Massachusetts Institute of Technology

My trip to Boston began with the now-familiar 7 am to the bus station-at the airport by 10 am routine…check in, sit around, and wait for my plane. It left only slightly delayed, and we actually made up the time in the air even though we had to circle around Boston for a bit. It was beautiful to come into Boston from the west, travel all the way past the city across the ocean, and then loop south to land at Logan. It really is quite amazing how small everything looks from that bird's eye view. It's almost beyond comprehension, especially when you think about how much is really going on down there within the streets and homes.

A couple of friends picked me up from the airport, and we drove through the winding streets of the Boston suburbs to get out to Needham. One of the odd things about Massachusetts is that it doesn't have the same sort of street gradation as Minnesota does...in St. Paul, the most-traveled streets are larger – two or even three lanes each way perhaps. In Massachusetts, the busiest street could be only one lane each way and through a residential area. There is no correlation between size and traffic level, which is just plain nonsensical.

Upon making it into town, I put my stuff down and had dinner in the cafeteria. Trays are such an abnormal part of the meal, but it did impress me that Sodexho was able to produce such delicious food. Granted, they only have to cook for 300 students, but the quality improves considerably when you lose an order of magnitude.

After helping my friends study biology for awhile (they're engineers) I pretty much fell into bed. I seem to be operating under a peculiar brand of exhaustion right now. I can't wait until finals are over. I need to just sleep for awhile. A long, long, while.

I got up at 5:30, got dressed in my suit, and my friend drove me to Eliot, the Green line station nearest to where he lives in Needham. A two-part train comes every five minutes for the morning commute; it is a well-executed system that must be really nice if you work downtown and want a reliable way to get from home to your job every day. I transferred at Park Street and caught the Red line up to Kendall/MIT and felt very nostalgic exiting the T across the street from my old haunt, Au Bon Pain (this past summer, MIT gave us our food allowance as TechCash, a form of payment that was only useful at certain places, one of them being a Panera-like chain which I ate at, oh, four to five times a week).


I arrived a bit early, and chatted with Doug Lauffenburger, the head of the program, for a little bit. I met him this past summer, and he seems like a great professor who really wants to encourage the growth and development of his students, not just use them for free labor. Dr. Alan Grodzinsky also spoke for some time about the program, but unfortunately (like all of the visits I have been on) it is hard to get a good sense of what exactly the classes are like until you actually talk to students. Apparently, I’d really have to step up my math skills and learn multi-variable calculus and differential equations during the summer, but I think I’d be reviewing concepts this summer no matter what program I will be attending.

All in all, the thing that struck me the most about MIT’s program was that none of the people involved with the program…professors, students, and staff….thought my biology backgrounds was a detriment to my experience and ability to flourish in the bioengineering department. I have felt at almost every school previous to this that I have had to justify my choice of being a biology major at a small liberal arts university. Kind of a shame.

I had my first interview with Dr. Harvey Lodish, and instead of interviewing, we talked about patent law. Now, law scares me. And I do not under any circumstances want to be a patent lawyer. But, the work he has done to make science explainable to the layperson is fantastic.

We walked together to the faculty club for lunch, which was a delicious mix of Moroccan cous cous, field greens, breads, and of course, a huge slice of chocolate truffle cake. So good! Each table had two professors and six students, and they asked us a variety of questions during the meal, including the cursory “Why do you do science?” question, at which point another student said, “Well, I want to help people.” Dr. Bevin Engelward, one of the professors, smiled and said, “When I talked about this with my PI my first year of graduate school, he said that if I really wanted to save lives, becoming a lobbyist against smoking would save many, many, more lives than a life in science ever would.” I responded, saying, “That’s all well and good, but it’s all about that balance between what you love and what you do well…being an effective scientist will be worth much more than an ineffective lobbyist.” Bevin absolutely beamed. I don’t think I’ve had someone respond to that statement so well ever in my life. Both of the professors were from cooler climates and had spent time at UCB/UCSF, and both emphatically understood and appreciated my want of seasons and snow (which was nice to hear. I’m glad I’m not crazy to love the change of weather throughout the year).

After lunch, there was a question and answer session with graduate students (sans professors, of course). We talked about the stipend, living in Cambridge, commute time, relationships with classmates, and the life of an MIT graduate student. Apparently, one of the reasons the program works so well is because everyone come in with a different background and specialty ends up helping and cooperating with other students to make up for deficiencies. For example, as a biologist, I would be able to help a straight-up mechanical engineer with cell biology, while she would help me with MatLab and some of the more difficult mathematical concepts. It is a straightforward recognition very early on in graduate school that no one of us will have all the answers, and it is important for us to rely on and cooperate with others to complete a project as efficiently as possible. I think the classes are as much to teach us bioengineering as to teach us collaboration.

During the visit, I was able to catch up with Bryan, a friend who UROPed in Linda Griffith’s lab as an undergraduate (UROP = undergraduate research opportunities program), as well as Nicole Casanovas, a friend from the summer who was also interviewing for the program. She lives in Puerto Rico, and we all joked that we should have a BE-REU reunion in San Jose during some spring break.

I had three additional interviews that afternoon. The first was with Dr. David Schauer, a professor who works with bacterial parthenogenesis of bacteria in the digestive tract. We talked quite a bit about options for research as well as more about life at MIT.

My next interview was with Dr. Leona Samson, a professor in the department of toxicology that does work with DNA damage and repair. She is originally from England, and considers herself a straight biologist that somehow ended up working in systems biology and bioengineering.

My last interview was quite different: I walked into Dr. Bevin Engelward’s office, and she said, “This is going to be a really short interview, because I think you’re a fantastic candidate, you put forth a stupendous application, and I think you should come here. So, I’m going to have you talk with some of my students about current projects in my lab.” So, I talked a bit with two of her students instead. Crazy.

Following the interviews, the students gathered in the lecture room again to hear more about the specific labs of certain professors, and we heard everything from bone tissue regrowth to research on malaria. MIT definitely has a wide variety of research options…

Next on the docket was dinner at John Harvard’s, a bar/pub thing in Harvard Square. It was a very loud place to eat, but we were still able to talk things over with graduate students. We took the #1 bus back to MIT, and most went on to the bars when I got off at 77 Mass Ave and went back into lab to talk with Alexandria (the researcher I worked with this past summer). Since she is leaving to go on to a post-doc, she wanted to have me come into lab and do a few experiments on Monday with Lorenna, the second-year graduate student that is taking over my general project. Due to Massachusetts’s odd liberal but puritan laws, the subway system closes at midnight, so I had to leave MIT around 10:30 to make sure I could get back to Needham on time.

The next day began with breakfast and a poster session with graduate students followed by additional research presentations. I find that I always wish I had much more time to hear about different projects and research. Fifteen minutes just isn’t enough.


We had bag lunches with the faculty after their presentations, followed by lab tours and a campus tour. There is a brand new graduate apartment building called Syn-Pac (Sydney Pacific) that is absolutely gorgeous…I just wish that the kitchen was the size of my bedroom and the bedroom was the size of my kitchen. The stove is so small, and I find myself spoiled by the big kitchen in my house. Apartments are also a viable option, but a great majority of students live in on-campus housing their first year and then go on from there to decide where they would like to live in Cambridge or Boston. I ended up skipping the trolley tour (since I did the same one this summer) and went into lab to prepare protocol for Monday. We me at Asgard for dinner, an Irish pub near Central Square, just in time for the St. Patrick’s Day rush. I really wish they had just given us money to visit a restaurant for Restaurant Week, but alas…slightly bad buffet food instead. That night, quite a few graduate students gathered at the party room at the top of Tack (another one of the graduate student dorms) to enjoy the great views and meeting the prospective students.

It was extremely difficult to look at other schools in a completely unbiased fashion during this process after having such a fantastic experience this past summer at MIT. Even though I don’t understand calculus, have never lived on the East Coast, and went to a small liberal arts school in the middle of Illinois, it seems to be such a good fit. Instead of seeing me as someone who hasn’t studied enough engineering or math, they see me a person who can make substantial contributions to their department. And that is pretty darn cool.