The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT
Author
Pepper White. He entered MIT in 1981 and received a master's degree in mechanical engineering in 1984. He later worked in energy and building-systems engineering.
Publication Details
The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. First published 1991; MIT Press paperback edition October 2001, 328 pp., 21 illus., 6 x 9. ISBN 978-0-262-73142-3.[1] The 2001 edition adds a new preface and a concluding chapter.
Description
The book is written as a diary and covers White's three years as a graduate student in mechanical engineering. Its organising anecdote arrives on the first page: the first professor he meets tells him that it does not much matter what he learns at MIT, because MIT will teach him how to think. The rest of the book is an account of whether that turned out to be true, and at what cost.
What distinguishes it from the general run of institutional memoir is that White does not treat the technical content as background. Heat transfer coefficients, engine cycles, thermodynamics problem sets and a long, grinding research project on internal combustion appear in the narrative at the level of detail at which they were actually lived, alongside the loneliness, the money problems, the marital strain and the intermittent conviction that he was not clever enough to be there.
Key Ideas
- Learning to think as an institutional product. The book takes seriously the claim that an elite technical education transmits a method rather than a body of content, and tests it against the daily experience of coursework and research.
- The hidden curriculum of graduate school. Advisor relationships, funding, lab politics and the informal apprenticeship system determine outcomes at least as much as ability does.
- Desperation as a normal condition. White is unusually direct about the psychological pressure of a competitive research environment, including the sense of failure produced by an environment where everyone is selected for prior success.
- The engineer's education as a cultural formation. The book is a first-hand record of how a particular technical worldview — quantitative, problem-oriented, impatient with the unmeasurable — is installed in a person.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
MIT is one of the principal sites where the objects cyborg anthropology studies are designed, and the culture of that site is not incidental to what gets built. The Idea Factory is an insider ethnography of the training that produces technologists — useful precisely because it was not written as ethnography, and therefore reports the assumptions of the culture rather than analysing them.
Related Reading
External Links
References
- ↑ The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT, MIT Press.
