It was my dream to come to MIT since I was in 5th grade. When I visited MIT for the first time as junior in high school, I just fell even deeper in love. And I very much still remember the day when I got my acceptance letter (though it wasn’t nearly as cool as the ones used today). So when I showed up to start classes here, I was a little surprised to find that not everyone loved MIT as much as me.

In fact, it seemed the longer somebody had been here the more they strongly disliked MIT. The place was nicknamed “Hell” and the acronym we used to express how much we hated it got five letters when most only got three. Upperclassmen told me that “MIT teaches you to hate the things you love” and it was taken for granted that the primary emotion of seniors (if not juniors) was bitterness. What on earth was going on? This was supposed to be the greatest place on earth for us nerds!

Of course I know I’m only giving one side of the story. There were and are plenty of people who love MIT and who “have truly found paradise.” And I think MIT has gotten better in many ways than it was in the late nineties. And, yet it seems that so many students are in a strongly ambivalent love-hate relationship with MIT. Lydia K’s recent Meltdown post clearly struck a chord.

When I graduated from MIT, I was tired, a little burned out and I had come to embody the senior bitterness that I had vowed to avoid. But I didn’t think this was a very big deal. I figured I needed some time to rest and recover and then I would be all set.

But instead of getting better, it got worse! It wasn’t until years later that I realized that the problem was much deeper and that I was emotionally and spiritually bankrupt when I graduated. Again, I know this is not the story for many people who graduate from MIT, but I’ve now known a lot of people who have graduated and it’s not an uncommon story.

So what went wrong? And let me say right off that I don’t blame MIT (except, yeah I do a little bit) for my messed-upness, because, you know, it’s good to take responsibility for yourself and all that. I think two major things went wrong for me while I was at MIT. First, even though I was always a very goal-oriented person, I had emerged from MIT purposeless (that’s the spiritual component). Second, I had failed to deal with personal crisis in a healthy manner (that’s the emotional component). I’ll focus on the spiritual for now.

I briefly worked in business after I graduated (I needed a break from science). I got really positive feedback from my boss that I had exceptional potential to excel and go very far and be tremendously successful in that field. But this did not excite me. It made me feel depressed.

“So what?” was my basic reaction. So what if I’m really successful and make lots of money? So what if I’m well-respected and at the top of my field? It all felt so meaningless and empty. And even as I dreamed about other career possibilities (I had an MIT degree after all, the world was my oyster, right?), I couldn’t find my way out of that empty feeling. I had no purpose in life.

Maybe this shouldn’t have been surprising. In all my time at MIT, how much attention had I given to the questions of purpose and meaning? I recall lots of psets and studying, lots parties and hanging out, lots of workouts and competitions with my sports team, lots of meals and antics with my living group. But I don’t think I recall any exploration of purpose or meaning (what I’m calling spiritual exploration).

Where and when would such a thing have happened? Could I have approached one of my professors and said “I don’t know what my purpose in life is or how to figure it out.” Was there some HASS class I could have taken that would have provided ways to address this question? Was there a club I could have joined to discuss the search for meaning with other students?

If any of these options existed, I missed them. But I’m not complaining that they weren’t available. Even if they had been there I would not have used them! I was too busy trying to survive and be successful on MIT’s terms. My life was so filled with furious effort and the drive to succeed that I think I confused those with purpose. I thought I was all set in the purpose department and that assumption went unchallenged.

Anyway, you might say (and I would agree with you), that these sorts of deeper conversations of meaning and purpose are the sorts of conversations best had among friends—you know the kind that happen spontaneously at 3:00 am over pints of Ben and Jerry’s.

Well, I’m sure my own choices had a lot to do with it, but I don’t remember having any of those late-night conversations about this stuff. It’s just not what people were talking about. Of course there were many 3:00 am conversations, but they tended to be focused on psets or procrastinating from psets or on how miserable we all were. Or they were providing some kind of comic relief and a way to blow off steam. But, as I recall, no one had the mental energy to really engage in deep, thought-provoking, self-reflective conversation.

So I’m not advocating that MIT offer a class on how to find purpose or make meaning. I’m not saying that we should have a student organization with this focus (though we should and I attempted to start one ;-). I’m saying that we should shift the culture of MIT to include this spiritual dimension; that we should all be challenged to engage in the hard work of self-reflection in regards to the purpose and meaning that undergirds our lives.

I don’t know enough about sociology to know how such a cultural shift is achieved in a practical sense. But I guess my basic theory is: if we start talking about this stuff, we’ll like it and find it to be really helpful and then we’ll talk about it even more. So that’s part of my hope in starting this blog.

I’m very eager to hear responses! Do you feel a similar lack at MIT? Have you had those awesome conversations that give direction to your internal compass that I somehow missed. How do you think we could inject some of this type of spirituality into our fine institute?