After 7 years at MIT, my advisor finally asked me if I wanted to become a SMART student. ‘Uh, yah, sure?’.

Actually, he was referring to the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) program, a major collaboration between MIT and universities in Singapore. Just yesterday the Singaporean government announced $1.2B more for research, including a state-of-the-art new SMART research building.

A few months later, i am sweating in a dorm room at the National University of Singapore, at 5am (thanks to jetlag), writing this while i listen to crazy birds outside and wait for sunrise. I’ll be here for another week, visiting some of our collaborators and buying expensive optics toys for the SMART lab.

With many international research programs, MIT is a leader in the race between universities to establish global connections. As an undergrad, i participated in one of the first of these, the Cambridge-MIT Exchange. I spent my junior year at Cambridge University in the UK, playing football(soccer) and drinking wine at Harry-Potter dinners. Besides that, I got to experience a whole new way of learning, with no psets (only finals at the end). This resulted in a lot of $0.02 weekend trips with Ryanair, followed by 6 weeks of studying 14 hrs/day. It prepared me better for grad school, where all the learning is done on your own and there aren’t as many deadlines.

At MIT, you can also create your own international experience. Last year, i stumbled upon an ad at Harvard looking for interns at a German Quantum Physics lab. I was learning german and, quantum physics sounds fun, right? so i applied, and ended up spending 2 hectic months in Munich, working at the TUM.

Before I came to MIT, I hadn’t left America, and now I’m on the other side of the world. I love to travel, but actually living and working in another country is so much more revealing than just being a tourist. So here’s a little piece of advice from one SMART student to another: Come to MIT, but then, once you get here, leave, while you’re still here, if that makes any sense.