MIT is a buffet for the mind, a congregation of ideas and their practitioners. If you see piles of food, what do you do? Jump right in and feast. It’s the same principle with MIT. With the depth to know, the bravery to inquire, and the curiosity to seek, you will be feasting too!

With a huge number of brilliant professors, unexplored research ideas, and broad progress to be made across technology in its widest sense, the initiative is yours to seize. Yours is the aim¹ to excavate minerals and bring them to knowledge, to delve into the libraries and understand the finer points of Kolmogorov’s work or two-stage (adaptive) optimization². Nobody said it would be easy; history has, of course, embedded iterations of brilliant minds, from Carl Friedrich Gauss to Norbert Wiener. But there is a glory and love in working diligently to solve problems and advance knowledge. To ascend yourself upwards and capture the beauty and essence of professors’ work or research progress, you need the depth to know.

Some say that, once you ascend to a certain level, the only true limit on your power and reach is your own mind. I disagree. There must also be an element of chutzpah. To link up separate dots, to advance a line of research with a professor, and to understand the current frontier of progress, you must have academic and interpersonal courage. The former involves qualities you’d expect in research: the nerve to dissent in research, the resolve to pioneer a new field. The latter includes suggesting ideas to departments, asking for volunteers in projects, and discussing with professors about their work and yours. As is seen, the conversion of thoughts and ideas to actions takes two main factors: knowledge and audacity. This latter factor: The bravery to inquire.

Establishing a base of depth and bravery is great; I don’t think there’s a third fundamental quality necessary to advance oneself. To preserve success, one needs to establish momentum³. To do so, one employs a technique often associated with childhood: curiosity! When researching or pondering ideas, curiosity is naturally generated, as surely as sweat is produced with every play in football. Experiment, ask others questions, send surveys to the student populace, do it all and then repeat! Make MIT your place—because it is! Such is the curiosity to seek.

The depth to know, the bravery to inquire, and the curiosity to seek will propel you to glory, and as a reward, produce joy and purpose. You need not nail down exactly what drives you or makes you happy, but you are driven, and you are happy, and that’s all that matters.

Footnotes

¹ I could’ve also chosen a “Hail to the Chief” parody here, e.g. “Yours is the aim to make humanity smarter / This you will do, that is our strong, firm belief”.

² Prof. Alexandre Jacquillat calls it two-stage optimization. Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas calls it adaptive optimization.

³ See my article “A Battle Against the Dying Flame” for my view on momentum.