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Faculty Profile: Olivier de Weck
Olivier de Weck designs evolving systems to confront technological and economic uncertainty. There’s a constant balancing act in Olivier de Weck’s work. He designs systems for water and power delivery,...
Are You Smart Enough to Be at MIT?
Attacking the smart versus non-smart cliché The Letter: It is mid-April. You receive an email from the MIT graduate office congratulating you on your admission to MIT. You are overjoyed....
Working from 0 to 1 instead of from n to n+1
Considering an academic career After pondering for a long time whether I should choose an academic career, I started to rediscover the motivation that originally led me to become a...
Culture Goes Beyond Your Lab
Appreciating the quirks and stories that makes MIT special When I started grad school, I met the other graduate students in the lab – most of whom, unlike me, had...
Boston Left?
Lessons learned from driving in Boston During my first experience driving in Boston I was waiting at an intersection on campus (Vassar and Mass Ave), my co-pilot, a fellow grad...
How to Combat Homesickness
Building your village in Boston It’s a small thing, ordering a coffee. Most of us do it, in some cases several times a day (or more likely several times an...
The Grad School Cha-Cha
Scientists and engineers dance too! “Nope,” I told the girl I was dating in high school, “I don’t dance.” And I meant it. Or at least I thought I did...
Stress Mechanics for Graduate Students
A highly rigorous investigation into the avoidance of cracking under strain MIT is a crazy place, there’s no doubt about that. But just because you’re in a crazy place doesn’t...
Perfection versus Persistance
How I got into grad school A skinny envelope containing a fat “No”: my first rejection. I’d been confident of my eventual acceptance to Penn State’s Schreyer Honors College, and...
Advising Advice
What should you look for when choosing an advisor? At the end of my second year at MIT, I chose to switch to a different advisor, based on our overlapping...