Meeting classmates and faculty makes me reflect on how they and I have stayed the same and how in other ways we have changed.
Sitting in the Stratton Student Center @MIT the TV screens are new (to me) and display "Congratulations 2013 Graduates"....some very happy families and friends saw the rain-soaked graduation last Friday. It was raining the day I graduated here, so this is a familiar story as we were soaked too.
MIT is rethinking higher education - and invites you to join the conversation at www.Future.MIT.edu
They have been doing so for many years, being the first to offer lectures online at no cost, through MIT OpenCourseWare ....and now EdX is another initiative investigating what the classroom of 2020 will be like. While in Singapore in April, I visited SUTD, the Singapore University of Technology and Design which is a collaboration by MIT and the Singapore government in setting up undergraduate education that emphasizes Active Learning. In brief, this seems to involve work-study all along the way so that theory collides with practice, hypothesis meets reality.
I think its a good thing for students and faculty together to develop the tolerance that is needed to get things done in life and society. Tolerance, for human interaction in all its high and low points, combined with patience, compassion and perseverance will always be needed by those who want to do things at a high bar.
The thing that strikes me as MOST the SAME, in coming back to MIT, is the sense of highly intelligent, highly motivated people wanting to serve the world, by contributing the best they have been endowed with by genes, by family, by experience, and by luck.
It's great to be back, and breathe that air. After being away so long, I needed the refresher!
