We need a strategy to deal with a hydra. 

It’s Sunday, January 14, 2024, more than 50 hours since the annual MIT Mystery Hunt kicked off at noon on Friday, and Setec Astronomy is one of more than 200 teams racing to solve hundreds of puzzles over three days. The 60-some members of Setec, many of whom are joining remotely from as far away as Australia, are making good progress, even though many of us are running on limited sleep and questionable nutritional decisions. Several of the chalkboards in the Building 2 classroom we’ve been assigned for our team headquarters are covered in lists of puzzle solutions or messy diagrams charting out theories about how to crack the various challenges—all of them constructed, as Mystery Hunt tradition dictates, by the most recent winner, in this case The Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later. 

The “hydra” we’re dealing with is a metapuzzle: We have to find a way to use the solutions from other puzzles that we’ve already solved to extract one more answer. If we solve this one, we’ll be rewarded with more puzzles.

We know we need to diagram the answers for this round of puzzles as a binary tree. In keeping with the hydra metapuzzle’s mythological analogue, every time we solve one puzzle, two more branch off until we have a diagram five levels deep. We’re still missing answers from several unsolved puzzles that would help us figure out how the diagram works and how to extract an answer to the metapuzzle. The diagram we’ve drawn, in green chalk, gets more chaotic with every addition, erasure, and annotation we squeeze onto the overcrowded chalkboard. But we can sense that we’re just one “aha!” away from a solution. 

MIT’s Mystery Hunt has been challenging puzzle enthusiasts every year since Brad Schaefer ’78, PhD ’83, wrote 12 “subclues” on a single sheet of paper as a challenge for friends during Independent Activities Period (IAP) in 1981. The answers led solvers to an Indian Head penny he had hidden on campus. Today’s Hunts are still built around that basic concept, but what constitutes a challenge has changed over four decades. One of the clues from the original 1981 Hunt is just a missing word in a quote: “He that plays the king shall be _____; his majesty shall have tribute of me.” It’s easy to solve today with Google, but in 1981, even if you knew it was Shakespeare, if you didn’t notice the subtle hint that you should look for a character referring to a play within the play, it might have taken a few hours of skimming the Bard’s collected works to find the answer. 

JADE CHONGSATHAPORNPONG ’24/MIT TECHNIQUE

We add a few more solutions to the hydra diagram over the next few hours. Eventually someone notices that all the answers in the fifth level of the diagram seem to have an odd prevalence of Ls and Rs. This is the “aha!” moment: They tell us how to navigate the binary tree. From the first node at the top of the tree, we follow the Ls and Rs in the order they appear in each of the 16 solutions on the fifth level. Take the left branch, then right, then left again, landing on a word that starts with H. The second fifth-level answer leads us to a word that starts with E. Repeating the process with all 16 answers spells out an apt way to deal with a hydra: “HEADTOHEADBATTLE.” (Puzzle solutions are traditionally written in all caps with no spaces or punctuation.) Those of us who’ve been tackling the puzzle take a moment to enjoy our victory before splitting up to find new puzzles to work on.

Some elements of the Mystery Hunt are hard to describe, the kind of must-be-seen ingenuity that also inspires hacks on the Great Dome and any number of above-and-beyond engineering projects showcased around campus every year. Most of the puzzles are utterly unique, although they do often incorporate logic and word problems as well as more mainstream elements like crosswords, sudoku, and Wordle. But almost anything can be turned into a puzzle. For example, chess puzzles might be combined with the card game Magic: The Gathering. Or solvers could be asked to organize a Git repository with 10,000 out-of-order commits (that is, find the correct sequence of 10,000 changes to a file as it was tracked in a version control system), identify duets from musicals, or draw on their knowledge of pop culture trivia. 

For most of its history, the Mystery Hunt had little official status on campus. By tradition as much as any organizational effort, teams simply showed up in Lobby 7 on the Friday before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday for the kickoff. In 2014, the MIT Puzzle Club was formed to help provide year-to-year continuity and other support, such as securing rooms for teams to work in and reserving Kresge Auditorium for the opening ceremonies. Puzzle Club also hosts other events, such as mini puzzle hunts and sudoku and logic puzzle competitions—which Becca Chang ’26, the club’s current president, says “has helped a lot with outreach to new students or anyone who might be interested in [puzzles].”

Technology has enabled the Mystery Hunt to grow and evolve in significant ways, and not just in terms of the kinds of puzzles that are possible. Through the mid-1990s, a single person could take on the responsibility of writing and running the event. Today it’s a yearlong commitment for the winning team to design the next year’s Hunt. Doing so requires managing creative output and technological infrastructure that rival those of a small business. Duties include spending thousands of hours writing and testing puzzles, constructing physical puzzles and props, and building a dynamic website that can withstand the huge influx of puzzle-hungry visitors. 

JADE CHONGSATHAPORNPONG ’24/MIT TECHNIQUE

Just organizing a team of solvers can be a major undertaking, especially now that more and more participants are joining remotely. Anjali Tripathi ’09, who started the team I’m Not a Planet Either in 2015, got her introduction to puzzle hunts through a miniature Mystery Hunt that Simmons Hall runs for first-years. After tackling the main event with the Simmons team on campus as an undergrad, she participated remotely for the first time in 2010. “I was abroad in England and still wanted to do Hunt, and I remember how hard that was,” she says. The team “had no infrastructure for it.” 

“It’s about connecting with other humans— that’s why we do it.”

Erin Rhode ’04, whose team name one year was the entire text of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

Today, solvers can work together across the room or across a continent. Platforms like Slack and Discord have become indispensable to many teams, which use them for updates and announcements as well as creating separate channels where people can tackle a given puzzle together. Many teams use applications that organize the convoluted deluge of puzzles into a workflow so everyone can see which have been solved, which need attention, and who’s working on what. Google Docs and Google Sheets make it easy for multiple people to contribute to progress on the same puzzle whether they’re sitting side by side on campus or are separated by several time zones. 

“I think especially post-2020, there is just the expectation that everything is going to be accessible online,” says Tripathi, who still has a Hunt-related Google doc from 2008, just a couple of years after the service launched. 

But even as the Mystery Hunt has adapted to the internet—and to increasingly powerful search engines, smartphones, the Zoom era, and even some machine-learning applications—at its core it remains a very human experience. 

“It’s about connecting with other humans—that’s why we do it,” says Erin Rhode ’04, a longtime Mystery Hunter whose team has won twice. She recalls being inducted into the Hunt as a first-year in 2001. “An upperclassman came in and was like, ‘You’re coming to the math majors’ lounge. We’re doing this puzzle hunt thing.’” The name of Rhode’s team changes every year, though they might be best known for the year their name was the entire text of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Last year, they were . (That’s not a typo or a missing word—it’s the zero-width space, a Unicode non-character primarily used in document formatting.)

JADE CHONGSATHAPORNPONG ’24/MIT TECHNIQUE

Like so much of the Hunt, team names are an exercise in creativity. The full name of the team running the 2024 Mystery Hunt was officially The Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later. Some teams keep their name every year, like Setec Astronomy (an anagram for “too many secrets,” in a reference to the classic 1992 heist film Sneakers). Others change every year or every few years, or when teams merge, as when Death from Above joined forces with Project Electric Mayhem to become Death and Mayhem. 

Rhode remembers one particular puzzle from her first Hunt that she and her team (known that year as the Vermicious Knids) worked on through the night. They had to figure out that a list of enigmatic phrases were clues to song titles. For example, “Of course; you just go north on Highway 101” clued the song “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” “I think today, we would have solved that puzzle in about an hour,” Rhode says. “There weren’t song lyric databases back then. And so it was a lot more sitting around on your own trying to come up with songs as opposed to just finding some master list and then searching it.”

Writing puzzles with the knowledge that solvers will have a slew of tools at hand is just part of the process. “Use whatever technology you have at your disposal to solve the puzzle is the general rule of thumb,” says Jon Schneider ’13, a machine-learning researcher who hunts with  Galactic Trendsetters . (The   in their team name is pronounced like a plane taking off and landing, respectively.) Schneider has been hunting since 2010, when it was common for solvers to have to identify clips of songs or other audio. He’s seen that change in the past decade, though: “Audio recognition [technology] like Shazam has become a thing, so it’s harder to create puzzles that require the skill of music recognition.” 

“When you’re a constructor, you try to figure out: What is my challenge for the solver?” says Dan Katz ’03. Katz has solved and written a lot of puzzles. (In fact, he created a five-puzzle mini Hunt for this issue’s Puzzle Corner.) He attended his first Mystery Hunt in 1998, as a junior in high school, before he had even applied to MIT. He’s been part of a winning team eight times (probably a record) and competes in events like the World Sudoku Championship and US Puzzle Championship. In Katz’s view, technology should make puzzling more interesting for the solver. While solvers might need to, say, code a program, organize information in a spreadsheet, or navigate a video-game-like interface to arrive at an answer, what he prizes most is the mental challenge of figuring out how to solve a puzzle.

JADE CHONGSATHAPORNPONG ’24/MIT TECHNIQUE

Rhode misses the days before an app was able to listen to a few seconds of a song and identify it. “One of my superpowers in the early days of the Hunt was: Play me a bunch of pop songs and I can identify like 90% of them,” she says. “Now everybody’s got Shazam on their phone. And so as fast as I might be, Shazam was always going to be faster.”

That doesn’t mean puzzles can’t be based on song identification—or image identification, another common puzzle element that has been made trivial by tools like Google’s image search capabilities. It just means constructors must become more creative. “You have to obscure the images or the music in such a way that the technology can’t find it quickly,” Rhode says. She describes a puzzle she wrote when she wanted solvers to identify songs without using technology: “I arranged eight songs a cappella and sang them myself, but buzzing like a bee. And the whole idea was you can’t Shazam that.”

Schneider’s team took a similar approach to constructing a puzzle in which solvers had to identify specific visual artists—not by their work, but by their distinctive style. Solvers were prompted to upload an image of their choosing, and a generative AI tool similar to DALL-E rendered it in the style of the artist they were supposed to name. 

“I mostly just want to be surprised.”

Jon Schneider ’13 of the team    Galactic Trendsetters    

That’s not the only puzzle to have incorporated some machine-learning elements in the last few years. A few examples have used semantic similarity scoring systems where solvers have to guess words or ­phrases—a kind of machine-learning-enabled version of “hot or cold.” 

Even if machine learning has potential as a tool for puzzle constructors, generative AI is unlikely to solve Mystery Hunt puzzles anytime soon. ChatGPT can answer questions that might be helpful in getting started and maybe even help solve a crossword clue or two, but the puzzles are often so unusual that it doesn’t know where to begin. When presented with them, it usually responds by stating that it “would need more context or clues” in order to proceed.

Schneider did find ChatGPT very helpful, though, in solving a non–Mystery Hunt puzzle about navigating the byzantine rules of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which he admits he’s never played. A few years ago, there would have been no way around spending hours digging through the rulebooks and figuring out each step, but giving the puzzle to ChatGPT worked. “It was really good at doing this. I guess it had trained on enough data of people playing Dungeons & Dragons that this was within its capabilities,” he says.

Schneider is optimistic that new technology will be integrated into Mystery Hunt in creative ways, expanding the scope of what puzzle constructors can come up with to entertain solvers. Ultimately, he says, “I mostly just want to be surprised.”

As the sun sets on Sunday, Setec continues solving puzzles at a steady pace, but we’re also still unlocking new sections of the Hunt—a sign that we’re still some distance from the endgame, though rumors (but never spoilers) from friends on other teams suggest that a few teams might be closing in. As midnight rolls around there’s still no announcement, and so we push on. Ultimately, the 2024 Hunt ends up running into Monday morning, one of only a handful of times it’s taken more than 60 hours to complete. 

MOLLY FREY/DEATH & MAYHEM

A little after 5 a.m., team Death and Mayhem solves the final puzzle to win the 2024 Mystery Hunt—and the responsibility of developing the 2025 Hunt, which kicks off on January 17. In the end, 266 teams have solved at least one of the 2024 Hunt’s 237 puzzles and Setec Astronomy has solved 174. (Teams typically care less about postgame rankings than about how many puzzles they get to before time runs out.) 

The Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later sends out an announcement that a wrap-up event, at which they’ll give a full overview of the weekend and hand over the reins to Death and Mayhem, will begin at noon in 26-100. Because creating a Mystery Hunt is such a daunting task, Death and Mayhem got to work on this year’s within hours of winning, says James Douberley ’13, who assumed the title of “benevolent dictator” to orchestrate and oversee the team’s puzzle writing.

The weight of expectation is not lost on Douberley and his teammates: This is a once-a-year event that holds a lot of meaning for many participants. 

The Mystery Hunt is about solving puzzles, but it’s also far more social and immersive than puzzle books and escape rooms. In 2024, nearly 2,000 people representing 91 teams showed up on campus to participate­—and another 2,450 or so signed up to puzzle from afar. All told, solvers included 52 faculty members, 278 students, and 950 alumni, ranging from recent graduates to those who got their degrees decades ago. For Chang, the Hunt is an opportunity to connect with the broader community, including alumni from her dorm whom she doesn’t see often. “This is the one time in the year that we get to all just be in one place together and do this thing that we love,” she says. “It’s just a really great bonding experience.”

COURTESY OF DEATH & MAYHEM

The MIT campus plays a special role in the Hunt. Maybe you have to use the walls of the List Visual Arts Center lobby as a grid for a logic puzzle, or find certain names on the memorial plaques in Lobby 10 whose first letters spell out an answer. But it’s not just that clues can be part of the physical space—it’s that campus is the epicenter for the MIT spirit of creativity, inventiveness, and industriousness that makes the Mystery Hunt unique. “People talk about New York being a character in movies,” Katz says. “I feel like MIT is a character in Mystery Hunt.” 

For Douberley, the Mystery Hunt takes him back to his student days, when he tackled hard challenges through marathon work sessions and all-nighters. “You fall asleep on the floor, and you’re in the dorm lounge and your friend comes and wakes you up and says, ‘Here’s a coffee—I need your help with something,’” he says. “And that is something that lives with you for the rest of your life.” 

Editor’s Note:

The 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt kicks off on January 17, 2025. But if you’re eager to start puzzling before then—or get a taste of puzzling if you’ve never taken part before—check out the MIT Mystery Heist, a pre-Hunt round of puzzles written by the Mystery Hunt team known as the Providence Crime Syndication. Learn more and solve at mitmysteryheist.com.

“THE CULT OF THE FOUNDER.” “THE CULT OF THE TECH GENIUS.” 

“Beware: Silicon Valley’s cultists want to turn you into a disruptive deviant.” “Tech’s cult of the founder bounces back.” “Silicon Valley’s Strange, Apocalyptic Cults.” “How the cult of personality and tech-bro culture is killing technology.” “Company or cult?” “Is your corporate culture cultish?” “The Cult of Company Culture Is Back. But Do Tech Workers Even Want Perks Anymore?” “10 tech gadgets with a cult following on Amazon—and why they’re worth it.” “13 steps to developing a cult-like company culture.”

The headlines seem to write themselves (if that cliché is allowed anymore in the age of ChatGPT and generative AI). Tech is culty. But that is a metaphor, right? Right?! 

When I first saw Michael Saylor’s Twitter account, I wasn’t sure. Saylor is an entrepreneur, tech executive, and former billionaire. Once reportedly the richest man in the Washington, DC, area, he lost most of his $7 billion net worth in 2000 when, in his mid-30s, he reached a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission after it brought charges against him and two of his colleagues at a company called MicroStrategy for inaccurate reporting of their financial results. But I had no idea who he was back then.

In 2021 Saylor started showing up in my Twitter feed. His profile picture showed a man with chiseled features, silver hair, and stubble sitting in a power pose and looking directly into the camera, a black dress shirt unbuttoned to display a generous amount of his neck. It was a typical tech entrepreneur’s publicity shot except for the lightning bolts blasting from his eyes, and the golden halo crown. Then there were his tweets:

As MIT’s humanist chaplain, I follow a lot of ministers, rabbis, imams, and monks online. Very few religious leaders would dare to be this religious on social media. They know that few of their readers want to see such hubris. Why, then, does there seem to be an audience for this seemingly cultish behavior from a cryptocurrency salesman? Are tech leaders like Saylor leading actual cults? 

According to Bretton Putter, an expert on startups and CEO of the consulting firm CultureGene, this needn’t be a major concern: “It’s pretty much impossible,” Putter writes, “for a business to become a full-blown cult.” And if a tech company or other business happens to resemble a cult, that might just be a good thing, he argues: “If you succeed in building a cultlike culture similar to the way that Apple, Tesla, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom, and Harley-Davidson have, you will experience loyalty, dedication, and commitment from your employees (and customers) that is way beyond the norm.” 

Are the cultlike aspects of tech companies really that benign? Or should we be worried? To find the answer, I interviewed Steve Hassan, a top expert on exit counseling, or helping people escape destructive cults. 

At age 19, while he was studying poetry at Queens College in New York City in the early 1970s, Hassan was recruited into the Unification Church—the famously manipulative cult also known as the Moonies. Over his next 27 months as a member of the church, Hassan helped with its fundraising, recruiting, and political efforts, which involved personally meeting with the cult leader Sun Myung Moon multiple times. He lived in communal housing, slept only a few hours a night, and sold carnations on street corners seven days a week for no pay. He was told to drop out of college and turn his bank account over to the church. In 1976, he fell asleep at the wheel while driving a Moonie fundraising van and drove into the back of a tractor-trailer at high speed. He called his sister from the hospital, and his parents hired former members to help “deprogram” him and extract him from the cult.

After the Jonestown mass suicide and murders of 1978 brought attention to the lethal dangers of cult mind control, Hassan founded a nonprofit organization, Ex-Moon Inc. Since then, he’s earned a handful of graduate degrees (including a doctorate in the study of cults), started numerous related projects, and written a popular book on how practices with which he is all too familiar have crept into the mainstream of US politics in recent years. (That 2019 book, The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, seemed even more relevant in early 2024, when a video called “God Made Trump” went viral across the campaign trail.) Hassan even found himself advising Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, leader of the second impeachment trial against Donald Trump, in 2021, on how to think and communicate about the cultish aspects of the violent mob of Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on January 6 of that year.

I wanted to ask Hassan what he makes of the discourse around tech cults, but first it’s important to understand how he thinks about cults in the first place. Hassan’s dissertation was titled “The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control: Undue Influence, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Mind Control, Trafficking, and the Law.” The idea was to create a model that could measure cult exploitation and manipulation, or what Hassan and other experts in related fields call “undue influence.” His BITE model looks to evaluate the ways social groups and institutions attempt to control followers’ behavior, information access, thoughts, and emotions. Because there is no one quintessential, Platonic definition of a cult, what matters is where a given instance of potential cultishness falls on an “influence continuum.” In this continuum model, Hassan evaluates the ways in which institutional cultures attempt to influence people. To what extent are individuals allowed to be their authentic selves or required to adopt a false cult identity? Are leaders accountable to others, or do they claim absolute authority? Do organizations encourage growth in the people who participate in them, or do they seek to preserve their own power over all else? While any kind of person or group can struggle with some of the dimensions on Hassan’s continuum chart (which lists constructive behaviors at one end and destructive behaviors at the other), healthier organizations will tend toward constructive responses more of the time, whereas unhealthier institutions—those more truly worthy of the cult label in the most negative sense—will tend toward destructive responses such as grandiosity, hate, demands for obedience, elitism, authoritarianism, deceptiveness, or hunger for power. 

It turns out that there are some real, meaningful similarities between cults and tech, according to Hassan. “This is the perfect mind-control device,” he told me, holding up his iPhone. He explained that when he joined the Moonies in 1974, cult recruiters had to get information from the victim. Now, he said, users of everyday technologies are sitting ducks: “There are 5,000 data points on every voting American in the dark web, and there are companies that will collect and sell that data.”

The first time Hassan was told about cryptocurrency, he added, it smacked of multilevel marketing to him. The proposition that you can make a fortune in a very short amount of time, with almost no labor, was something he had seen many times in his work. As was the idea that if you become an early investor in such a scheme, you’ll make more money if you recruit more people to join you. “The people who started it are always going to make 99% of the money,” Hassan said. And as in the cults that recruited him and continue to recruit the kinds of people who ultimately become his clients, “everyone else is going to get burned.” 

All of this would certainly seem to explain why I so frequently hear from people, eager for me to know they are fellow atheists, who tell me to buy some bitcoin because it will rewire my neurons and cure me of the woke mind virus.

Of course, it should be noted that some scholars have complained about Hassan’s work, arguing that brainwashing and mind control are concepts for which there is not sufficient evidence. But I’m not claiming that tech uses literal brainwashing, nor is it like when a character in a Scooby-Doo episode hears “You are getting very sleepy” and then their eyes become squiggles. Hassan probably wouldn’t say so either. 

Companies don’t need to go to such extremes to exert undue influence on us, though. And as is clear from the headlines I cited above, a lot of companies have been accused of, or associated with, a bit of cultishness. 

I won’t attempt to evaluate anyone’s cultish tendencies on a scale of 1 to 10. But I see crypto sales techniques as a particularly good example of cultlike behavior, because if there’s one thing cults need to be good at to sustain their existence, it’s separating people from their wallets. Cryptocurrency has specialized in that to extraordinary effect. 

It’s all a continuum, and it would be hard to find a person whose life is completely devoid of anything cultish, technological or otherwise. But as a culture, we are careening dangerously toward the wrong end of Hassan’s chart. Or to quote a Michael Saylor tweet, “We all stumble in the dark until we see the cyber light. #Bitcoin.”

Adapted from Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. Copyright 2024 by Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at MIT. Used with permission of the publisher, MIT Press.

When I last wrote to you in this magazine, I told you a bit about the MIT Collaboratives, an effort to spark new ideas and modes of inquiry and help the people of MIT solve global problems. Since then, we’ve launched the first collaborative, grounding it in the human-centered fields represented by our School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). We’re calling it the MIT Human Insight Collaborative, or MITHIC.

In broad terms, MITHIC is an endorsement of the quality of our faculty in these fields and an expression of how deeply we value the scholarly and artistic practices that expand our understanding of the things that make us human.

In a practical sense, it’s designed to help our scholars in human­-centered disciplines “go big.” MITHIC will give them the resources to pursue their most innovative ideas within their discipline, create opportunities for them to collaborate with colleagues outside it, and enable them to explore fresh approaches to teaching our students.

We celebrated the launch of MITHIC with a showcase of creative excellence. MIT faculty shared research that blends the humanistic with the technological, MIT students improvised on jazz saxophone, and in a keynote conversation, the acclaimed novelist Min Jin Lee talked about her dedication to putting the human at the center of her work.

Our faculty are wonderfully energized by MITHIC, and more than 100 have already taken part in the collaborative’s “Meeting of the Minds” events, organized to connect researchers across the Institute who work on similar ­topics—from cybersecurity to food security, climate simulations to the bioeconomy. 

There may never have been a more important time for society to make humane choices about new technologies. And I’m thrilled that at MIT we’ve created a collaborative powered by human insight to support our scholars, students, explorers, and makers in shaping a future of technology in service to humanity.

“I’m moving to Boston in three weeks!” At my high school graduation, I had just learned I’d been accepted into the Interphase EDGE program, an incredible opportunity to acclimate to life at MIT before the 2022 school year began.

I was glad to have that chance, since I faced a big change from life at home in Claremore, on the Cherokee Nation reservation in northeastern Oklahoma. I’d been away on my own only once, on a fifth-grade trip to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, where I first fell in love with aerospace engineering.

It didn’t take long to find community on campus. To my surprise, out of the dozen students at a welcome event for the Indigenous community, three grad students and an undergrad were in the aero-astro department. As a prospective Course 16 major and a FIRST Robotics alum, I was excited to discover that they planned to start a new team for the First Nations Launch (FNL) rocketry competition, a NASA Artemis Student Challenge. It was the perfect opportunity to merge my technical passion with my cultural roots.

That first year, many people questioned the need for our team. “MIT already has a Rocket Team,” they’d say. But while most build teams are defined by the specific projects they work on, the product is just one aspect of the experience.

Yes, I’ve learned to design, build, launch, and safely recover a model rocket. But doing that alongside other Indigenous engineers on the team we call MIT Doya (ᏙᏯ, Cherokee for beaver) has taught me more than engineering skills. Beyond learning how to work with composites or design fins, I’ve learned how to navigate classes and connect with professors. I’ve learned about grad school. And I’ve learned how to celebrate my Indigenous identity and honor my ancestors with my work. For instance, we often hold smudging ceremonies—burning sage to purify ourselves or our rockets—at our team meetings and competitions. 

Our team emphasizes universal consensus and buy-in on the technical side and pays attention to the success of each team member on a personal level. We call this gadugi (ᎦᏚᎩ) in Cherokee, or “everyone helping each other.”

I’ve also learned that embracing my culture can offer a better approach to engineering challenges. While many engineering settings foster top-down decision-making, our team tests and incorporates as many ideas as possible to engage everyone, emphasizing universal consensus and buy-in on the technical side while paying attention to the success of each team member on a personal level. We call this gadugi (ᎦᏚᎩ) in Cherokee, or “everyone helping each other.” And we find it’s led to better technical results—and a better experience for everyone on the team. 

I feel incredibly fortunate to work closely with other Indigenous students on an engineering project we all deeply care about. I’ve looked up to the senior members of the team, seeing in them proof of what an Indigenous student at MIT can be and accomplish. And I’ve loved mentor­ing newer members, passing along what I’ve learned to help them excel.

Our launch weekends expand our community further, allowing us to work alongside inspiring Indigenous engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Blue Origin. I’ve gotten to meet my heroes and seen that it’s possible to succeed as a Native American in aerospace engineering. In fact, my FNL experiences have already helped me secure an amazing internship. Last summer—exactly a decade after setting my heart on aerospace engineering at Space Camp—I returned to Huntsville as a lunar payloads intern on the Mark I Lunar Lander at Blue Origin.

Through the FNL team, I’ve significantly advanced my technical skills. As our systems and simulations lead the first year, I integrated all the components of the physical design into a cohesive computer model with accuracy in both geometry and mass distribution. From that model, I can run simulated flights while adjusting for various launch conditions and trying out different motors. A small change on the ground can yield a big change in our final altitude, which must be within a specific range—so this analysis drives the overall design. 

In our first year, our challenge was to re-create the design of a kit rocket while making it lighter by fabricating all the parts ourselves, primarily using hand-laid carbon fiber and fiberglass. We finished in second place and were named Rookie Team of the Year.

For 2023–’24, our challenge was to build a rocket large enough to carry a deployable drone, leading us to build an airframe 7.5 inches in diameter. We also had to design and fabricate the drone’s chassis to meet strict specifications: It had to fit inside the rocket on the launchpad, deploy at apogee (ours was 2,136 feet), unfold from a compact stowed configuration to 16 by 16 inches, descend by parachute to 500 feet, and then release the parachute for piloted navigation to a landing pad. To meet FAA requirements, two of our team members studied for and earned Part 107 remote pilot certificates so they could operate the drone.

Since this new challenge required us to fabricate a rocket while also designing and building the drone, we broke up into two subteams to work on both in parallel. This approach required precise coordination between the subteams to ensure that everything would integrate well for the final launch. As team captain, I managed this coordination while staying involved on the technical side as systems and simulations lead and airframe lead. And as we worked our way through the project milestones from proposal through flight readiness review, we kept in mind that we needed both an operational drone and a safe flight to the right altitude to meet the challenge. 

In April our team traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to put our rocket to the test. We loaded the parachutes and payload, blessing it with some medicine before sending our hard work into the sky. But when I went to load our motor, the motor mount fell off in my hand. We quickly proceeded to the range safety officer, who was able to salvage our rocket and our launch with the last-minute addition of an external motor retention device. After that minor (but almost catastrophic) delay, we had a safe launch and successful recovery—and earned the Next Step Award, a $15,000 grant to represent FNL in the University Student Launch Initiative, a NASA-hosted competition open to everyone, for the 2024–’25 season.

Six weeks later, when the overall competition winners were announced, we were thrilled to learn we had won the grand prize! Along with bragging rights, we won a VIP trip to Kennedy Space Center in August and got to walk through the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building, explore the shuttle landing strip, see Polaris Dawn on the launchpad, and watch a Starlink launch from the beach in the early morning hours.

This year, I’m honored to serve as team captain again, leading an expanded team as we tackle the challenges of the new Student Launch Initiative. I’m already looking forward to May, when we’ll launch the rocket we’ll be perfecting between now and then. And to honor our Indigenous heritage and send it into the sky with good intentions, I’ll make sure we smudge before flight. 

Hailey Polson ’26, an aero-astro major and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, is captain of MIT’s First Nations Launch team.