, and was floored when the university flew him to Boston to sway him to choose MIT over Harvard or Stanford. He says exceptional teachers, particularly science teacher Dave Sherden, worked hard to make classes deep and engaging.

 MA Now researchers at MIT have integrated a collection of light sensors into polymer fibers, creating a new type of camera. Yoel Fink, a professor of materials sciences and engineering and the lead researcher on the project, notes that a standard camera ...

It is based on thorough discussions undertaken in recent months among Portuguese and MIT faculty, in close consultation with industry in Portugal and the Program's External Review Committee. Minister Gago, emphasizing the importance of the ...

By Matt McGann '00 Similarly, you may or may not have the opportunity to have one of those real great conversations with professors. If it doesn't happen, don't be too disappointed; you're only here for two class days. When you're at MIT, you'll have many more opportunities to have meaningful interaction wi...

 MA And the 49-year-old investor from upstate New York willing to pay $5000 a month for a “daytime playmate” for “intense connection without commitment.” Critics say the site is at best a convenience store for adulterers and at worst a virtual brothel, ...

By Matt McGann '00 A 6-foot-4 guard, Bartolotta is averaging 27.8 points a game, best in the New England Men’s and Women’s Athletics Conference and third best in Division III. He has led the Engineers to a 16-5 record and their best conference start at 7-1.

By Ellen Duranceau Professor Kai von Fintel, Professor of Linguistics, and Associate Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, reported on his experience as co-Editor in Chief of a new open access journal in his field, Semantics & Pragmatics. The journal is sponsored by the Linguis...

By Yan Z. '12 That's 12 times up the tallest building in Cambridge. Continuously. There you have it, the story of how I went from being a poor undergraduate student to being a poor undergraduate student with a UROP. Now please excuse me while I go make sure my sleeves are glued on correctly.

By Yan Z. '12 If you're not familiar with it yet, that January 5th constituted my introduction to FIRST robotics. Every night for six weeks after that, we drove to the Alewife MBTA station or directly into Cambridge, depending on traffic, to sit in the basement of a Sloan building. (Sloan is MIT's busine...

By Snively '11 When I sat down late last April in front of my computer and went through the process of telling MIT that I would, in fact, be attending their school in the fall, I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. MIT is, well, MIT, right? After reading the blogs for years and visiting campus during...

By Snively '11 Not all sciences are created equal. To be perfectly frank and honest, I hate math, chemistry, and biology. I used to loathe physics but I'm slowly warming up to it. MIT forces you to take chemistry, biology, math, and physics, whether you like them or not. Whether you understand them or not. Whet...

By Mikey Yang '05 But with several blog posts in the past few weeks about how terribly hosed people are, I thought I'd bring some balance to the conversation. I remembered a guest post I wrote a couple years ago (back when Ben was still here - BEN WE MISS YOU!) - this was actually in response to an admitted studen...

By Chris S. '11 It was great. Cali was sunny. The students were enthusiastic. Splash ran amazingly well (due to the diligence in preparation of Michael '07 and his enthusiastic team!). Meeting so many MIT people in Stanford's grad school was actually pretty amazing - it's awesome to be talking about 8.02/5.1...

By Ahmed H. '12 I have an interesting MIT “story.” It wasn't my first choice school until very, very late in the game. Except then I got into MIT in March. This complicated matters considerably. It was family meeting time, and I realized how brash my decision was. My dad didn't force me to go to MIT, don't get me wr...

By Paul B. '11 When most people I know think of MIT, the first thing to leaps to mind is almost always computer science, physics, or some other aspect of science and engineering. As important as it is, international development isn't exactly something MIT is world-renowned for. Yet.

By Ahmed H. '12 You don't need to have done research, or invented something, or won math competitions, or anything like that to get into MIT. I didn't, and I actually have only met one person so far who has. Don't feel inferior because you didn't win the Intel Fair when you were a freshman. Something like that w...

By Snively '11 I came to MIT wanting to be a mechanical engineer. I love building things, piecing things together, and constructing a product. I did not come to MIT to learn math, chemistry, or biology. As such, I struggled/didn't really enjoy these classes. Yes, I know, it's MIT, "we're" good at these class...

By Laura N. '09 When I do get to MIT, I'm planning to declare Course 2 (Mechanical Engineering) as a major and possibly minor in Course 17 (Political Science). WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG. Here's a photo of me posing with Susan Hockfield during Orientation of freshman year:

By Chris M. '12 I don't know if you can read that tiny text but apparently there is a low-res version for people with speeds "lower than 28.8 kbps" Lower than 28.8kbps?! I didn't even know that was possible!! Once again though, it's hard to blame them, I mean after all this is new technology, if we want an examp...

Last week I was in Boston to moderate a panel at the MIT Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference — one of those tech shindigs so expensive I can only attend as hired help. My panel was on parallel computing and it produced this column and another I’ll file early next week. This we...

By Matt McGann '00 Rowing: 7 MIT rowers, 10 Olympic Games Fencing: 2 MIT fencers, 2 medals Track and Field: 2 MIT athletes, 1 medal Skiing: 1 MIT skier, 2 Olympic Games Rifle: 1 MIT marksman Skeleton: 1 MIT slider Tae Kwon Do: 1 MIT Taekwondoist Wrestling: 1 MIT wrestler

By Paul B. '11 MIT Medlinks MIT Emergency Medical Services (EMTs) MIT Police Homepage MIT Nightline: 617-253-8800 (anonymous peer-listening service run by student volunteers) Boston Area Rape Crisis Center: 1-800-841-8371 MIT Emergency Phone Numbers

By Paul B. '11 Ben: Welcome Susan Hockfield MIT celebrates the inauguration of its sixteenth president, Dr. Susan Hockfield. Melis: 10 things I love about MIT Reason #11: MIT students make awesome lists. Technology Karen: Inbox Insanity This entry is so true. And kind of sad.

By Karen F. '11 Basically, some kids with bikes from Harvard and MIT meet up on Thursdays for a nice bike ride to a new ice cream place around Boston. Did you HEAR that?! Ice cream, biking AND inter-collegiate-ness. If that's not the best idea ever, I don't know what is.

By Cambridge Program The Cambridge-MIT Institute was founded to make two of the world's best universities better. In 1970, Dean of Institute Relations at MIT, Benson R. Snyder, published a book entitled "The Hidden Curriculum." In this book, Snyder provides a sweeping critique of MIT and a culture of bible-co...

By Chris S. '11 Around the same time, the brothers of Sigma Phi Epsilon invited Susan Hockfield over for dinner. Over a classy dinner at the fraternity house, we discussed everything from the vision of MIT, the state of the Institute, even about iHouse (the "living-learning community" dorm) that I'm li...

By Bryan O. '07 Since this is ostensibly a CPW entry, I guess I should talk about my CPW. Overall, my CPW was pretty tame. Keep in mind this is saying tame for CPW - this is a lot like saying west campus people are normal (they are, for MIT). the housing/dining info session

By Oliver Mentken Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and los...

By Snively '11 This story is not really meant to be depressing, it's meant to show that MIT can be too hard, absolutely, but you'll know it. Many of my classes are hard (2.001, 8.02, 18.03, etc) but I can do them if I put in the work. Sometimes it's not fun, but it is feasible. If you get a class that seems impossible bu...

By Paul B. '11 Finally, we come to the humanities section of my life. Because MIT requires all students to take 8 classes in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, most students fulfill that requirement by taking one "HASS" class each semester they're here. Last semester, though, I took four scienc...

By Sam M. '07 Yo, I'm in grad school. How's that going? Well, not too bad. In a way, I can't seem to ever get away from MIT. Half the books I use in my graduate classes were written by my MIT professors. During the first week of my product design and development class last semester, we were assigned a reading abou...

By Melis A. '08 The Undergraduate Association (UA) is composed of elected students who represent students in matters concerning the Institute. The goals of the UA include planning undergraduate events, voicing student concerns, and serving as a link between the student body and the Institute admin...

By Jess K. '10 MIT-EMS (Emergency Medical Service) is a student-run volunteer ambulance service that provides basic life support to the MIT campus in Cambridge, as well as part of Boston, and runs 24/7 - which means a large number of greatly desired overnight shifts, many of which I have been taking la...

By Jess K. '10 I'm certainly not trying to pawn off my indecision entirely on our education system - in many ways I was very lucky, because I got to take and experience a diverse selection of classes that covered a lot of academic bases. It was very easy to take all the challenging classes in math, science, E...

By Karen F. '11 Luckily, it's not in Chicago. It's in Massachusetts, and not a day has gone by without me thinking "TGI Boston" (even though we're actually in Cambridge) at least once. This is because Boston is an unbelievably cool city. From the music scene to the history and diversity and proximity of othe...

By Paul B. '11 A lot can happen in a semester, especially a semester at MIT. In retrospect, I realize that - in spite of reading the blogs, in spite of talking to upperclassmen and alumni, in spite of going to CPW - I really had very little idea of what college life is like. People talk a lot about the "transitio...

By Ben Jones My first interviewee is Michael Epstein, who graduated from MIT with a Masters in Comparative Media Studies and then went on to create Untravel Media with three other MIT grads. If you visited MIT in early September, perhaps you even used one of their mobile media tours to explore the Stata...

By jon petitt After making his public stand against what he claimed to be systemic racism in the MIT tenure process, Sherley had promised that even after the end of his appointment to the faculty he would stay at the University. In early June Frank Douglas a significant player in the biomedical field at M...

By Josh(jumbehr@gmail.com) The blood-vessel wall is a complicated structure," says Elazer Edelman, director of the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Engineering Center and cofounder of Pervasis. When the endothelium is damaged, it leads to a condition called intimal hyperplasia--an abnormal growth of smooth muscle ce...

By Peter Suber In the late 1990s, when everybody wanted to take advantage of the money-making opportunities offered by the internet, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided that it, too, wanted a slice of the action. MIT was, and still is, one of the most prestigious universities in the wo...

By Michael According to the MIT Press Office and MIT's Tech Review, a team of scientists from the institute's Center for Biological Engineering developed a novel, utrasensitive NMR probe, that has the potential to revolutionize research in genetics and protein analysis: The new highly sensiti...

By Michael Now, through studying nontoxic yeast prions, scientists at MIT and the Whitehead Institute have discovered small but critical regions within prions that determine much of their behavior. MIT Tech Review: Prion Infectivity Pinpointed ...

By Michael Some observers say that Z-Tech's technology, while an improvement over mammography, needs to perform dramatically better if the aim is to encourage regular screening of the population at an earlier age. The worry is that false positives, even when there are fewer compared with mammogr...