Tech Reflection: McCormick Hall, 2022

Tara Venkatadri ’22: “This photo is me on graduation day outside McCormick Hall, where I lived all four years that I was at MIT. I still remember the very first time I visited McCormick. It was Campus Preview Weekend, and I was a high school senior. After an exhausting day of events, a few new friends dragged me to a party where I felt completely like a fish out of water. I practically ran out of the building and wound up at the Harry Potter movie night in McCormick. As I entered the Green Living Room, an instant sense of calm washed over me. I knew at once that I had found my sanctuary.

“McCormick was not only my living community during my undergraduate years—it’s also where I met some of my closest friends. My freshman roommates were incredibly supportive, and they pushed me to do things I would never have thought of—including spending all night wallpapering our door with a mosaic of the rising sun, composed of hundreds of tiny squares of vibrantly colored paper!

“In my first year, some of us also formed an informal breakfast club, meeting at the McCormick dining hall at 8:00 a.m. sharp every day to chat about our shared GIR [General Institute Requirements] struggles. Throughout that long, often painful freshman year (my battle with the GIRs had me convinced I’d never become an engineer), McCormick was a persistent beacon of light shining through the darkness and reminding me that, no matter how difficult things were, I had a community of wonderful people to lift me up and cheer me on.

“The McCormick house team provided a steady stream of bonding activities, including study breaks with a wide assortment of home-baked goods, barbecues, karaoke nights (which invariably devolved into a gleeful cacophony of dozens of McCormick residents standing in the courtyard, belting songs at the top of our lungs), and more.

“When we were sent home during the Covid-19 pandemic, I missed McCormick so much that I took advantage of an assignment to write about it. In my class on modern architecture, I was asked to write about the social history of a building and decided to focus on the pivotal role McCormick had played for women at MIT. I was astonished to learn that in the early 1900s, the few female students at MIT were required to wear hats everywhere—and it seems they even wore feathered hats in labs! Also, although Katharine Dexter McCormick [1904], an early MIT alumna, donated the money in the early 1960s to build the women’s dorm (named for her husband), it wasn’t until 1970 that MIT stopped capping the admissions of women based on the capacity of McCormick Hall.

“Fortunately, by the time I arrived in 2018, I never felt that my gender was a barrier to success. I was able to drink fully from the MIT firehose—experiencing the highest highs and the lowest lows with a constant underpinning of stress—and I was grateful to return at day’s end to the welcoming place I truly came to consider my second home.

“I am incredibly thankful to the generations of alumnae before me for creating such an amazing space for women at MIT.”

After earning her degree in aerospace engineering, Tara Venkatadri went to the University of Cambridge for a master’s in engineering. She is now a PhD student in space engineering at Caltech.

Photos courtesy of Tara Venkatadri