The Summer of Ideas

I got 5 internship offers for this summer…more than I expected considering I had zero with a month left in school. I ended up turning down all these offers. Instead I’m living in my fraternity in Boston, unemployed, eating Chipotle every day and bumming around the student center. That’s how my parents would frame it anyway.

In reality, I chose unemployment because I believe this is the most educationally enriching way to spend my time. After two years of college, even at MIT, there are precious few jobs I am uniquely qualified to fill. At any given internship, I will spend two weeks learning about the software used by engineers in the company or familiarizing myself with the code base. There is a prodigious amount of busy work that is not important to learn at this point in my academic life. Now is a time for exploration, yet 99% of my peers will be working in a lab or office, being exposed to a small subset of related problems. No intensive cross-discipline learning is possible, because it is irrelevant to the 9-5 black hole in the the middle of their day.

This summer, I’m trying to build a way of life where a lack of great ideas never limits the usefulness of any hour I spend working. I’ve been at MIT for two years, and I’ve utterly failed to work on meaningful side projects or make good use of the great resources at this school. I’m talking about intellectual capital. If you can identify a problem that’s out there in the wild – an inefficiency in the operation of a company, an bottleneck of production, an unquestioned assumption baked into an academic field – there are people and facilities at MIT to help you solve it.

Unfortunately, that’s a big “if”. A standard academic curriculum entirely fails to plug in students with real industries, real professions, real processes. As engineers and designers, we exist to make new things and improve old ones to improve people’s quality of life. Each hour we spend designing a bridge saves hundreds that would be spent driving around the river.

The world is far from perfect. There are bottlenecks in every process. There are slow processors, broken machines, and poorly designed products all around us. Smart people waste time on mindless tasks. For decades, entire industries have been technologically stagnant and entire demographics have been suffering, underserved.

This all results from one universal inefficiency: the people most familiar with the problem don’t see it as a problem. A lifelong farmer learned long ago the “right way” to dust crops, and would never dream of using drones. A biology researcher may see pipetting as simply “part of the job,” a given, and never dream of an automated system. An economist may have accepted the “rational agent” assumption long ago, but a psychologist has the authority to question it.

Breaking out from this “theory-induced blindness” is a prerequisite for seeing the problems in the world around us.

How is this done? What do you do once these problems are identified? These are the questions I hope to answer this summer, so stay tuned.