The Most Successful Class MIT Ever Taught
A 1990 class that changed everything...
In the late 1990s, an MIT physicist named Neil Gershenfeld opened a course called How to Make (Almost) Anything. He built it for the handful of researchers who needed his lab’s fabrication machines. On the first day, roughly a hundred students showed up. Most weren’t engineers and had no research reason to be there. When he asked why they came, one answer kept repeating: I’ve been waiting my whole life for a class like this.
This morning in Boston, the descendants of that class open the doors on FAB26, the world’s largest gathering on digital fabrication and making. Twelve hundred people. Two hundred fifty sessions. A Fab Lab is a community workshop stocked with laser cutters, 3D printers, computer-controlled milling machines, and electronics benches. There are now more than 3,000 of them in 150 countries.
Look at what that growth ran on. No accreditation. No admissions office. No federal loan program bidding up the price. A workshop where you learn the machines and make something real spread across 150 countries on word of mouth, because it fed a hunger the official system starves.
MIT’s most successful educational export of the past 25 years isn’t a degree. It’s a workshop.
The most prestigious technical university on earth runs lecture halls, problem sets, and a $65,000 tuition bill through the front door. Out the side door, almost by accident, it released a model where nobody checks your transcript and the only thing that matters is whether the thing you built works.
I keep coming back to those hundred students. They were already at MIT. They had won the credential game outright. And what they lined up for was the first chance anyone had ever given them to make a physical object with their own hands. Kindergarten was the last time school let them build something; every year after, education meant more abstraction, more screens, more paper. The hunger never left. The system just stopped feeding it.
This is why The Preparation tells young men to choose physical experience over virtual education nine times out of ten. It’s the rule behind the whole program, and it’s why one of the sixteen cycles is the Maker cycle: three months in a fab lab, finishing with a portfolio of objects you designed and built. Welded steel, milled parts, working circuits. Things you can hand to another human being.
The reason is practical, not romantic. A built object can’t be faked. An employer doesn’t have to trust a grade or take your word for anything. He picks the thing up. It works or it doesn’t. And the young man who has watched his own hands produce working objects for three months carries a confidence no seminar can install. Competence you can hold is competence you believe in.
College now averages about $43,000 a year to sit in the abstraction machine. Fab Lab access runs a tiny fraction of that, often free, in 150 countries. The book lays out how to turn that access into a deliberate quarter of full-time work. It’s called The Preparation, and the Maker cycle is one of sixteen ways it converts a young man’s time into capability instead of debt.
One more detail from Boston worth noticing. This year FAB26 added a Kid Lab Pass: nine-year-olds, real machines, real projects, all week. While most of the culture childproofs everything a young person touches, the makers hand a fourth-grader a design challenge and expect results. They have the expectations right.
The Fab Lab network publishes a map of all 3,000 locations, and odds are one sits within an hour of your house. A young man can walk in this week, learn one machine, and build one thing. Then a better thing. Twelve weeks later he has a shelf of objects that argue for him, and he knows something about himself that no acceptance letter can tell him.
If you don’t already have a copy of our book, The Preparation, you can get one here. The Maker cycle is just one of 16 we outline in the book. All together they lay out a better alternative to college and a path for building extraordinary young men.
Best,
Matt Smith