In this video, USA Today highlights Tiera Guinn, an MIT student who is working on designing rocket components for NASA while she completes her senior year at MIT. Guinn explains that her parents always told her that "others don’t declare the fate of your destiny. It’s up to you to achieve the dream you set in the first place.”
In this CNN video, Maya Dangerfield highlights the team of students from MIT participating in the SpaceX Hyperloop competition. The MIT team finished among the top three teams, and was honored with the Safety and Reliability Award.
Kevin Slane writes for Boston.com that a number of the honorees recognized on Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list are members of the MIT community.
The 2017 Forbes “30 Under 30” lists, an annual recognition of change-makers and innovators in 20 industries, feature a number of MIT students, alumni and researchers.
Graduate students Mohammad Ghassemi and Tuka Al Hanai write for Salon about an app they developed aimed at connecting people from different backgrounds. Ghassemi and Al Hanai note that about a third of the app’s users “report having made a lasting friend, someone they keep in touch with regularly.”
A team of MIT students has developed a device that can convert text to braille in real-time, reports Devin Thorpe for Forbes. Undergrad Jialin Shi explains that the team hopes the device “will be able to increase the braille literacy rate, and in turn, increase the employment rate of adults with significant vision loss.”
The Atlantic spotlights MIT’s Hacking Arts event, which is aimed at igniting innovation within the creative arts, as part of their "Saturday Night in America" video series. “Something like a hackathon is releasing this pent up hunger, to stretch the imagination, to work with a lot of people, to get down and just build something,” says grad student Helen Smith, co-director of Hacking Arts.
Pimploy Phongsirivech of Boston Magazine writes about MIT’s Hacking Arts Festival, which brought together artists, entrepreneurs, engineers, designers and scientists working at the intersection of art and technology. Phongsirivech writes that the event was a “collaborative effort to not only envision but also to actualize the future.”
Jayesh Kannan, a graduate student in the Sloan School of Management, writes for the Financial Times about how technology is changing the recruitment process for business school graduates. “Like pretty much everything in the 21st century, the recruiting process today is no less immune to ‘disruptive’ forces: evolving student interest, a changing landscape of recruiters and technology."
Gabrielle Emanuel reports for WGBH that MIT students shared their hopes and fears following the 2016 election on sheets of paper wrapped around columns in Lobby 7. “It wasn’t long before the sheets were filled with notes scribbled in many different languages. There were famous quotes and personal confessions. There were pleas for understanding and calls for action.”
President L. Rafael Reif speaks with Federico Kukso of El País about the MIT Campaign for a Better World and the need to educate students prepared to tackle society’s most pressing challenges. MIT is “an intellectually explosive, unique place,” says Reif, adding that “we value intelligence, passion, curiosity.”
MIT alumna Margaret Guo was named the 2016 NCAA Woman of the Year during a ceremony in Indianapolis, reports Emily McCarthy for The Boston Globe. Guo says the award “reflects the amount of support I’ve had and the people around me who have pushed me to become better than I could have been by myself.”
Michael Rosenwald of The Washington Post writes about John Urschel, an MIT graduate student and Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman, and his love for math and football. “I’m living an amazing quality of life. I get to play football. I get to play math. I get to play chess,” Urschel says.
Erandi Palihakkara writes for The Huffington Post about the Viet Youth Projects Conference, an event held at MIT and co-organized by undergraduate Trinh Nguyen, aimed at bringing together Vietnamese youths focused on developing innovative solutions for social problems. The conference was a “networking and learning opportunity that brings together the emerging leaders of social change,” Palihakkara writes.
AP reporter Collin Binkley writes about Swapfest, an event hosted by the MIT Radio Society, in conjunction with the MIT UHF Repeater Association, the MIT Electronics Research Society, and the Harvard Wireless Club, “where tinkerers from across New England go to buy and sell the gadgets they can't find in stores.”