Dear Faculty & Staff,
As outlined in the president’s letter, summer at MIT will be different than what most of you and your students are used to or were hoping for. Specifically…
- MIT-sponsored student domestic and international travel is suspended for the entire summer;
- all summer programming in which participants live in MIT residence halls will need to be virtualized, cancelled, or rescheduled; and
- all other summer programming will need to take place remotely through June 28, 2020.
Decisions about the remainder of summer will be made when more information about public health conditions is available, likely by late May.
We know that these decisions will be difficult for our students to hear. But this is MIT, and when we encounter a hard problem, we find a way to solve it. We’re working hard to expand existing programs and create news ones that will allow our students to pursue academic interests, develop professional skills and networks, advance entrepreneurial projects, and earn much-needed income.
As we wrote to our students, we can’t achieve these goals without them—and without you. We need your help to reimagine and reinvent great research experiences and experiential opportunities. To make them robust and special. To make them worthy of MIT.
While UROP may be the most frequent and familiar way to work with students during the summer, it’s not the only way. Projects will need to be remote-friendly for at least part and possibly all of the summer, and we’re developing new resources to help support virtualization as we speak. For instance, we’re currently exploring and actively developing new ways that our students can help support remote teaching, both at MIT and in K-12 districts nationwide.
If you have a creative idea for how we might engage our students in rigorous and relevant projects and learning this summer, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
Our best,
Ian & Kate
Ian A. Waitz, Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate and Graduate Education
Kate Trimble, Senior Associate Dean & Director of the Office of Experiential Learning