MIT Links

MIT is known best for nurturing scientists and engineers, Nobel Laureates in the sciences, mathematicians, biotech entrepreneurs and, yes, nerdly computer geeks. It is a rich repository of scientific and technical expertise, a beehive of experiment and innovation. Science writers will find here ideas, theories, research programs, and technological gimmicks and gizmos enough to occupy them for a lifetime.

But MIT is not only that. When the MIT Symphony Orchestra performed Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto a couple of years ago, the Boston Globe reviewer of the performance suggested that perhaps a quarter of MIT students could qualify for admission to the New England Conservatory of Music: MIT nurtures the arts and the humanities, too.

In 1949, the Institute launched a humanities school that has blossomed into today's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, now home to more than 150 faculty members and 300 graduate students. Many of its programs and departments in music and theater arts, foreign languages, linguistics and philosophy, anthropology, history, literature, economics, political science, and writing have earned worldwide repute in their own right.

MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, home to the Graduate Program in Science Writing, offers courses and programs in creative writing, expository writing, and digital communications, as well as science writing. Its faculty includes poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, historians, and biographers.

Students in the Graduate Program will find boundless inspiration in the science and engineering that swirls around them at MIT. But they will be encouraged as well to tie science to broad humanistic, historical and cultural concerns.

The Graduate Program affords its students access to the magnificent resources of the whole MIT community. These include hundreds of science and engineering laboratories working at the edges of human knowledge, but also a number of key programs in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

Among these is the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program, which brings to Cambridge for an academic year mid-career journalists who wish to root themselves more firmly in the sciences and offers a myriad of special seminars open to Graduate Program students.

Students drawn to media outside of print will be able to turn to the interdisciplinary Comparative Media Studies program, which offers courses about media—film, video games, the internet, and the like—and their cultural, social, and aesthetic implications.

Finally, the Graduate Program maintains links to MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society, whose distinguished faculty includes many whose writings about such subjects as genetics, military technology, and computers have crossed over to reach the wider reading public.