# Bringing MIT to the world, and the world to MIT

Data: 11-01-2025 21:39:41

## Lista de Vídeos

1. [The World at MIT: Highlights](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bAuxEOmb0U)
2. [The World at MIT: Akintunde Ibitayo (Tayo) Akinwande](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukZA51BE_QI)
3. [The World at MIT: Daniela Rus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze4zOhGN0c)
4. [The World at MIT: Hashim Sarkis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBOw2V6rkVE)
5. [The World at MIT: Mai Hassan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNISn46b3_M)
6. [The World at MIT: Moungi Bawendi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuHmbZxuTm4)
7. [The World at MIT: Nergis Mavalvala](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Mh4vBEKEA)
8. [The World at MIT: Pattie Maes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HiXfDp3SwY)
9. [The World at MIT: Paulo Lozano](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuGnqaXWgaA)
10. [The World at MIT: Roberto Rigobon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHbeJ--3kC8)
11. [The World at MIT: Sana Aiyar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYKPYBe3wdg)
12. [The World at MIT: Yasheng Huang](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmrzGl5XWeI)

## Transcrições

### The World at MIT: Highlights
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bAuxEOmb0U

Idioma: en

We are a community that is diverse
on who we are, and that forces
our ideas to become better.
Because I have to explain my
idea to a physicist, to an
engineer, and a sociologist.
Usually that would be a joke, you know?
But in this case, it's actually real life.
We're all rational,
compassionate human beings first.
And then, oh, and by the
way, I come from Beirut.
By the way, I come from Macedonia.
By the way, I come here.
It's, it's It's something that we take to
be for granted that we come from somewhere
and we have a unique story to tell.
You know, we celebrate identity,
but we don't essentialize it.
I've always been fascinated in my, you
know, what's the problem I'm solving?
What difference does it make?
I just wanted to contribute
to space exploration.
What is this transition between
an atom and a bulk material?
How do authoritarian regimes
and dictatorships come about?
How do they sustain themselves?
What explains regime durability?
I decided that I would work
on helping people get smarter.
You know, where is the
action happening, right?
MIT's name will come up
eventually, in one way or another.
Walk around the infinite corridor and
suddenly you see a person who wrote a
textbook or the person who won the Nobel
Prize and suddenly it's not any person in
the field, it's THE person in the field.
I mean, that is also inspiring.
There was this draw to MIT because it was
this mecca, really, this place where all
of this amazing research was happening.
You have all these time life
books that were always there.
There in my high school and there
was one specific one on technology or
engineering, and it talked about MIT.
It was always the thought that
MIT is where magic happens and
that was a theme of that book.
So that has always stuck in my head.
What has really made me come to appreciate
MIT is how global MIT really is.
We have a faculty of about
20 in our history department.
Each of the major regions of the world is
represented in terms of the research that
they do, but also where they come from.
I am so inspired every day when
I go to work and I talk to our
students and colleagues about how
technology should be advanced.
People take it for granted.
MIT has world class
engineers and scientists.
We also have world class faculty
doing cutting edge work on
international affairs, on economics,
society, on culture, on history.
It's long been known that if
you want the very best ideas,
you have to look everywhere.
That's how you're going to have access
to a whole range of experiences,
and therefore perspectives.
One of the great things about MIT
is that we emphasize fulfillment.
Do something that is meaningful,
do something that is important, do
something that is for somebody else.
We want whatever we have in our
brain to be actually used and
implemented with our hands, but it's
always with a purpose of service.

---

### The World at MIT: Akintunde Ibitayo (Tayo) Akinwande
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukZA51BE_QI

Idioma: en

Full name, Akintunde Ibitayo Akinwande,
otherwise known as Tayo Akinwande.
I grew up in Nigeria.
The school library, you have all these
time life books that were always there and
there was one specific one on technology
or engineering and it talked about MIT.
It was always the thought that
MIT is where magic happens and
that was the theme of that book.
So that has always stuck in my head.
I still remember the picture
of somebody doing orbital
mechanics, working on the board.
I still want to go find that book
and find which classroom, so I
can go there and do the same.
Offa was a small town,
but now it's a big city.
Petroleum and oil was very prominent.
That was the expectation.
Oh, I'm going to go there
and make a lot of money.
But that did not fascinate me.
The school that I went
to was a boarding school.
The students who were there
before us would take us out in
the evenings to look at stars.
The first satellite went to the
moon and it circumnavigated.
That was my first year.
We couldn't see it, but
we knew it was out there.
But the most fascinating thing for me was
when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.
We were able to see the
pictures, meaning TV pictures.
How did that happen?
What goes on into the radio?
Why could somebody talk
to somebody on the moon?
So those questions are
more interesting to me.
All the radios I could
find I take them apart.
Well, was I able to assemble them?
No.
My father was a vice principal
in a secondary school.
My mother was teaching elementary school.
She always got me on schedule.
And my father was the
one who made me dream.
A perfect combination for me.
The area that I worked on, if
you want to call it, is called
microelectromechanical systems.
It's both electrical, mechanical.
And you build it into a system.
I've always been fascinated in my, you
know, what's the problem I'm solving?
And what difference does it make?
After working in industry for a while,
it dawned on me that I will have more
impact in a university than in a company.
The most, most fascinating to me
was MIT, of all those schools..
Most of the universities you will
not be able to find in one single
project all the expertise you need.
So that's something about MIT.
You will always be able
to go across departments.
It allows inter departmental labs.
And it's the same way
dealing with students.
I've had students from physics,
I've had students from mechanical
engineering, I've had students from
material science and engineering
work with me on different projects.
Anytime I teach a class, undergrad class,
I always learn something by their probing
questions, by what they're looking to
get back gives me new insights sometimes.
And that's always the kind of
environment I like, where I'm
learning something new all the time.

---

### The World at MIT: Daniela Rus
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze4zOhGN0c

Idioma: en

I was born in Romania, and I
grew up during communist years.
It was a very different experience than
what we have in the United States today.
I was a regular child.
I loved reading science fiction, I loved
playing with friends, and I was good in
school, so I was a, I was a good student.
I enjoyed learning.
School was very rigorous.
The leadership believed that every school
student needed to work in a factory.
So, for one week every month, I was
working in a factory that produced
spare parts for locomotives.
During those times, I learned how
to operate complex machines that
help us make things, like the lathe.
I made screws from scratch.
And I learned how to appreciate
the material side of things
and the physics of things.
While I was a really good student and I
enjoyed everything from math to history
to physics to languages to literature, the
work in the factory did not really seem
that, um, important and interesting to me.
As the math we learned in school
became increasingly more abstract, I
realized that I wanted to do something
mathy and science, yes, but also
something with a practical angle.
And so now, here I am at MIT,
essentially bringing together the
world of science and math together
with the world of making things.
So I think that working in that
factory has actually been very
beneficial in my work with robots, in
my work to design new robot systems.
My family left Romania.
We moved to the United States and
then at one point I met John Hopcroft,
who is one of the founding fathers
of the field of computer science.
And at this talk he said, well,
computer science is solved.
And it is time for the grand applications.
And John was very interested
in computation that interacted
with the physical world.
And so at the time, this idea that you can
make embodied machines that can compute
and perform and impact the physical
world as robots, was extraordinarily
inspiring and fascinating.
So I decided to go to Cornell and I
worked with John Hopcroft on robotics.
And I guess the rest is history.
I've been here for two decades and
it's been an extraordinary journey.
I have learned so much from my
students and from my colleagues, and
I am so inspired every day when I go
to work and I talk to our students
and colleagues about how technology
should be advanced, what technology
can do to make the world better.
How can computing enhance
how we live, work, and play?

---

### The World at MIT: Hashim Sarkis
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBOw2V6rkVE

Idioma: en

I grew up in Beirut in the
late 60s and early 70s.
We had, like many houses, we had
Persian rugs on the floor at home
to keep you warm in the winter.
And I would drive my cars, my
matchbox cars around them and I would
build forms that were corresponding
to the patterns of the carpets.
Therefore I understood how complex a
system, visual system, making a rug
is and how complex a craft it is.
That perhaps is the most
formative of my visual education.
I lost my father when I was six years old.
He died of a heart attack.
My mother kept the family together.
She, uh, kept us focused on our education.
She was an educator herself.
She still is in some ways.
I was also always keen
about the visual world.
The arts, architecture from my childhood.
I think that was influenced a lot by the
fact that I grew up in a house that my
father who was a contractor, designed
with two architect friends of his.
It was a tiny house, but
it was a beautiful house.
And it had a lot of the modernist
features, but it also had a lot of nature
in the house, and house and nature.
It was different.
The walls were colored.
There were big glass doors that
slide, and you could mix inside and
outside in a way that the regular
apartment building in Beirut couldn't.
So it stood out.
And so that shaped my personality quite
a bit, and my interest in architecture.
Ever since I was three years old,
I said, I want to be an architect.
I never knew what it meant, but I
just wanted to do something like that.
Beirut was the center of the universe.
Beach, sun, mountains, ski.
It was truly just a lively,
chaotic, messy, celebratory
space that we grew up in.
Until it turned violent in 1975.
At that time, I was about 10 years old
and, uh, I had to go to boarding school.
In the end, even though I had to leave
Lebanon because of the war that kept going
on and continued my studies in the U.
S., Beirut is still with me in many forms.
I am kind of in a Beirut
state of mind always.
The war kept going on, so I said
I might as well get a master's.
I went to Harvard, got a master's.
War kept going on.
Taught for a short stint at MIT.
Became very interested in
architecture theory at the time.
And then said, okay, why
don't I continue for a PhD?
So I sort of walked backwards into my
academic career, even though I enjoy
it tremendously, but I'm certain that
I first knew about MIT when I was
studying architecture history in Beirut.
In my first years as an architecture
student and in our architecture
textbook, there were buildings, beautiful
modernist buildings, that were included
in our textbook that were at MIT.
I knew about those buildings
before I knew about MIT.
The chapel, Kresge
Auditorium, Baker House.
I believe that the world is made by us
and therefore can be transformed by us.
Rather than given to us and us
having to keep it the way it is.
There's no way I can be a professor of
architecture without being a practitioner.
There's no way I can be an architect
without being curious about some
of the things that are emerging in
the academic world because they're
opening up possibilities for building.
So I think of teaching as asking
questions to the students that
I'm asking in my practice.
Bringing to the table problems
that I don't know how to solve,
but that I'm thinking about.
We're all rational,
compassionate human beings first.
And then, oh, and by the
way, I come from Beirut.
By the way, I come from Macedonia.
By the way, I come It's, it's, it's
something that we take to be for
granted, that we come from somewhere
and we have a unique story to tell.
We celebrate identity, but
we don't essentialize it.

---

### The World at MIT: Mai Hassan
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNISn46b3_M

Idioma: en

My younger self would have instinctively
answered, Oh, I'm Sudanese.
I'm from Sudan.
I was born there.
My family immigrated
here when I was young.
We still have strong ties and
that's all completely true.
And I still feel that way.
But at the same time, I am realizing
how much more of a member of this
Sudanese diaspora community I am,
that I am as opposed to someone
who is just purely Sudanese.
I was drawn to political science because
I am a member of the Sudanese diaspora.
One of the great things
about growing up in the D.
C.
suburbs is that there's a huge
Sudanese diaspora community there.
It's the largest Sudanese diaspora
community outside of the Middle East.
Sudan, from 1989 up until
2019, was ruled by this really
repressive dictatorial regime.
And the topic of conversation
at any diaspora table was
talking about this regime.
And how horrible it is and the
strategies that we should take to
organize and mobilize against it.
And so from a young age, always
thinking about How do authoritarian
regimes and dictatorships come about?
How do they sustain themselves?
What explains regime durability?
And so I wasn't thinking about those
questions within, with the words
that I'm using now as a trained
political scientist, but I think
the kernel of a lot of those ideas
formed based off of my experiences.
Now, being a tenured professor,
I can take a little bit longer
to work on my projects, and I
can, in a sense, aim bigger.
A lot of them are focused on Sudan,
and so Sudan is a very difficult
environment to research, and so for
my first book and my first research
agenda, I didn't touch Sudan at all.
Now, in part because I feel this moral
obligation for people to know more about
the country, so that It enters more
into the conversation and enters more
into policy circles and that people
are thinking about this about the
issues that Sudan is facing when, you
know, they're making their next moves.
Teaching here, especially
undergrads, is really exciting.
And it's really rewarding.
Most of the students that I have in my
class, a lot of them aren't going to
go into political science graduates.
A lot of these students are
shaping where technology is going.
Shaping AI, for instance.
And so to, especially since I teach
classes at the undergraduate level
based on dictatorship and authoritarian
regimes and tyranny, it's really
nice to It was a really interesting
experience to be able to connect with
these students, and help them understand
the different tactics and strategies
that these types of regimes use , and
have
conversations and think a little
bit deeper about what roles and
responsibilities do the developers
of these programs then have.
I get such a range of undergraduates in my
classes that it's nice to have different
experiences from them or see how they
interpret some of my our findings or the
questions that we're discussing in class
or, the theories that I'm teaching them
how they as oftentimes as engineers,
are thinking about these questions.
How what I teach them about
dictatorship, how, what I teach them
about authoritarian regimes, how
they're thinking about those questions.
And it's nice to see how my work
and the conversations that I'm
having can have broader influence.

---

### The World at MIT: Moungi Bawendi
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuHmbZxuTm4

Idioma: en

I ended up growing up in the
outskirts of Paris until I was seven.
And then we moved to
Tunis for a couple years.
Then we moved to Nice for a year.
Then we moved to West Lafayette,
Indiana when I was ten.
Then we moved back to Paris when
I was a freshman in high school.
And then we moved back to
West Lafayette, Indiana.
I always felt a little bit
like an outsider going back and
forth between different places.
I think I developed this
sort of self reliance.
Maybe that's why I became an introvert.
My father was a mathematician,
so he was a professor.
Being a Tunisian in France
at the time was not easy.
You couldn't have a
permanent job as a professor.
And being, you know, half French
and half Tunisian also at the time,
you know, I felt that a little bit.
So I never felt like I belonged
really, either in France or
in Tunisia, or even in the US.
I came as a 10 year old, essentially
without knowing a word of English.
But after six months when you're
ten, you know, you become fluent.
I think I was always interested in
science broadly, not mathematics.
That I'm sure I was never
interested in mathematics.
So at the time, you know, you could buy
science kits with stuff in them that
today you wouldn't be able to sell.
So I got, you know, a chemistry
kit and I got a physics kit and
you start learning about hooking
circuits together and elements or
molecules together to form new things.
They change color, you crystallize things.
Then I started taking, uh science
courses in junior high school.
In high school, I had a
great chemistry teacher.
You know, I want to credit him.
I think he made a huge difference.
And then when I came to college
at Harvard, my freshman chemistry
professor was also an amazing professor.
So, that combination, you
know, led me in my path.
Because when I came to Harvard,
also I had the same problem of
feeling like I was an outsider.
But chemistry was something that
I liked and I could do and forged
ahead and I really liked physics.
And so I sort of got into the
physics realm a little bit and, you
know, became a physical chemist.
Then I went to visit MIT and that
was a really great experience.
And I was so surprised that there was this
other university just down the street.
I realized it's a really unique place.
So quantum dots are small nanoparticles
made out of semiconductors.
They're small enough that, uh, when you
put an electron in them, that electron
no longer behaves like a little particle
moving in a circuit, but it behaves like
a wave, like a quantum mechanical object.
It asks the question, What
is this transition between
an atom and a bulk material?
The discovery of quantum dots happened
in the Soviet Union and in the U.
S.
simultaneously by my post doc mentor,
Louis Brus, in the early 1980s, and
by Alexey Ekimov in Leningrad at the
time, also late 70s, early 1980s.
I went to do a post doc with Louis
Brus and that's where I learned
about quantum dots as a thing.
At the time, the materials property
of quantum dots was rather poor.
That was my project basically coming at
MIT as an assistant professor, again,
I was an outsider, you know, it was
an outsider coming into this field
of chemistry, of synthetic chemistry
that I really didn't know much about.
We ended up developing a way to make
these quantum dots to be of quite high
quality, high quality enough that we
could start to do the basic experiments.
Within five years of me starting
here and making progress in making
these new materials, it started being
clear that there were interesting
uses for them, beyond studying them
for their fundamental properties.
It's important to really work on what you
want to work on, what you believe in, and
to have the confidence that if you think
it's interesting, then it is interesting.
MIT is a great environment.
It's very collegial.
Very collaborative, and the setup of
the buildings really encouraged that.
The interdisciplinarity is
really important and unique.
It helped to advance my career, make
it more rewarding for me, because I'm
constantly learning new things, and the
field itself really benefited from that.
Not only is MIT a unique place because
of this interdisciplinary, but as a
result, we also have amazing students.
I couldn't have done my first three
years here, which eventually got the
Nobel Prize without having really bold,
smart, and adventurous graduate students.
It's not just the physical
environment, but it's also the people.

---

### The World at MIT: Nergis Mavalvala
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Mh4vBEKEA

Idioma: en

Some of my work involves studying
the universe, the distant universe,
and in some ways, This is history.
This is history, it's physics, it's
chemistry, it's all put together.
Because you can ask the
question, where do we come from?
We.
The Earth.
First you look at history.
The written record is only
a few thousand years old.
You go to, to archaeology,
paleontology, eventually you say, you
have to get off the Earth, because
where did the Earth come from?
You go to our solar system.
You go further out, you have to keep going
out further and further into the universe
just to ask where do we come from.
I get to think about these lofty questions
of where do we come from and what's out
in the universe, but then I get to go
into a lab and just build, plain old build
things, design things, you know, and so it
kind of, it's the best job in the world.
So I grew up in, in Pakistan.
I grew up in Karachi,
which is the largest city.
It's a, it's a coastal city.
Right outside the apartment
complex where I lived was a, sort
of a row of, of little shops.
It was a shanty town.
Among the shops was a bicycle
repair shop, and right next
to it was an electrician shop.
I learned to repair bikes, and
then just by chance, you know, the
electrician was next door, so I
would also watch them doing things.
It's very interesting because
I'm an educator today, and I,
you know, I really see myself
as a researcher and an educator.
But I'm also very aware that education
comes in many different forms and
not necessarily from educators.
I grew up in a family of parents
who never went to college.
Even though, they never went to college
and they weren't a family of huge means or
anything, they were completely committed
that their daughters were going to go
to one of the best schools in the city.
The family drove a 20 year old car, lived
in subsidized housing, but we went to the
best, you know, school they could afford.
And that was the gift they gave us.
From a pretty early age, it was understood
that for higher ed, you go overseas.
That is the path to social
mobility and success.
I actually was very keen on
going to a liberal arts school.
I had been tracked in science and
math early on, and I thought that
was too narrowing, too early.
So I came to Wellesley
College here in the U.
S., and I chose Wellesley of all
the places I could have gone to
because of the connection to MIT.
Part of what I know today that
I didn't know then about MIT
was that MIT has liberal arts.
I mean, we, you know, not
to mention I didn't get in.
Let's be clear, I did not get in.
MIT has a huge international brand,
if you will, even when I was a kid.
I was always aware of MIT as this
place where sort of the science and
engineering and techie kids went.
Today, the community we have here,
the students, the faculty, everybody
has a broader range of interests and
a level of engagement with things that
are not just science and technology.
It's long been known that if
you want the very best ideas,
you have to look everywhere.
The whole reason to make your community,
your, you know, at writ large or
your team as diverse as possible
because that's how you're going
to have access to a whole range of
experiences and therefore perspectives.
Everybody here wants to make the world
a better place and are using their
intellectual gifts and their education
to do so and I think that's an amazing
sort of community to be part of.

---

### The World at MIT: Pattie Maes
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HiXfDp3SwY

Idioma: en

I'm not sort of the, the stereotype
of the computer science professor
who was taking apart radios
and building robots at age 10.
I was playing with Barbies and
I'm very proud of that, as well
as Legos and doing experiments
I'm from a suburb of Brussels in Belgium
and I grew up in a family of six kids.
I was always very curious and, and
sort of exploratory and creative.
I wasn't the sort of person that
was like studying hard and so on.
I was terrible actually.
I, I didn't usually open my backpack
with my books until I was on the bus
on the way to school the next morning.
I was very interested in plants so I
would go to the Royal Greenhouse in
Brussels and cut off little pieces of
plants and then try to make them grow
in my room and it was very exciting.
Well, my father died very
young at 52 when I was 19.
The thing on my mind was,
I do have to make money.
And at that time, actually, there
was sort of an economic crisis in
Europe, the oil crisis in the late 70s.
And I thought, well, Computers seem
to be this field of the future and
I thought, well, maybe if I study
computer science, I'll definitely get
a job, even though there's a crisis
and nobody else is getting jobs.
And it's a way of avoiding making
a choice about and locking myself
into one discipline because computer
science is really something that you
can apply in all these different areas.
I don't want to have a
boring job in a company.
I want to be able to keep being
creative and explore things.
I was always very curious.
And that was my reason for
going more into academia.
There was this draw to MIT
because it was this mecca, really.
This place where all of this
amazing research was happening.
So initially when I studied artificial
intelligence, I sort of joined in
this mission to try to create smart
machines, smart robots, and so on.
I worked on six legged robots that
had to teach themselves to walk
by doing experiments and so on.
It was exciting, but at some point,
and that was when I already was here
at MIT, I decided, well, actually,
I don't want to build smart machines
that one day may surpass us.
I don't find that to be an exciting
goal for the rest of my life.
And so instead, I decided that I would
work on helping people get smarter.
At that time, I also moved from what was
then the AI laboratory at MIT to take
up a position as a faculty member at the
Media Laboratory because the Media Lab
is sort of more about how cutting edge
technologies might improve people's lives.
We create that diversity of backgrounds,
diversity of disciplines and so on.
The work that we do can be so much
more impactful because we are not
just all AI people or all electrical
engineers or all designers.
What sort of brings us together
is that we're all very interested
in how smart technologies can
be used to empower people.
So I'm very interested in helping
people realize their potential through
the use of some of these technologies.

---

### The World at MIT: Paulo Lozano
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuGnqaXWgaA

Idioma: en

Even if it was cold, what I would
do is go outside at night and get
a blanket and just, you know, stay
all night just watching the stars.
There is something fascinating in
watching the sky for hours at a time.
First of all, you see the
spectacle of different stars
as the Earth is turning, right?
There's a satellite and
there's a shooting star.
And sometimes the shooting
stars have different colors.
Depending on what is the material they
have, they will glow in a different color.
And they will glow with
different intensities.
But if you're not looking for
hours, you will miss all this.
Yeah, I don't, I don't even remember
when I started, but I was very young,
so, so young that I don't remember when
I started to be interested in space.
My parents took me to a planetarium
for the first time, and actually
it was, I think back then, the only
planetarium in Mexico City at least.
And for me it was just eye opening,
because the history of the universe from
the Big Bang and then telling the things
about the lives of stars and planets.
And the fate of these stars,
depending on their size, and some
of them will blow up and some
others will turn into black holes.
So I was like, just, you know, I was,
it was just like too much for me.
Again, it was probably the again, one
of the, the most memorable- I still
remember it, and I was about 10 years old.
And I think it was mostly because of, you
know, kind of getting to know the unknown.
And there were so many fascinating
things out there that we didn't
understand as humanity And I was so
interested about each one of them.
And then the prospect of actually
going to space and exploring.
For me that was just, uh, too much.
It was fascinating.
I just wanted to contribute to space
exploration, uh, and understand the
physics behind the, you know, the
working principles of the universe.
And the more tools I could
get to help me understand this
and contribute it, the better.
You know, where is the
action happening, right?
And of course I knew about NASA and all
the other places that I would hear in
Carl Sagan's Cosmos series, for example.
MIT's name will come up, right,
eventually, in one way or another.
Because, you know, you can find
pretty much an expert on every
branch of interesting science
and interesting technology.
And, and just the fact that you can,
you know, walk around the infinite
corridor and suddenly you see the
person who wrote the textbook or
the person who won the Nobel Prize.
I, I mean, that, that,
that is also inspiring.
I never imagined that I could be
a professor in a place like MIT.
And the fact that that happened,
that was very inspiring for me.
It's a community that
is very open to ideas.
And find weak points on hypotheses
and discover new things and, you
know, all these kind of things.
And now since I'm a faculty, I
would say that what makes MIT very,
very truly special is the students.
We have the best students.
I mean, they are way
smarter than the faculty.
I mean, we probably as faculty don't
want to admit that, but the students are
like here and we're like that, right?
And it's amazing to work with them.
You know, every time you're riding your
bike or driving to campus or taking the
bus, you're looking forward to actually
chat with your students because you're
always going to learn something from them.
And I think that that's one of the key
things that make, in my view, MIT special.

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### The World at MIT: Roberto Rigobon
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHbeJ--3kC8

Idioma: en

We're always teaching and learning from
each other and then we are a community
that is diverse on the disciplines, is
diverse on our histories, is diverse
on who we are, and that forces our
ideas to become better because I have
to explain my idea to a physicist,
to an engineer, and a sociologist.
Usually that will be a joke, you know,
but in this case it's actually real life.
I am from Venezuela originally,
and I have a very weird
combination of nations in my blood.
My dad had to escape Argentina because
of political persecution during
the first dictatorship of Perón.
And my mother,  Spanish, she was escaping
Spain for the dictator of Franco.
It was after the Civil War.
I was born in a relatively humble
home, very, relatively violent town.
I was super quiet and super shy.
I don't think I have a happy
memory in the first 12 years of my
life, related to my normal life.
It was actually the last year and
a half of high school that I found
that I was very good at programming.
It was just kind of surprising.
I never had any programming.
It just happened to be that my brain
was very well organized for that.
The math professor says there's gonna
come some former alumni from this high
school, he's going to bring a computer,
but he's going to teach BASIC, but
he can only teach seven students.
We're going to do a competition
of the ones that are interested.
Anyone that is interested, he's
going to pick the top seven.
He's going to come this weekend.
You have to show up.
And the guy explains BASIC
and he says, well, you know, I
need you to solve this problem.
The one that solves it with the
least amount of instructions will
make it, and I remember, I think I
spent like one minute and 30 seconds.
And when I stood up, almost everyone
in the classroom started to laugh.
So I gave it to the person, and when I'm
leaving, the guy turns and yells at me.
I said, wait a second, how did you
solve this in so few instructions?
And I said, what do you mean?
I said, this works.
This is better programming than what I do.
You should be teaching the class.
So that actually saved me.
I went to the best engineering school.
I had to take the admissions exam
twice because given my grades
they thought that I had copied.
Yeah, I was the worst student ever
accepted to that university in the first
20 years of life of that university.
Imagine.
And they said, then when I did
the oral exam, they said, you,
you are perfect for this school.
Like, you know, you are, you,
you, you will be a good engineer.
And that's how I started.
I was planning to go to finance and
the professor of macroeconomic became
a very close friend during the MBA.
You know, he said, you're wasting your
life if you're going to go to finance.
You should go to academia and
you should become an economist.
And I stayed as his research assistant.
He became the Minister
of Finance of Venezuela.
So I was kind of his advisor at the time.
And he was the one that helped me
come to MIT as a PhD in economics.
So when I was studying, you
know, Venezuela had a democracy.
So it was very natural to
think we're going back.
My father in law and my father, they both
saw the uprise, the coming of Chavez.
They said, this is the same as Argentina.
And they said, no, no, no, don't
come back, don't come back.
And they actually kept telling me to
stay there for a while, but because
this is going to be a disaster.
I found a job at MIT, so I never left.
One of the great things about MIT is that
we differentiate success and fulfillment.
I realized that there were many of
those people that were incredibly
successful by the standards of
money, power, influence, etc.
That they had not achieved
fulfillment at all.
They were still searching, no?
Now, everyone that had achieved
fulfillment in some form felt
that they were also successful.
We emphasize fulfillment.
Do something that is meaningful,
do something that is important, do
something that is for somebody else.
Which is very rare in an
engineering school, it's very
rare in a business school, it's
very rare in a science department.
We want whatever we have in our
brain to be actually used and
implemented with our hands, but it's
always with a purpose of service.
And I really love that part.

---

### The World at MIT: Sana Aiyar
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYKPYBe3wdg

Idioma: en

I'm an associate professor of history here
at MIT, and I teach South Asian history.
There have been many empires before the
nation of India emerged, and Delhi was
the capital of many of these empires.
So you're really always just a
stone's throw away from history.
We grew up in Delhi in India, which
is where my father, who was interested
in politics, ended up resigning
early from the foreign services
and, you know, joined politics.
My mother is a journalist, and we
were taken across India all the time.
You know, if she had to cover a news
story somewhere in rural Rajasthan,
she would take the three kids with us.
We went campaigning with my
father in his constituency.
You sort of saw the diversity
across gender, across
regional dialect, across food.
Even in terms of Cultural festivals
that were celebrated the way in
which we celebrated certain cultural
festivals at home were celebrated
differently in different areas, right?
And history is contested deeply in
India and particularly in Delhi.
So I grew up around all of these
conversations about history, about
the contested nature of history.
I came of age, I would say, in the
1990s, which was a time when India was
going through a massive transition.
The economy was moving from a
closed socialist economy, to an
open economy that was allowing in
the world's markets, and there were
lots of anxieties over this change.
What would it mean in terms
of equality and inequality?
Would inequality be exasperated
or in fact was this opening up a
way to remove poverty from India?
I loved history because it was my
insight into understanding what was at
stake for all these grown ups you know,
arguing and impassioned about something.
But what I loved doing
as a kid was reading.
And books were everywhere around us.
Fiction, non fiction, newspapers.
I just got immersed in this idea of
understanding and discovering the world
through literature, through stories.
You know, I mentioned that
my mother is a writer.
Actually, we come from
a family of writers.
My father as well would write very
often in the newspapers, editorials.
And I found that now, you know, me
and my sisters, all three of us,
we have very different careers,
but all three of us use the pen.
So I would say that in some ways
the inheritance has absolutely been
about, you know, reading and writing.
You know, those are the two
things that till today continue
to bring us together as a family.
I think I came to appreciate
MIT more after having joined
here and spent a few years here.
MIT isn't somewhere that was
known for history or, you
know, the history department.
Of course, once I joined, I realized
that we have, you know, the best
historians, in the country, in
fact, from across the world here.
I think what has really made me
stay at MIT and really sort of
made me come to appreciate MIT
is how global MIT really is.
We have a faculty of about
20 in our history department.
Each of the major regions of the world is
represented in terms of the research that
they do, but also where they come from.
If you want to build yourself as
a place that engages with the real
world, right, there's a focus on MIT's
scientists and technology science
interest in real world problems.
The real world is more than just
Cambridge or America, right?
It is the entire world.
The success of being able to have
conversations with others, right, and
connect with others is because of this
focus on the global scale and the real
world impact of the research that we do.

---

### The World at MIT: Yasheng Huang
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmrzGl5XWeI

Idioma: en

MIT is a truly idea driven place.
I was born in Beijing, China,
and then raised during what is
known as the Cultural Revolution.
The educational system was practically
destroyed, so all I can say is
I skipped a lot of school days.
To add to the complexity of this,
my parents were sent away to do
hard labor in the countryside.
My grandmother was with me and my brother,
but I grew up in an intellectual family.
My father was a writer,
my mother was an editor.
Myself and my brother,
we read a lot of books.
So basically, we educated ourselves.
One of the good things about doing
all these things on your own was
that you were not necessarily
constrained by that one ideology.
I came to America to study social
sciences at Harvard College.
I was extremely fortunate to be one of
the first of Chinese students to come
to America and that got me interested
in international issues, international
economy, international affairs.
The first time I was on the highway
was taking a taxi from Logan Airport.
And it was an incredible cultural shock.
In China at that time, we didn't
have to think about making choices.
There, everything was set for you,
and that was the path you went down.
Here, a lot of it is up to you.
You know, what do you study,
and what do you major in?
So that was an eye opening experience.
At that time, most of us were thinking
about going back to China to serve
the country, we were, thinking about
why China was behind other countries?
Most of us were thinking about
going to the civil service.
So that was the dream of all of
us to go into the government.
But then what happened was in 1989
the Tiananmen crackdown happened.
And that essentially
closed off that option.
China was incredibly repressive.
Many of us decided to stay and then
decided to pursue an academic career.
After I became a professor I got to
know about MIT because there are so
many famous MIT social scientists in the
economics department, in the political
science department, and at Sloan School.
What I hope my students go away with
is appreciation of the complexity,
multidimensionality of so many
issues that we have to face.
So I always organize my classes very
heavily on the basis of discussions.
And I also do this for a very selfish
reason because I learn from my students.
We have amazing students and they
have very diverse backgrounds.
People take it for granted.
MIT has the world class engineers and
scientists, but I think we ought to let
the world know that we also have world
class faculty doing cutting edge work
on international affairs, on economics,
on society, culture, history, and I
think it would be great if we connect
the social science work that we do
with policy And MIT has a lot to offer.

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