In MITERS (the MIT Electronic Research Society), an undergraduate club that Damon Vander Lind says “exists for the sole purpose of building cool stuff,” he salvages components from a 1960s-era tape deck. “I was stealing parts for a power supply,” he says. “Old equipment tends to be made of nicer parts.”

There is a place or persona or maybe a state of mind called Tetazoo. That stands for “Third East Traveling Animal Zoo,” the name of a dormitory hall at MIT. At the moment, several of its scruffy denizens, including Sam Kendig, 22, are ramming sectional couches down a corridor of classrooms as fast as low-tech human power can, past lab-coated professors and graduate students, none of whom blink an eye. After all, it’s the weekend of the amazing Mystery Hunt—more about that soon—when such peculiar behavior is normal. And in the institute’s 140-year history, these corridors have been traversed by 59 Nobel laureates and 30 astronauts, as well as Dr. Dolittle author Hugh Lofting, architect I. M. Pei, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, inventor Raymond Kurzweil, Ford Motor Company honcho William C. Ford, suspected Al Qaeda agent Aafia Siddiqui, and NPR’s “Car Talk” guys. At a guess, none of them were normal, either. No one seems to be normal at MIT.

In the 1960s, when campus life at Harvard University, on the other side of Cambridge, Massachusetts, meant protesting the Vietnam War, dropping psychedelics, and taking over buildings, counterculture types considered MIT a Pentagon front, where a bunch of nerds developed radar, missiles, and napalm. That wasn’t altogether wrong. But it’s clear now that the nerds have won those culture wars: Technology has taken over the earth.


Think about it. The World Wide Web was born at MIT in 1994. That same year, firms founded by MIT graduates generated $232 billion and employed a million people worldwide. Now Treo phones and Google are part of everyday life. We’re all nerds. And there’s a pretty good case to be made that whatever the students on the MIT campus are interested in at this moment will utterly change our lives again in about a decade. The MIT culture is a fecund environment where some of the finest creative minds on the planet not only nurture ideas but also figure out how to use them. The definition of technology is, after all, “the science of the application of knowledge to practical purposes.”

Well, not always practical. Take, for instance, that Mystery Hunt that has those students pushing sofas around. Sam and crew are dragging furniture into a classroom because they will live there, day and night, for the several days it will take them to decipher some 150 complex puzzles. After the sofas are in place, they head off on other missions to stock up for the hunt: scrounging power strips and reference books (Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, Bicycle Official Rules of Card Games, The Lord of the Rings) and loading up stores of junk food (Marshmallow Fluff, barbecued potato chips, animal crackers, Little Debbie cakes, Mountain Dew) that will fuel them for the weekend. The checkout clerks at the Star supermarket near the campus have become pretty blasé about Mystery Hunt buying sprees. They’ve scanned entire shopping carts full of Coffee-Mate (makes great sparkles when ignited) or aluminum foil (to wrap an entire dorm room, including walls, bed, CDs, and books). Once, for a single-color feast, Sam checked through nothing but orange items: Cheetos, Doritos, carrots, OJ, cheese-peanut butter crackers.

Students gather in the wee hours in the East Campus dorm hall. “People all over MIT stay up all night and build crazy things,” says Jenny Hu (center, with sketch pad). Next to her, brothers Jason (face obscured) and Vincent Chen crack their laptops while Damon Vander Lind and Danny Shen wire a motor. “Built into this place is so much competition,” says Natan Cliffer, making music with a water bottle. “You need people’s help to succeed.”

This year, 26 separate teams ranging in size from two people to more than 100 are competing in Mystery Hunt. “We’re mainly interested in getting together, solving puzzles, and having fun,” says Sam. But an MIT student’s idea of having fun is cramming a semester’s worth of brain-draining work into three days. Each puzzle, for example, begins on one level, like a crossword, but then moves to another level, like interpreting the crossword’s solution in Morse code. The final level combines all 150-odd answers to create a solution to an overall metaboggler, which enables the winning team to hunt down a hidden circular object, like an Indian-head penny in 1980 or a CD-ROM two years ago. And the prize for all this extracurricular effort? More work. The winning team is rewarded by being allowed to spend months devising the puzzles for the following year’s hunt.

At noon on a Friday, the race begins. Competitors pull up puzzles on Web sites, calculate on printouts, chalk columns on blackboards, tap on laptops. “Who’s good at, like, history?” someone yells. “Can anybody identify this MP3 song?” “If you take the Universal Product Code as a 10-dimensional vector . . .” “Who’s good at sets?” “Get an anagram on . . . ” “Anyone in here really good at poker?” “Who wants to do some Shakespeare?” Sam studies an abbreviation, a numeral 7 followed by the string of letters J. B. F. S. S. C. “James Bond Films Starring Sean Connery!”  he crows. “How did I get that?” Answer: The same way a scientist finds a solution to a problem—step by step, applying a mixture of intelligence, inspiration, and doggedness. Competitors have to be good at everything—braille, cryptography, Java, origami, base 16, flag signals, integer sequences, tarot cards, map reading, and Mandarin Chinese.

And so they are. This year’s graduating class of about a thousand entered with the highest SAT scores in MIT’s history: Four percent had perfect scores; the mean in verbal was 711, the mean in math 756. The kids, half of them valedictorians of their mostly public high schools, came from 45 U.S. states and 47 countries. For such students, it was a revelation to arrive on campus and discover others like themselves. “I was always kind of a loner,” says Amanda Seybold, 19, who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, the daughter of a medical equipment buyer and an online stockbroker. Inspired by a high school physics teacher, she applied to MIT and chose to live in the “stereotypically geeky” Random Hall, perhaps best known as the place where you can click on student-designed Web sites to check whether the bathrooms or washing machines are unoccupied. When Amanda was asked whether she’d be able to remember her room number, 225, she said, “Of course—it’s a perfect square.” She knew she was at the right place when everybody began to calculate how many rooms were perfect squares and determined that hers was the only one on the second floor.

Her parents, of course, were worried: The suicide rate at MIT is about one a year, and the last two undergraduate suicides had been in Random Hall. Elizabeth Shin, who in 2000 set her room and herself on fire, got national press when her parents sued MIT for $27 million, claiming that the institute should have informed them that their daughter, legally an adult, was seeking psychiatric help. The case is still in litigation.

“It’s a hard place,” says Marilee Jones, dean of admissions, who has been at the school for 25 years. “MIT can be the critical parent you can never quite please.” After the suicide, Jones looked back at Shin’s application but could detect no trace of the problems the girl had reportedly struggled with since high school. Her academic qualifications were tops. In the 1980s, male and female applicants had a 10 percent to 30 percent differential on the SAT math score. Now, says Jones, “We routinely see girls with 800s in everything.” When Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, himself an MIT graduate in economics, suggested at an academic conference that there might be “intrinsic differences in ability” between men and women in math and science, a female MIT professor walked out. MIT has the high ground after the recent appointment of neuroscientist Susan Hockfield as president. Faculty women are up, too, to 18 percent, and 43 percent of the class of 2005 is female. Jones wants to admit students of both sexes who will not just survive but thrive on stress. “MIT is like a samurai school,” she says. “These students have more courage than most adults.”