The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT

This book gives a first hand account of one man's journey through graduate school at MIT. I will be attending this fall as a freshman undergraduate and from what I've seen of MIT myself and heard from friends who are current students. This book, although the story is 20 years old, accurately describes life at the institute. It is a great read for anyone who is considering MIT or is just curious about it from the point of view of a student. LOVED IT!!!

This is an excellent read if you want to be able to stand in Lobby 7 (the big dome, 77 Mass Ave.) and understand what it is that makes this place tick. It's easy to be discouraged when Pepper doesn't pass his qualifiers, but the reader learns in the first few chapters that he is not the typical grad student. I would read this going into MIT, just as to not be caught off-guard when presented with the issues that the author gives care to (professors, exams, competition, tooling, suicide, theses). Sporting perhaps a dark outlook, The Idea Factory is a compilation of the major steps in Pepper's re-education toward his thesis. While he is able to quote professors to their exact words, the author apparently did not have the time to journal the more fun parts of his MIT life. Accordingly, some readers might be disappointed by a lack of social exploits. There are enough mind-games and powerful characters to outweigh this, though.

I got this book when I was in Cambridge for a project. It is a great book. After reading this book it made me realize why MIT is different from others. Even though it is life of a typical graduate student but he presented in a good way. Sometimes you feel sympathetic to the characters, but they outweigh the feeling of getting a degree from MIT. The feeling of walking on the campus is electrifying. I wish I could take atleast a class from MIT.

The main point of this book is that access to higher education should be based on merit, not on racial, ethnic or gender quotas. The author chose to study for a master¹s degree at MIT instead of Harvard because MIT was ³merit-oriented² (p 51). Unlike Harvard, at MIT, ³If you can¹t produce, you¹re history². (p. 115). As supporting evidence, the author provides a diary of his successes and failures during his three years at MIT. He works very hard. He earns a master¹s degree, but does not qualify for the PhD program. He does learn how to think, how to solve engineering problems. Along the way, some of his friends jump or are pushed out of school. One good friend commits suicide. His only criticism is that MIT should be more human.Of course, there is the stereotypical black professor who argues that, ³MIT is a racist, sexist institution.² (p 194). As evidence, the professor alleges that when he was an undergraduate some white professor rejected his project notebook because he was black. and that he threw the notebook in a bon fire and cried while it burned. In his prejudiced mind, there was no possibility that his notebook lacked merit. He also tacitly accuses the author of racism because the author asked him a difficult question during a stump-the-professor session. This professor is a master at playing the race card. But I doubt that even he would fly in an aircraft that was engineered by a person whose only qualification was membership in a racial and ethnic minority group.This book proves that at MIT, ³merit² is not a dirty word. Maybe that¹s why MIT is arguably the best engineering school in the world.

After almost 20 years in and around MIT, I've encountered only two great MIT books: (1) A.R. Gurney's out-of-print novel _The Snow Ball_; (2) Pepper White's book. White went to a top undergraduate school and was very strong academically. Yet he was completely unprepared for MIT grad school and couldn't believe how easily the folks who'd been MIT undergrads took everything in stride. He didn't know that they'd had exactly the same experience four years before! It is all here. Losing the girlfriend. Being surrounded by nerds. Scrambling for funding. Being called a jackinape by professors. Every MIT kid should make his parents read this book, if only to increase the supply of mailed-in CARE packages.