On Tuesday I will be returning to MIT. Even though I graduated well over a decade ago, my feelings about the place remain complex. It has left a taste in my mouth that could be approximated by sipping on a lovely barolo right after touching a battery to your tongue. Memories of emotions from that time are a muddled mix of joy and shock – like having a bucket of cold water dumped on your head while being informed you’ve gotten a much larger than expected tax refund. IHTFP (I Hate This …cough… Fabulous …cough… Place) is the nearly-official school motto for many good reasons. Yet MIT has an incredibly strong alumni community that donates heavily. What’s the source of the love/hate? Perhaps a personal anecdote might help explain.

When I was an undergrad, I was having a lot of trouble with my second-semester physics class. As a result I spent a LOT of time getting tutored by the teaching assistant, a very patient graduate researcher named Wolfgang. God knows how often he had to explain the most basic concepts to me only to watch me drool senseless as my mind struggled pathetically. However, his persistance paid off and I aced the final exam, getting the highest grade in the class, which earned me a C for the course. That’s not a typo – at MIT, a 98% on a final can still leave you with a C overall. Refer back to IHTFP.

About seven years later an article about a recent MIT Nobel Laureate caught my eye. To my surprise, it was talking about Wolfgang! He had won a Nobel Prize for the work he did while he was my tutor (he showed the work to me at the time – I thought it was cool because it had lasers but otherwise had no idea what he was getting on about).

Wolfgang wasn’t a professor, or even anyone particularly notable at MIT – he was just one of many researchers working on an experiment and helping out with some entry level classes along the way. He could have easily brushed me off after it was clear I was a physics retard (day one, really). Instead, he devoted many hours to helping me figure out basic physics, even though I was never going to become a physicist.

My story isn’t as unique as you’d think. It’s actually very typical for MIT, and it happens because some of the smartest people in the world are there and are accessible to students. It’s painful to get through (the level of competition is often unbearable), but at the end most people have had similarly remarkable experiences that stand out above all the hardship.

All that said, I’m very happy that I’m returning as an observer and not as a inmate student.I’m really interested in seeing what cool new technologies are being developed. Who knows, I might even meet a future Nobel laureate who will probably need to explain their technology to me in much the same way Wolfgang had to explain basic physics.