MIT has a bad habit of molding people in unhealthy ways, or worse, breaking them. I want to share something that only a few very close friends know: I didn’t graduate with my class in June. The thought of scraping by a class and a degree with a C or D was so bad that I’d rather fail, and I did just that with not 1 but 2 required classes. My senior year was one of the worst in my life. It took living back at home and away from the specter of toxicity for me to pull it together in the next semester.

To an even more drastic degree, one of our mutual friends dropped out that year and cut all ties to MIT because of mental health issues exacerbated by the expectations and stress of our school. You know something is drastically wrong when almost everyone has some deeply buried memories related to MIT.

In response to the quote about ego, I would say that it’s those that have strong egos that are most at risk. Not many of those people can live up to their sense of themselves at MIT. Happiness and optimism are hard to come by when reality clashes with aspirations so often. Suicide may be the end of the road, and very few students stray that far, but there are many victims, unnoticed, along the path.