Subra Suresh ScD '81

INTERVIEWER: Today is May 17, 2010. I am Karen Arenson.

We are talking today with Subra Suresh, Vannevar Bush professor of engineering, and dean of the School of Engineering. He is the former head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and is still affiliated with that department, as well as with the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, and Biological Engineering, and also with the Harvard MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He has also served on the governing board of the Singapore-MIT Alliance, the MIT Portugal Program, and the IMDEA Materials Institute in Madrid, Spain, and as a member of the Advisory Board of Technology Review India.

Subra, thank you for talking to us today.

SURESH: My pleasure.

INTERVIEWER: As dean of the engineering School, you not only lead the largest school at MIT, but one that has many departments that are ranked in the top of their fields. What makes them so special, and how have they managed to remain special for so long?

SURESH: MIT has historically attracted some of the very best students from around the world, from all over the world. We are also fortunate to attract the top faculty from all over the world, as well as retain them through most of their career. The combination of outstanding faculty, outstanding students, outstanding staff, both research and academic administrative staff, in conjunction with an ecosystem that places emphasis not only on brilliant fundamental science, but also translating that science into useful tools, products and processes that benefit society, has made engineering at MIT a very, very powerful entity that has had huge impact on a global scale.

INTERVIEWER: A growing number of American universities seem to be putting more emphasis on engineering and applied science. How will you and MIT ensure that you remain at the top with this growing competition?

SURESH: I think it's very important for us to make sure that people come to MIT in many different fields of engineering and many different departments because this is the place where they can do the best science and best technology. It's very important. This has served us very well, and I think we should continue to keep that edge in order to keep the School of Engineering at MIT at the forefront.

This means we have the infrastructure, the physical infrastructure, namely labs, facilities, both for education and research. We have the type of people who excite young minds. And we have an ecosystem that continues to provide the opportunity to take an idea and put that into practice, either whether it is for a student or for a faculty member. This is why I think it's very important that we continue to recruit the best minds from around the world.

INTERVIEWER: As you've mentioned, American research universities have long attracted the best and the brightest students from around the world - students like you. But now other countries are trying to create their own world-class universities, and some of them are investing heavily. Building the greatest research university is a lot more complex than building the tallest building, but probably not out of the question. How serious do you think the global competition will be, especially in the face of the money that's being poured in in some countries?

SURESH: I think MIT became what it is today, just like many leading institutions in the world, not because of overnight success, but because of cultivating and nurturing a certain set of principles and then using them to continually strive for excellence. The competition that we face from a global scale is a lot more today than it was a decade or two ago, and it is something that we should pay a lot of attention to. Complacency for any institution, including MIT, is not a good thing. But at the same time, I think one should not panic either. I think it requires careful thought, careful assessment of competition.

This also means both at the institutional level, at the national level, we continue to place emphasis on science and technology in providing support, especially for young people to want to go into science. It also means that we make science and engineering an attractive destination for high school students. This is something that goes well beyond what a university can do, but it's very important for the country. Once we lose the edge in science and engineering and its impact on society, it'll take a long time to regain this.

So I think it's very important, especially in the 21st century which is going to be the century of science and technology, more so than the 20th century, that we pay attention to this. A part of the trick here will be to communicate to the young people that some of the biggest challenges that are facing humanity on a global scale have solutions that can be found through science and technology.

INTERVIEWER: The post World War II arrangement that funneled abundant Federal aid into basic science research at MIT and other leading universities has been eroding. And no broad support system has arisen to take its place. Instead there have been moves to spread the support among more institutions or to cut it. Do American research universities need Federal investment beyond what exists today? And what form do you think it should take? And do you think that's possible politically?

SURESH: I think we are in very tough economic climate with huge national debt and a physical infrastructure in many institutions that needs to be renewed on a massive scale. Having said that, government support over the past many decades has had a profound impact in transforming higher education from the GI Bill to the Apollo Program to a lot of other things that one can think of have galvanized generations to go into not only higher education, but also to study science, math and engineering.

It needs to come from a variety of sources. No single source alone will suffice. I think we need to look at telling the public why science and engineering is important. Exciting the bright high school students why they should go into science and engineering. We should also provide incentives for young people to go into science and engineering. This may mean addressing two career issues, making it easier for young women to take up academia while balancing all the demands of raising a family.

I think the approaches are multi-prong, but the government support is an important one, and it's not the only one. One can also think of support from industry, which needs to take a longer view rather than short three month cycles in which they assess the success or failure of funding.

INTERVIEWER: How do you do that?

SURESH: Well, I think if we look at historically institutions like the Bell Labs, which created an ecosystem where scientific discoveries could be made and put to practical use, I think that kind of an infrastructure has not been sustained in the last few decades. It's very important, and we have different systems that have evolved. Our younger people have become much more entrepreneurial in recent years.

I think creating an ecosystem to foster that kind of creativity, but at the same time not taking the short term view. The research in energy is a very good example. We cannot formulate energy policies based on the fashion of the day or today's price of oil. One has to take a long term view in this. And same with renewable energy sources.

So it's very important that at all levels one takes a longer term view and not a short term view.

INTERVIEWER: Like many universities, MIT has been entering into a variety of partnerships around the world, and you've been involved in some of them. Why is MIT reaching out now, and does it have a set of guiding principles for what makes sense to do and what doesn't?

SURESH: MIT is not reaching out internationally now; it has always reached out internationally. For example, after the Second World War, MIT was one of the institutions that created a unique system called the Industry Liaison Program, which is the largest industry liaison program of any American university at the present time. So MIT faculty have always be entrepreneurial on an international scale.

What is new now with the increase in interest in science and engineering, especially from rapidly developing very large countries, like China and India, Brazil and Russia, and so forth, there is a greater emphasis on coordinated large international programs. With respect to guiding principles, MIT faculty always engaged on an international scale. As long as they engaged, they delivered their MIT duties, and then create unique opportunities for education and research for their students and for their research groups, MIT has increased this within the confines of their regular policies and procedures of MIT.

At the same time, there are major, large scale programs which will require top level discussion between leaders at MIT and their counterparts in other organizations. So it has to be a combination of coordinated activities, and also activities that bubble up from the faculty level based on faculty interest. Ultimately, no activity will survive or succeed unless it has the buy-in of the faculty. I think this is something very important, whether it's bottoms-up or top-down, it excites the faculty, it excites the students.

Another guiding principle is that MIT has an obligation to take care of its students in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that's the first and the foremost. And there is only one MIT degree at the present time or for the foreseeable future, which is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That's very important.

The second guiding principle is that if we want to do something in a remote part of the world, it has to benefit MIT students and faculty, both intellectually, and possibly infrastructurally or in terms of a geographical dividend. So what the value-added in a particular collaboration? It could be strategic -- the strategic advantage could be geographical, it could be in terms of access to a unique set of facilities or cohort of people which benefits the MIT education. Many of our international programs provide all of this.

A growing desire on the part of MIT faculty and students in recent years has been to increase the level of international exposure to our undergraduate students who will increasingly work in a highly globalized world. This also calls for greater levels of formal engagements with multiple entities around the world.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that MIT is moving fast enough on the international front? And are the support systems for whatever faculty do get interested in of the right sort? Are there things you'd like to see added or created to make it easier to facilitate what the faculty do overseas?

SURESH: I think there are some areas of which MIT has been a leader in international engagement. I mentioned the Industry Liaison Program, the engagement of international industry, large industries, with MIT faculty and students has been a pioneering effort.

The other major international effort which started eight years ago where MIT has been a pioneer is in OpenCourseWare, and that's our virtual engagement around the globe. So those are two examples. We also partnered with various institutions in Singapore well before many other institutions from the US started collaborations. So in some areas we've been leaders, we've been ahead of the game.

There are also areas where we have constraints, where we are not where we would like to be. For example, unlike undergraduate education in humanities or social sciences, it's very difficult for engineering and science students to go abroad for junior year, especially given the demanding schedule constraints of their undergraduate education at MIT. So in that sense, our international engagement for undergraduate students has not been as much as in other areas or other disciplines or compared to other institutions that don't have an engineering or science heavy undergraduate population.

But we're trying to overcome that with providing opportunities for our undergraduate students through a variety of means. The MISTI Program has been very successful in recent years in sending hundreds of students every year abroad. We've internationalized the UROP Program called IROP, International Research Opportunities Program. We started a program called UPOP, Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program a few years ago, which hundreds of engineering students benefit from. We have now internationalized that as well called IPOP.

So there are many opportunities available, but it'll be great if all of our undergraduate students get opportunities at least to be exposed to international students and faculty during the course of their four years at MIT.

INTERVIEWER: Some years back MIT faced criticism in Congress and elsewhere for educating students from overseas. Are you hearing any criticisms like this now, either from inside MIT or from outside?

SURESH: No. I think one of the fears now is that the scientific enterprise of the United States has been very strongly influenced in a very positive way by the inflow of immigrants, especially students. I'm a very good example of that. I came to the US as a graduate student to get my graduate degree. I stayed in the US, became a US citizen. And the United States, compared to any other country in the world, has been a leader in providing opportunities for science education and jobs for people who come from anywhere in the world. I think it's that particular infrastructure that we have had, that ecosystem that we have had that has enabled us to be at the forefront of science and engineering.

Take MIT today, School of Engineering, 43 percent of our faculty in the School of Engineering at MIT are foreign born. More than half of the MIT affiliated Nobel Laureates have been foreign born. If we do not have access to this pool of talent from around the world, top students from around the world, our scientific enterprise will be very severely hurt.

With the growing competition from different parts of the world and the improving economies and the emphasis on science and engineering that's being placed now around the world, we may run the risk of losing a talent pool in many different ways. We may not have as many students from abroad, top students, come to the U.S., places like MIT, to do science and engineering. And even those who may come here may not choose to stay here and pursue careers in the US and this could adversely affect the scientific enterprise in the US in the long term.

INTERVIEWER: You seem to be a person who cuts across boundaries. You've worked in multiple cultures. As you just mentioned, you came from one country to here. You've worked across a number of disciplines -- the material science, mechanical engineering, bioengineering, health sciences. Are you conscious of being a bridging sort of person? And have you always been this way?

SURESH: I think the way science and engineering is evolving, the problems are so complicated and they more frequently now cut through disciplinary boundaries. For example, take energy as an example. It's not just scientific or technological research into energy that's going to solve the energy problem. It's also other things which are not often affiliated with engineering or science. Taxation, political considerations, political science, geographical considerations.

So if technologists were to address energy as an area -- same applies to transportation -- it's not just science and engineering that will influence the global society, it has to be multi-disciplinary. It has to cut through all five schools at MIT in many of the complex areas. As a result there is a growing realization that we have to, as we talk, tackle larger and larger problems which institutions like MIT have the expertise and the bandwidth to do. We have to become increasingly interdisciplinary.

But I also want to add a note of caution there. We don't want to sacrifice depth in the interest of broadening width, our bandwidth. So it has to go hand-in-hand. I think we need to be very careful about while we create opportunities for multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, both in education and research, we want to make sure that that expanded scope doesn't come at the expense of rigor and depth. And this is something that we constantly struggle with in all of our initiatives.

INTERVIEWER: When you became dean of engineering you asked your department heads to think about offering more flexible majors so that engineering students, could indeed, take a wider array of courses, perhaps even management or economics, so they could tackle broad problems like energy or transportation. Tell us what's happening with that, and how well did that sit with the departments and how many of them have moved in this direction now?

SURESH: This idea of providing greater flexibility to students, as they seek to broaden the scope of their undergraduate experience at MIT, was part and parcel of our strategic planning effort, which I started in 2007 soon after becoming dean. We had two independent groups that looked at strategic directions for the school with respect to the possibility of a flexible degree. Roughly around the same time, the Institute faculty were also looking at opportunities to make interdisciplinary undergraduate educational experience much more flexible.

At the Institute level we had two major things happen. The requirements for a double major were changed so that it made it easier for an undergraduate student to get a double major. At the same time, it was also made easier for the student to get a minor in a broad area of interest such as energy. So we have an energy minor that was approved by the MIT Faculty.

At the School of Engineering, the strategic planning committees that looked into this came back with the recommendation that the School should consider taking up or at least exploring the possibility of a flexible engineering degree program. We were fortunate to have an example already with a lot of data points in mechanical engineering. The mechanical engineering department offers something called the 2-A Degree Program, which is ABET accredited. Now about 45 percent of the undergraduate students in mechanical engineering opt for the 2-A Degree Program. So we have a lot of information on what works, what the challenges were, so we could use that in formulating a plan for the flexible engineering degree program.

Just this semester, the Institute Faculty approved a program called 16-ENG, which is a flexible undergraduate degree program in engineering that will be launched by the aero and astro department this coming fall. The plan for the department is to take the degree program and seek ABET accreditation two to three years from now. These are the two departments that have launched this program. Intentionally we have made this program voluntary on the part of the departments. This was the recommendation of the Faculty committee. By that I mean the department can opt in or opt out.

Two departments are already launching this program -- mechanical and aero and astro. Other Faculty from another department have just voted to take up this issue to prepare for a possible launch next year. There are two other departments in engineering that are in the process of doing a strategic planning effort in their own department, and they'll be coming back with some recommendations later in the fall of this year.

So, my expectation is that in about two to three years, a number of departments in engineering will be offering this flexibility engineering degree program.

INTERVIEWER: Was ABET somewhat slow in deciding to approve the mechanical engineering path back in '02? Did it take a long time before they said OK? And what do you expect now?

SURESH: No, ABET was not slow to approve it, but the ABET has a requirement that the first cohort of students graduate and then there'd be data before they actually approve and give accreditation to that program. So there is a time delay of a few years. So mechanical engineering, once they had the cohort of students graduate in the new program, they did seek approval and were successful in their accreditation.

INTERVIEWER: What does it mean for the several years of students who come out before it's accredited, anything? Does it matter?

SURESH: Of course, it's a consideration. A lot of the students it did not bother them it was not ABET accredited, and that's how we launched the program. But the enrollments did go up after ABET accreditation. But also the enrollments did go up broadly in mechanical engineering -- we don't know whether it's just a coincidence or whether there is a cause and effect related to this year.

INTERVIEWER: Have you looked at the experience of the students once they graduate? Is industry hiring them? And are you getting any kind of feedback as to whether or not they think that you've given up some depth or that the students have or that it's OK and that the trade-offs you've made are good ones?

SURESH: It's a little bit too early, but we do conduct exit surveys, and exit surveys are conducted at the time of graduation and five years down the road. They're conducted periodically. Our experience has been the perceptions of students, and also the data points that we receive, are a function of time. Students' perceptions soon after graduation is somewhat different from their perspectives five years after they've graduated. We have found that the fondness for MIT grows with time, and the appreciation of experiences that they have at MIT grows with time as well.

INTERVIEWER: That or their lack of fondness diminishes with time?

SURESH: That could be too, but from the recent exit polls that we know, the vast majority of the students are in a category of either being satisfied or very satisfied with their experience at MIT.

INTERVIEWER: What do you know about how many of the students who graduate in engineering, undergraduate, go out to work in engineering as opposed to, say, going into business or some other field?

SURESH: Well, the data points are changing very fast. If you had asked me this question two years ago, a number of our top students, not just in engineering but also in the sciences, were going into either management consulting or finance or Wall Street. In the last couple of years that has changed dramatically. We've seen a significant increase in the number of applications to graduate school. We've also seen a significant increase in applications for faculty positions, junior faculty positions -- some people who may have gone to non-engineering careers have chosen to stay in engineering.

There are also interesting possibilities abroad. There are new but significant numbers of new institutions focused on science and engineering coming into existence, especially in the developing part of the world. There are opportunities for our engineering graduate students to seek academic careers abroad, more so than, say, 10 or 20 years ago. I think the combinations of these factors will play out and will have a greater set of data points a few years down the road.

INTERVIEWER: On one of your websites you say this, and I quote, "When addressing issues today, especially those affecting the climate, it is not sufficient to take complex problems apart and merely investigate incremental improvements to their components." What did you mean by that, and why do you think it's important?

SURESH: I mean if we take energy as an example, or carbon-based energy as an example, if we focus just on engineering issues, I don't think that's going to address the issue. We have to look at a variety of geopolitical issues. Issues related to the environment. Short term versus long term gains. Cost just not of energy expenditure, but the effect of climate change precipitated by that particular form of energy. That's what I meant by that statement.

I think looking in isolation, one nano issue of a very large complex problem will not solve the problem. INTERVIEWER: How widely do you think this is recognized at MIT or within the School of Engineering?

SURESH: I think it's in the last few years it's come much more on the spotlight. For example, the energy initiative of which the School of Engineering is a major player, also benefits from participation from the humanities, arts and social sciences, management, architecture and planning, and the science School. And giving opportunities for faculty to engage at the institutional level gives a much greater appreciation of the issues related to engineering than just focusing on energy research within the school of engineering.

The same is true for energy minor at the undergraduate level. While the students take courses in engineering, they also take courses in management and economics, which is a great benefit.

Another example I want to give in this regard is at the intersection of engineering and life sciences. Here I can cite two recent trends. Engineering faculty are increasingly engaging in research, not only in biology but also in biomedicine and public health as it relates to human health.

Secondly, this pursuit has become much more international. One of the first programs to start in our SMART Center, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology is infectious diseases. Half of the participants in this program are from the School of Engineering looking at infectious diseases. The Regan Institute for HIV/Aids is another effort where research is being done into HIV/Aids by engineering faculty members at MIT. This is a new effort.

A third example is the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, which will have about 25 labs when it's completed next year. Half of those labs will be occupied by engineering faculty.

The recent trend has been not only to bring engineering in much closer contact with life sciences, but also to connect it in a seamless way with the medical research community, the clinical research community, and the research community that deals with public health.

INTERVIEWER: When you teach classes or interact with students in your lab, how explicitly do you talk to them about the need to have more breadth or to think of economics or political components of things that might touch on what they're working on? Or do you think that these are things they'll pick up in other courses?

SURESH: Part of the problem that we have, which goes back to the earlier comment I made about breadth versus depth, the undergraduate students have only four years at MIT. And within the four years they have to fulfill their GIRs, and they also have to take very rigorous and very demanding subjects in their areas of specialization. But having said that, it's important, and MIT has been one of the places that historically has done that probably as well or as better than anybody else to relate fundamental science and engineering to reality and societal relevance. And that needs to be done in every subject, in every course.

As curriculum changes, as issues change, as complex problems evolve, that affect this century as opposed to the last century or the century before, we need to adapt our curriculum to take care of that. That doesn't necessarily mean every undergraduate has to take a course in economics or a particular type of political science, but I think if we can integrate at least all the relevant issues it would be very beneficial.

In my own subjects, I try to bring in case studies and examples, classes that I have taught, and whether it's done either during the lecture hours or in recitation or as a homework problem or term paper, having that given to the students in some form would be very beneficial.

INTERVIEWER: Let's back up and talk about the path that brought you to the United States and MIT. Where were you born and what were you like as a child?

SURESH: So, I was born in India. I grew up in south India, and I did my undergraduate degree at Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, which is now called Chennai. The IITs are and still continue to be an institution which, at the societal level, was perceived as Ameritocracy. For me the path was not completely voluntary, but was set by the set of circumstances that I was in, and a ticket to success in a career at that time and still, to some extent, true today, would be to get a degree in engineering. This is the aspiration of most middle class families in India even today.

It was ameritocracy, and you got in because you did well in the exams, and there was no other way to get in. That propels you to do well in high school. That was the path to get into engineering. I was very good at math and science in high school and I thought naturally engineering was a very good profession to pursue.

Once I finished my undergraduate degree, at that time there was no question, if you want to do post-graduate studies, there was only one place to go to and that's the United States. I applied for a scholarship and I received it and I came to the US.

INTERVIEWER: So you weren't particularly interested in science or math as a child?

SURESH: I was good at science and math. I did well in high school, and I wanted to pursue a career, a rewarding and satisfying career, and engineering was deemed at that time, as a very rewarding career. Because I was the first one in my family to go to university, especially in engineering, there was no push from anybody that I should do engineering and it just happened naturally.

INTERVIEWER: Were either of your parents in any kind of related field or relatives or friends, and what did your parents do?

SURESH: My mother stayed at home to raise two children, so she did not have a career of her own, even though she's an extremely brilliant woman. My father got a diploma in a polytechnic and he worked for a local government organization, so he was not an engineer by any means or a scientist.

So my path into engineering was primarily through a desire to take up a profession that was a pathway to a satisfying career, which gave me an opportunity, despite the fact that I did not have the right push from the surroundings to get into it. It potentially provided opportunities to go abroad, and it was a path to financial success as well. That's what propelled me at that time.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think you might have studied if it hadn't been set up that way?

SURESH: I was very good at languages. I was in the high school debating team in three different languages. For a few fleeting moments, I dreamt of going into the foreign service and becoming a diplomat. Somehow I thought that being good at languages would be helpful in pursuing that career -- this was when I was in the ninth grade or 10th grade. I really enjoyed learning languages and participating in the debating teams. But in the end, engineering was my destination.

INTERVIEWER: What languages did you know?

SURESH: As a child I studied Sanskrit in elementary school. Then I studied Hindi for about eight years -- eight, nine years -- so I went very deeply into Hindi literature. I studied Tamil . In fact, Tamil was my medium of instruction through secondary school. I was very deeply into Tamil literature that goes back a few thousand years. Then I studied English throughout school. Then in my one year pre-university, I studied French, at Alliance Francaise in India.

Then at my undergraduate school in IIT, Madras, it was in collaboration with Germany, so we had a couple of semesters of German instruction. So I did a number of different languages and I kept my interest in some of the foreign languages when I came to the US So at MIT for my PhD I minored in French. I'm not as fluent as I would like to be, but I did study French for a few semesters.

INTERVIEWER: What kinds of elementary and secondary schools did you go to, and how was the preparation?

SURESH: They were all, what we would call them here, public schools, and they were nothing extraordinary. It was free education. They were just your ordinary public schools and--

INTERVIEWER: But they sent how many, what portion of their graduates went on to college?

SURESH: We lived in the same city in a relatively small city in south India from about second grade to end of high school. They were good schools, they taught me well. But I don't even know the numbers -- I would guess probably less than 10 percent of the graduates go to university, and even a much smaller fraction go to graduate school. At that time anyway. I don't know what the -- this was 35 years ago, so I don't know what the numbers are now.

INTERVIEWER: Was college free, IIT?

SURESH: IIT was almost free. You just paid for your dormitory and your living expenses. I had a scholarship from the government even to take care of that. So I would say my five years as an undergraduate, IIT was essentially completely free.

INTERVIEWER: How similar to MIT was IIT?

SURESH: If you look at the law of supply and demand, several hundred thousand students every year apply to the IITs -- only a few thousand make it. So the probability of getting in to an IIT today, and it was not that different 30 years ago, is almost one in 1,000. So the analogy I can draw here -- there's a lot of self-selection, it's very difficult to get into MIT, and this year it became even more difficult. I think the class that's coming in the fall of 2000, the acceptance rate is less than 10 percent.

INTERVIEWER: The 2011.

SURESH: No, the class of 2014, which will be coming into MIT this fall, the acceptance rate is less than 10 percent. It's a self-selecting group. But because of the numbers of people wanting to get in, and India's a country with a population more than a billion, the probability just from supply and demand and the number of slots available of getting into an IIT is likely to be much, much more difficult.

INTERVIEWER: Is the IIT systems government owned or government run?

SURESH: It's funded by the central government, the India Institutes of Technology.

INTERVIEWER: And there are a whole network of them around the country?

SURESH: There were seven campuses. There are some new IITs that have been created recently, so the numbers are growing. But still you're talking about a few thousand students getting admitted each year to these schools. It's very small compared to the cohort of students who would like to get into them.

INTERVIEWER: What was the preparation of students going into the IITs like, say, compared to the preparation of students entering MIT?

SURESH: MIT attracts really top students, valedictorians. But there is no entrance exam to MIT -- it's based on your performance in high school, and it's based on your SAT scores. A variety of factors -- how well you do in interview, your extracurricular activities, and so forth. With IITs it's very different. The criterion for admission to IIT is not based on your high school final exam or grade, it's based on the entrance exam for IITs that are administered jointly by the IITs -- it's called the joint entrance exam given by the IITs. So even if you are number one in your high school, if you don't make it into the top few thousand in the joint entrance exam you will not get in.

The exams today are different. When I took them there were four exams -- mathematics, physics, chemistry and English, and each one was three hours, and each one was 100 points. So four of them 400 points. They will sum up your score for all four subjects, for all hundreds of thousands of students who take them, the top 2,000 will get in, the others won't make it. So the competition is so severe, that the difference between number one and number 2001 will be extremely small.

Today, and at that time, I remember I prepared for this over the course of two or three weeks. Two or three weeks before the joint entrance exam. After the high school exam was finished, I bought a few books, I studied at home for a couple of weeks, went and took the exam and got through. But now I understand talking to friends and colleagues that the students start in their sixth grade or seventh grade, they have special coaching, they study seven days a week, and they take the entrance exam. It's extremely demanding, and they have to give up some of the fun associated with high school life in order to get through the entrance exam these days.

INTERVIEWER: And what about the graduates of the IITs? By the time they've done four years, how would you compare their preparation, what they know and can do, to graduating seniors at MIT?

SURESH: I would say that -- if you look at that data points, how well IIT graduates have done around the world, a lot of them in the US. The IITs have done extremely well as an institution that prepares students in engineering.

But these are the students who are the cream of the crop from the country. So one could argue that as long as you have access to these kinds of students, you could put them in any institution and they are bound to do very well. And to a large extent, this is true of MIT students as well, that the types of students who are self-motivated, who are highly accomplished, who are driven.

So I don't have a basis for comparison. All I know is remembering my undergraduate experience from IITs and looking at the quality of the students that I went to school with in IIT, and comparing them to the quality of undergraduate students that I see at MIT, their educational experiences are very different. The social experiences are very different. Their possibilities are very different.

For example, when I was an undergraduate student, I did not have the same level of access to an international cohort of students or international faculty as MIT students do now. Of course it's 30 years later as well, and the circumstances were very different. But the quality of students is very high, and I would say that both are very high quality institutions.

INTERVIEWER: Did you choose an area of concentration while you were there, or did you all do a general engineering education?

SURESH: So, IITs work very differently. Based on your pecking order or rank in your entrance exam, you could either choose or be assigned an area of engineering that you will major in, and this fluctuates and this varies through generations.

So, at that time in the early 1970s, most of the students wanted to go into electronics because that was very popular. So, a lot of the top students would go into electronics. At that particular point in time, areas like civil engineering were not that popular because there were no major construction projects in the country.

So, you would see a shift, a particular skewed demographics towards areas like microelectronics among top rankers. I was in electrical engineering initially. You don't really get into your major until you're third year of a five year program. At that time it was five years, now it's only four years. They changed some time during the 1980s. So while in the beginning of the third year, you really get into your program. The first two years are common among all engineering students.

At the beginning of my third year I switched to mechanical engineering, so I received my degree in mechanical engineering because I found a set of subjects that that particular department was offering in that particular institution really appealing. So I graduated in mechanical engineering.

INTERVIEWER: What drew you in? What about it appealed to you, do you recall?

SURESH: We had some projects in my first couple of years and I enjoyed doing those projects. They were much more mechanically oriented and oriented towards electrical engineering, so I decided I would pursue a major in that.

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember any of them specifically?

SURESH: I think the idea of building mechanical things appealed to me.

INTERVIEWER: Did you do it as a child? Did you have lots of little things that you played with?

SURESH: No. No, we didn't have a workshop or anything in our home for me to play with. But it was mainly the experience of my first couple of years.

INTERVIEWER: So your aim had been to go abroad to do graduate school?

SURESH: That's correct.

INTERVIEWER: And the United States, was that the only country you considered?

SURESH: No other country even entered my thought. At that time, the place to do graduate education was the US.

INTERVIEWER: And how did you pick a college to do it at?

SURESH: Well, I picked a college because at that time I did not have an relatives or very close friends other than people I knew in my undergraduate school who had previously gone. In any American institution, we didn't have any relatives, and I was the first one in my family to go abroad, let alone as far away to a place like the US.

At that time, if you did not have access to resources outside of the country it was not that easy to get foreign exchange. I don't remember the exact numbers. If I remember correctly, we went allowed only 100 US dollars in foreign in exchange, with which I had to take my GRE exams, I had to apply for my US Visa, I had to pay for TOEFL, plus I had to come and settle down here with those resources.

So I decided only to apply to those universities that did not have an application fee. And if I remember correctly, MIT's application fee at the time was $15, so I did not apply to MIT, even though probably my grades were good enough to get in to MIT.

So I applied to seven or eight universities that waived the application fee. Because of a very attractive offer I received, I went to Iowa State and there were a few students from earlier batches in my undergraduate school who had gone to Iowa State and they had some nice things to say about Iowa State. So I went there. My eventual goal was to do research in an institution like MIT. So I went to Iowa State, received my Master's, and I applied to MIT for a PhD and came here for my PhD.

INTERVIEWER: So you had full funding to go to Iowa State -- they offered you a scholarship?

SURESH: I had a fellowship for my first year and then I had an assistantship, which without that I would not have come.

INTERVIEWER: What was your time at Iowa State like? Did you work for a particular professor or in a specific lab, and how was it?

SURESH: Iowa State was a wonderful location to arrive in the US. This is middle America, and it was also a cultural change in a different way. I had grown up in large cities. So the Indian Institute of Technology is in Madras, which now it's much bigger than the population of Chicago. At that time it was probably about the population of Chicago. So I was used to living in big cities. Ames, Iowa where Iowa State University is located, during the school year it had a population of 45 thousand people. During summer about 10 thousand people. One end of the town to another end is about two and a half miles.

That was a very big culture shock, but it was a wonderful place to arrive in, to get to know a small town America, you get to know the culture. It's a very good way to ease into a new surrounding without being overwhelmed by a very big city environment. I had wonderful friends, very friendly community, and I got an opportunity to get to know the local Iowa community where I had host families I spent Thanksgivings and a few long weekends with local families. So it was a very good social experience.

With respect to research experience, the particular areas that I had the opportunity to start with were not very well funded at that time. So it took a little bit of time. Because of some funding issues I was also a teaching assistant, which was very beneficial in a way later, because I very quickly soon upon arrival in Ames, Iowa, I had the opportunity to teach undergraduate students and I realized how much I enjoyed teaching students.

That probably set a path for me to contemplate going into academia. Also, my thesis advisor at that time, I was at Iowa State a year and eight months or so. During about 10 of those months he was on sabbatical abroad. So unfortunately, I did not have the benefit of having him close by. But nevertheless, it gave me a good education, a good exposure to the US. Then I defended, I got my Master's degree. I applied for a PhD degree, and I came to MIT right after my Master's.

INTERVIEWER: Did they give you any kind of training or coaching in teaching, or did they just say here's your classroom, go to it?

SURESH: Well, I was a teaching assistant. I did not teach the lectures. I was a teaching assistant in a class working with a professor, and the professor was an excellent teacher, a very popular teacher. So working with them was a very good experience.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have to do any language study when you got here or were you completely proficient?

SURESH: So I studied English throughout, almost from elementary school. But my medium of instruction fluctuated between a local Indian language and English. But in undergraduate school everything was in English. So by the time I came to the US I had excellent proficiency in English.

INTERVIEWER: To MIT next in 1979 for your doctorate. Tell us about how that happened and what your plans were then.

SURESH: I wanted to work within the area of mechanical properties of materials. I found a thesis advisor who was a young assistant professor at that time in mechanical engineering. I had the opportunity to start at the beginning of summer of 1979. And remarkably, I started doing experiments as soon as I arrived, and by the end of the summer I had some very interesting results, even before I took a single class at MIT. It really energized me and motivated me and I was working very closely with that professor.

I took classes during the following academic year. I finished my qualified exams in 1980. That summer I had an opportunity to go work at Lockheed in California, so I spent the whole time in Palo Alto, working at Lockheed Palo Alto research labs. I came back, and just in little more than a year it turned out that my research work had really taken off, and I was already writing papers for journals and a couple of papers got accepted.

Then I was really pleasantly surprised when my thesis committee said I could defend by PhD thesis the following May, which would have been less than two years since I arrived on MIT campus. So I defended my PhD thesis.

Then I realized that I hadn't taken enough classes at MIT, so I had to stay through an extra summer, the summer of 1981 and finish my doctorate. My advisor from MIT moved to California, and I hadn't had time to even look for jobs because everything happened so quickly. I decided that I'll continue that work for a couple more years. So I followed him to Berkeley and I was a postdoc there for a year and a half. Then I applied for faculty positions, and Brown University offered me a faculty position. So the experience at MIT was brief but wonderful.