What it Means to be an MIT Engineer
I graduated from MIT a week ago. That day, as I walked among the sea of capped and gowned graduates, I realized how this momentous end to my undergraduate career ironically made me feel wholly insignificant. With all of us in our uniform attire receiving our uniform degrees, I was met with two thoughts: (1) Since when were there so many people in my class?? (2) Damn, I’m just one of so many.
What made an MIT degree so special if thousands of people were receiving one today?
Despite the respect that an MIT degree confers, technically these degrees only indicate that the recipient has earned at least average grades and is capable of completing requirements. Not particularly something to be proud of. Graduation makes it difficult to distinguish any one person’s unique experiences or achievements from another’s, instead aggregating everyone into the category of graduate. If you passed the threshold requirements, you walk.
So given how little an MIT degree actually conveys, it seems unreasonable how many assumptions come with it. In internships and causal encounters alike, I’ve been met with unreasonable expectations of my intellect and skill level based solely on the fact that I go to MIT. With no context whatsoever, crazy presumptions arise. There must be something more behind this highly coveted piece of paper.
What does this piece of paper show?
I have a hard time believing it’s a certification of genius. My classmates are hardly the super-geeks typically used to portray MIT students in movies. Perhaps we have something else in common. I came across this article that talks about how being an engineer is just being a problem solver. Whatever concentration you choose, be it computer science, mechanical engineering, or architecture, each just prescribes a different set of tools for problem solving. Maybe our degrees show that we are really good, certified problem solvers.
However, after four years, I’m still far from a mechanical engineering expert and still fumble often. When I started at MIT, I naively thought that 4 years was enough to make me an expert at my chosen discipline. Now, I’m a lot more jaded and feel only a little more knowledgeable about the mechanical engineering practice. This seems to be the result for most of my classmates. Of course there’s the standout students who resemble the media depictions of the MIT student. But the majority of us came in knowing little and came out awe struck by how much more there is to learn.
My classmates and I were all told the stories of wild intellect typical of the MIT narrative and thus, we expected to be exponentially smarter, wittier, and wiser at the end of this four year journey. It didn’t really turn out that way. Missed ideas, forgotten concepts, and some imposter syndrome mixed in left us feeling not that much smarter than when we started. There’s so much more to be learned. After the breakneck speed of learning in secondary school, picking up more abstract, theoretical concepts in college seemed to move at a frustratingly slow pace. Progress was hard to see.
So yes we learned, but not as much as we or the world expected. But although we did not learn as much pure content, we learned other lessons never explicitly taught to us, but internalized in everything we did. MIT serves as a great equalizer in that it challenges everyone, no matter what background you come from. While struggling together, we learned to discard the label of genius for the label of hard-working, and the goal of expert for the goal of lifelong learner. And we learned to be curious.
So after our four years of training as engineers, we are not geniuses, we are not experts, but we can boast curious minds. When an MIT student sees a problem in the world, they try to fix it. Engineering is all about breaking things down to their fundamental components to figure out how to improve, optimize, and innovate. In other words, it’s a discipline of non-stop problem solving.
So although we need more practice before we become even close to experts, MIT has laid the foundation of curiosity to at least begin to live up to our stereotypes. MIT nurtures a curiosity for applying knowledge to solving problems, a precursor to the genius we are expected to achieve over time. And by planting this seed in all of its graduates, it is no wonder that so many great scientists, inventors, and changemakers come from MIT. They don’t leave as fresh-faced graduates with greatness right over the horizon, but the seed of curiosity sprouts into a thirst to solve the unsolved. This thirst is what drives our graduates to learn voraciously, and achieve great things through hard work and a love for learning.
So when I look out into the uniformity of graduates, I am reminded that despite our unique experiences, we all share the same MIT-bred curiosity that will catapult us forward. The sea of nerds before me may not be the smartest or most accomplished, but at least we all share a curiosity for solving the problems in the world.
I’m proud to be one of this unique many.
