Editorial

A Letter to the Class of 2015

Greetings to you, the graduates! – and to your families.

Together with the thousands of family members and friends gathered for Commencement, we share the excitement of this passage. Faculty both respect and take pride in your accomplishments as MIT’s new 2015 graduates. In teaching and mentoring you, we on the faculty have also learned and grown and received new insights. As you launch your own careers, your contributions to your communities and to humanity will be among the most gratifying products of our academic labors.

We hope you will look back on your years at the Institute with a positive feeling, and the sense that you have contributed to enhancing the MIT environment and experience for the coming classes. As you transition to other opportunities and challenges, MIT and other universities are in the midst of a vigorous and healthy reexamination of how and what and when we teach.

You will be entering a world where digital distance learning, new forms of academic and social communication, and global interactions are the norm. Issues such as climate change, nuclear disarmament, and reducing global poverty, once in the distance, have now established themselves as requiring the urgent attention of us all. Instabilities in nations that may have once seemed very far away now emerge as problems that the world – and this nation – cannot ignore.

During your years with us, we on the faculty have directly encountered your manifold talents, your serious ambitions, your resilience in the face of setbacks, your thoughtful and quirky self-expression, your creative and entrepreneurial energy, and your myriad achievements. We hope that as your various individual paths unfold, you will put your powers to work on solving some of the problems that confront us, and making our society more responsibly productive and more supportive to those in need. On behalf of the entire faculty, we wish you vision, strength, commitment, and success in the challenges you take on.  

The Editorial Board of the MIT Faculty Newsletter

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