Volume 144: Year in Review
From the Editor-in-Chief
2024 at the Institute was a year of promise and passion, partisanship and protest. We at The Tech had the privilege of witnessing and covering it all. Yet a lingering question remains: what is our place in the world as engineers, scientists, and innovators?
There is certainly something indomitable about MIT’s can-do spirit. We watched our peers and professors ascend to the pinnacles of their fields, from Rhodes Scholars to HHMI Investigators, from Schwarzman Scholars to several Nobel Laureates. The Tech covered all of that and more, profiling teams pushing the frontiers across several dimensions of research, from clinically relevant bladder models to integrated machine learning approaches in material science. Mens et manus is alive and well.
The Institute dreamed big and adapted to the times. In just her second year of tenure as MIT’s President, Sally Kornbluth unveiled three landmark programs across the humanities, human health, and climate. Just earlier this week, the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium was announced. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling overturning affirmative action practices in admissions, MIT affirmed its commitment to attracting the best and the brightest in admitting one hundred students through the QuestBridge Scholars Match program. In an era of inflation and economic instability, the Institute became tuition free for undergraduates with family incomes under $200,000.
However, it’s worth noting that while the pursuit of objective truth and the establishment of new initiatives may be alluring, we have a duty to grapple with the pressing questions in our society as the rational thinkers that we hold ourselves to be. It is the perspective and wisdom we bring that transforms murkiness into clarity, dilemma into action.
We are a composite of our identities, pasts, fears and dreams: perceptibly and imperceptibly, we are constantly being molded by the lived experience. While we saw so much good, we saw some of our own and others far less fortunate than ourselves struggle against an interminable gale of authority, avarice and acrimony, their pleas for help and change buffeted and lost.
The war in Gaza galvanized introspection within MIT’s own’s walls. Months of student protests, and several arrests and suspensions later, an Institute that has inherited and embodies a global reputation of forward progress continues to struggle to reconcile the polarized views of the war, pulled apart in several directions by the forces of the status quo. To some, how neutrality and silence could somehow lead the community along a path to a common ground remains puzzling.
And there was more. The ascendancy of President Trump to the Oval Office for the second time has left many of us questioning whether the American Experiment will last and importantly, questioning whether we are still able to pursue our dreams in a society that is deeply embittered, desperate, and cynical.
In these times, it does not suffice to be a mere witness. Fear of reprisal or conflict cannot and should not supersede the instinctual human urge for understanding. We are encouraged and trained in the classroom and the lab to pursue difficult questions even if we are wrong. What keeps us from asking the same questions of the world around us?
Amidst all of this, Volume 144 of The Tech was a place where we raised such existential social questions of our time. We are blacksmiths at the forge of our keyboards, hammering, smithing, and molding words into ideas and stories, all whilst the sparks fly. Indeed, sparks have flown this year. Nonetheless, we persisted, turning around pieces driven by nothing else than our volition and our will. There is an existential possibility, urgency, and responsibility when we write.
Here at The Tech, we’re not simply part of history: we construct it. Each story we put out is a thread in the tapestry of human connection between the present and future MIT. While I hope that I have upheld these ideals as the editor-in-chief, I am fully confident that my successor will elevate our work to further amplify voices otherwise drowned out in a din of inattention and indifference.
I would be remiss to not acknowledge the team that I’ve had the honor of working with this year, from the editors to staff. Over these past years as news editor and editor-in-chief, I have had the privilege of reading hundreds of pieces that have gone to print, and let me assure you there is no finer and truer expression of excitement, energy, and angst than that conveyed within the lines of this paper.
I was a sophomore when I took on the role of editor-in-chief. I understood the nature of the task at hand, yet I was young, and perhaps a bit naïve. With 2024 in the rearview mirror, I consider Volume 144 to not just be a formative experience in my undergraduate years, but something I will look back upon in five, ten, forty years, and say, “Wow, I was a part of that.” The Tech has truly reshaped me: it has taken my perspective, broken it down, and built it back up again.
So, what is my final ask? Develop a new direction in your life, a vector of kindness and empathy. To step back for a moment, we have seen what happens when diametrically opposed directions collide, the beliefs with which we hold sacred, suddenly escalate into a point of tension, a spark for conflict. But if anyone knows what happens when vectors of equal magnitude and opposite direction collide, they sum precisely to 0. So take the time to educate yourself. Keep asking the tough questions. It takes a bit of listening, a bit of empathy, and a bit of heart to redirect yourself. Trust that others will too. With that, we’ll move towards a better tomorrow.
Alex Tang, Volume 144 Editor-in-Chief
News
Last year, we wrote, “The stories we write will become the story of this Institute.” The events of the past year on this campus and in the world could have been truer to that statement.
Amidst the protests, arrests, and suspensions, we looked to past issues of The Tech, namely those from the anti-war movement during Vietnam in the late 1960s and 1970s. So much has changed, yet so little has changed. The tension, emotion, and grief are as palpable through the images and words published fifty years ago as they are in the news articles in Volume 144. The last year will not fade from the minds of many: it will be imprinted in us and the legacy of this Institution for decades to come.
MIT has needed to adapt to a society in rapid flux. The Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action and recent initiatives by the Trump administration have threatened marginalized members of our community and the groups that exist to support them. While still a work in progress, the Institute found a way, becoming tuition-free for students with family incomes below $200,000, and admitting 100 Questbridge students in the Class of 2029, the highest ever to date. As the foremost institution of science and technology in the world, we embarked upon a journey towards shaping the MIT of tomorrow with several initiatives, from the Climate Project to the Health and Life Sciences Collaborative.
Volume 144 demanded the most from us as a department and as a paper. We leaned on each other, simultaneously processing the events of our times and working to share them with the world. We pursued our mission of constructing history so that those tomorrow will not forget: each paragraph, a portal, each word, a window into MIT in 2024.
We will continue to strive for excellence in Volume 145.
Vivian Hir, Volume 145 News Editor
Alex Tang, Volume 144 Editor-in-Chief
Campus Life
Campus Life has always occupied a unique niche among our contributors—what that niche is can be difficult to describe, because it covers such a wide range of topics. From anonymous vents to thoughtful essays to loved ones to the revival of Auntie Matter to profiles of students, Campus Life truly does it all. As our previous editor Vivian Hir ‘25 noted, each of these articles truly has a unique voice. Her analogy that these seemingly disjoint topics come together like an orchestra has proven true. Campus Life is always in flux—we truly never know what we’re going to get.
I’m proud of how we’ve been able to grow the column. For one thing, we successfully recruited Vi Trinh ‘27 and Susan Hong ‘27 as associate editors for the column, both of whom were invaluable to the editing and reviewing pipeline. A few guest writers also contributed, which is an encouraging sign of successful outreach.
To be clear, there is still room to grow. While turbulent personal essays have dominated in the past, I’m excited to see what our next editor Susan Hong ‘27 does to grow and diversify this column. We have high hopes for Volume 145
Alor Sahoo, Volume 144 Campus Life Editor
Arts
When I joined The Tech as a freshman in the fall of 2021, the arts department was a small yet vibrant section covering what events it could in the midst of the pandemic. I was drawn to the passion the writers seemed to have for the material they were writing about and recognized in them a love for the arts that I also possessed. Though the arts department has changed in many ways, that underlying passion has remained.
This past year, we expanded the department significantly, forging press partnerships with organizations like the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and the Harvard Bookstore. We covered countless BSO concerts as well as MIT events like the MIT Gala, the Family Weekend Concert, and Shakespeare Ensemble’s productions. We listened to a drag queen talk about the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, and we read about the Ukrainian information technology revolution. We ate at (and thoroughly enjoyed) a wide variety of Boston- and Cambridge-area restaurants and listened to charli xcx’s brat on repeat. We watched movies from around the world like Y2K, Megalopolis, and Saripodha Sanivaram, some good and some bad.
V144 was my second year as arts editor, and my last, as a graduating senior. I’m immensely grateful to The Tech for providing a sense of community and a welcoming environment for all of our writers to express their thoughts, connect with like-minded individuals, and grow as artists. I’d like to thank all of our writers, readers, and supporters, and I’m eagerly looking forward to what V145 has in stock for us!
Anahita Srinivasan, Volume 144 Arts Editor
Science
It’s said that journalism is the first draft of history. At The Tech Science, we aim to deconstruct jargon by drawing out stories of science hidden in labs and to build trust by breaking down walls of obscurity. We share stories of faculty and students alike – their successes and slip-ups, their certainty and confusion.
When I arrived at MIT in the fall of 2023, The Tech’s science section was the least active department. With the support of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the Knight Science Journalism program, we began to explore trails that sparked our interest. We welcomed over a dozen undergraduate writers, who wrote about political deepfakes and pareidolia, student-led competitions and events, iconic courses and faculty at the Institute, and esteemed guest speakers, aiming to imbue new life not only to research but to the stories of the people behind it. We ventured out of our comfort zone into stories that needed telling: national budget cuts that hurt researchers here on campus, a responsibility towards diversity in science, efforts for sustainability, and initiatives to encourage machine learning competency and awareness.
The science department published nearly forty articles in Volume 144. With each piece published, a new voice is added to the chorus of endeavors that define MIT. We tell stories of a world we see today and a world we wish to see tomorrow. And with each story, we become the architects of our future.
Thank you to everyone who shared their work and knowledge with us. Thank you to our readers. We look forward to bringing you more stories of science at MIT and the people behind it in Volume 145!
Karie Shen, Volume 144 Science Editor