what i learned at mit
how to walk through walls
23.09.26
I just graduated from MIT with a degree in physics. I certainly did learn some physics; I can talk at a reasonable undergraduate level about quantum and GR, about thermodynamics and particle physics. However, I am likely never going to use any of that again in my life. I've also done some AI research, which I might do for a little bit, but will probably stop doing soon.
I didn't go to MIT to learn physics, I knew that going in - I went there to find my crew and decide what to do. However, looking back it definitely did teach me something valuable, something that I intend to use for the rest of my life.
My experience at MIT is irreversibly tied up with my dorm, East Campus. I've written about it before, others have written about it before, whole books have been written about it before. It's the most incredible place on earth and I feel so lucky to have been such a part of it. EC is a dormitory that feels like it's run by the students; you can paint on the walls, we build our own stuff, the whole place pulses with this emotion and dynamism and excitement - it's Oops, All Weirdos. Part of the magic is that there's 10 different floors which are all their own self-contained living groups, which means there's this kind of magical pluralism; I lived on Putz, which was build-y and wild and loud, and we had prank wars with other floors, we tried to throw better parties than other floors, and that kind of competition kept us putting our energy into making it more and more cool. (It also, of course, generated a lot of middle-school drama, and as with everything on the extremes there is plenty that can be said negatively about EC - if you'd like a chill college experience, you should go to another dorm. Our motto is "The Weak Shall Be Eaten"). Historically it was one of the counterculture dorms, a haven for queer students, but as the world at large has become more accepting that's less of a unique role. Counterculture doesn't really exist now as it did in the 20th century, there's just lots of little cultures joined up by the internet.
Due to the diversity of the communities within, there's not much that unifies East Campus. However, if anything in my mind does, it's the atmosphere of anti-authoritarianism. There's this impression (which has existed forever, as far as I can tell) that there's a constant battle between "the admin" (dark faceless figures who control MIT) and us, and every year there's a chance they'll take it all away, and we have to fight we everything we have to beat them. This is importantly not actually true, or not quite true, but it set up the conflict at the center of my college career.
There's a tradition at East Campus called hacking; it's a kind of urban exploration, similar to night climbing at Cambridge, mixed with performance art. It's an oral tradition and something you have to go to the school itself to experience, so I won't talk about it much, but I spent a lot of my freshman year doing it. The skills required to go hacking are taught to you by older students, and once you really become a hacker, you get a new perspective on the Institute. I used to walk through the tunnels and corridors at night looking for open doors or unusual vents I could slide open. Hacking taught me how to walk through walls.
There wasn’t a room at the Institute I felt that I couldn’t get inside with enough work. You often had to walk around the room, check out all the entrances, the surrounding rooms, the floors above and below. A surprising amount of time you’d find something you could open and get through. If not, you’d find something else of interest to distract you.
Hacking taught me to walk through walls in more ways than one. During my years at East Campus, the dorm was undergoing renovation, and we had to spend time negotiating with the administration the new rules upon our return. I wasn’t in charge of that, but I remember an incident that stuck with me; we wanted to paint on the walls, the administration said no, and they said it was because summer residents (people renting to stay at conferences in the city) wouldn’t want to see whatever edgy art we drew on the walls. We said fine, we’d paint on panels and they could slide them out in the summer. They gave us a locked door and we found a window.
I used this tactic again and again; to get our liquid nitrogen ice cream event ran, to find funding for our giant fort and rollercoaster project. I got my first job at OpenAI by walking through a wall, and I did plenty more when I got there. Arguably I didn’t completely learn this at MIT, since I got in by walking through a wall: I was originally deferred admission and I found a way in by joining the rifle team.
I wrote before about how MIT is artificially hard. The problem sets are punishing, the work is too much, the exams are brutal. I wrote before how the real world, for most people, gets easier; many students say they worked the hardest in their lives when they got there. It never made sense to me why everything was so difficult - the same topics are taught everywhere else and they all learn them just as well; the requirements for all our degrees are much higher and require much more work than most undergrads. I like to think now that the point of this was not to teach me physics, or to “teach me how to learn” or some bullshit, but to put up a big artificial wall and ask me to walk through it. To get comfortable with hard problems and finding ways into them, to get comfortable hacking.
It worries me to see a lot of my classmates graduating and going off to various jobs where they’ll get told what to do. I worry that they never had the same experience as me, this opportunity to stare at a locked room and start trying things. To be clear, you definitely don’t need to start a company to feel this way - there are walls everywhere for those with eyes to see. All engineers are given hard problems that nobody has solved before and asked to figure it out. However, there’s a constant psyop perpetrated by the world unto all of us that these walls are real, that they’re important, that you have to stand up against the wall and be the tallest. It’s very hard to avoid this pervasive feeling that you have to make do within all these constraints; I find myself falling into it the whole time. The problem you need to solve probably won’t be given to you, you’ll need to figure it out.
I’ve spoken occasionally about why I felt OK going to MIT in the first place. I felt it was often tied up with this problem that we didn’t deserve all these resources, financial and cultural, if we didn’t use them. I know people trust me (well not me personally, but us) to solve the hardest problems, and that if we don’t nobody else will. I am motivated by a kind of debt I feel I owe to society, for giving me that trust in the first place. To complete that service to everyone else, I’ll probably need to walk through a ton of walls, and I’m very glad I got to practice.