Tech Totems: What Makes Workplaces Unique

In her home office in Federal Way, Washington, Janet Freeman-Daily '78 keeps a model of the Starship Enterprise that is made out of spare parts from her days designing aerospace components. On difficult days—she’s one of 30 lung cancer patients in the world taking an experimental drug to treat a rare strain of the disease—it encourages her to remember everything she accomplished in her two decades as an aerospace engineer.

Freeman-Daily dubbed it the “Starship Connector-prise,” an allusion to the electrical connectors used to put it together. “For years, while I worked on new products in aerospace, it hung in my office," she says. "It was a gift from a dear friend in my MIT dorm who earned his Course 6 degrees before the digital age. Now that I'm retired and fighting cancer, I focus more on living in the moment and less on possessions. But this still occupies a place of honor. It's a reminder of youth, friends, creativity, and hacking."

As reported in the July/August issue of MIT Technology Review, many such workplace totems occupy equal places of honor in the offices of MIT alumni. They range from ordinary objects to profoundly meaningful emblems of times past.

Many alumni offices house awards, plaques, certificates, and diplomas—the war trophies of academics. Robert Graber '75 hung his grad diploma on his faculty office wall at the University of Arkansas-Monticello along with a plaque awarded early in his career for distinguished research.

“I also treasure ‘thank-you’ letters from former students and others I have helped along the way. However, I keep those in a drawer, not readily seen by visitors,” Graber says.

For many alums, the brass rat is most often kept in the office if not on one’s hand. “Most people don’t recognize it, but it’s fun when they do,” says Bill Mize ’72, an associate professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “It represents for me the first time I had been away from home…and a dream come true, as I had talked about going to MIT since fourth grade. I feel an affection for it. At a reunion, I bought a giant replica of the ring, which I keep in my bedroom.”

In his office at the Broad Institute at MIT, David Altshuler ’86 keeps a wooden plaque that contains the eight core values of his sons’ summer camp in the Berkshires, including “Each for all, all for each” and “Better faithful than famous.”

“While these mottos are aimed at boys and young men,” Altshuler remarks, “I find that they have a lot to teach us as adults.”

In MIT Technology Review this month: more totems from alumni offices.