The Future: A Class for First-Year Academic Exploration

Principal Investigator
Prof. John E. Fernandez, Environmental Solutions Initiative; Prof. David Darmofal, Aeronautics & Astronautics; Prof. William Deringer, STS; Prof. William Minicozzi, Mathematics; Prof. Roberto Rigobon, Sloan; Dr. Jennifer French, Mathematics; Sarah Meyers, Environmental Solutions Initiative
Fund: d'Arbeloff Fund
Funding Period: AY2020
Department/Lab/Center: Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI)

The Future is a first-year class that explores how the various departments/disciplines at MIT ask questions about the world’s greatest challenges. We will use the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals as a guiding framework for investigating the future. This course will promote deep thinking about what students value, how they want to make a better world, and how their education at MIT is a step towards creating the future they want. Students reflect on own interests, envision pathways for themselves in a future global society, create social media campaigns to communicate and engage with the world, interview members of a variety of MIT departments, and commence on a four-year process of laying the groundwork for their own futures beyond MIT.