Fall 2024 / The Whole Student Experience

“I Didn’t Expect People to Be So Kind and Compassionate”

At MIT, Cesar Meza ’25 discovered his community—and the importance of charting his own path

Cesar Meza ’25 is candid about his transition to MIT from high school: the work was hard, and all-nighters didn’t always pay off.

He found a supportive community among his Catholic peers, in the Sport Taekwondo Club, and through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), where he studies lunar soil in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. These opportunities, he says, would have been out of reach without support from the Viterbi Family Scholarship. “This support has been monumental in funding my education and has allowed me to focus on pursuing research that I am passionate about, rather than worrying about how to pay for school,” he says.

Ambitions of space

I was always interested in space travel. When my parents took me to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as a toddler, I was absolutely blown away by the massive rockets. After that experience, I would watch Apollo footage in my room and read anything I could about space. That’s what really got me into STEM and engineering.

I knew MIT had a hands-on culture. So, before I started, I reached out to Professor [of the Practice] Jeffrey Hoffman because I wanted to research technologies for space travel. I cold-emailed, saying, “Hi, I’m a rising freshman. Can I work in your lab in the fall?” From there, I was able to UROP in his lab.

More to life than grades

In high school, I would put in a certain amount of time and effort and get a good grade. I could stay up all night working on something. I tried that my first year at MIT, and quickly realized it was a completely different game. To be honest, it made me feel miserable! I didn’t know what my work was worth. But the UROP program was a great experience that helped me get through. I was paired with a graduate student mentor who gave me hands-on work doing testing and validation for an Antarctic Seismo-Geodetic Ice Penetrator—imagine a missile without propulsion, dropped from a plane or helicopter to measure forces acting on the ice sheets. This really kept me going, because it reminded me that classes weren’t everything.

I am also engaged with the Catholic community on campus and joined the MIT Sport Taekwondo team my first year. Even when I was getting an average of four hours of sleep a night and thought that I was one of the worst students at MIT, these folks would remind me that this was not true. I owe a lot to my faith and the people around me.

The importance of charting your own path

Coming to MIT, I knew everyone would be smart, but I didn’t expect people to be so kind and compassionate. I have friends who are absolute geniuses, yet they can look at me and say, “Wow. You’re doing all this cool stuff.” If they could look at me and be impressed, why couldn’t I do the same thing with myself?

I struggled a lot with imposter syndrome. It took me three years to finally feel comfortable in my own skin, to realize that I do have things going for me. This year, I took a lot of project-based classes and got to start my own research on enriching lunar soil to extract iron and oxygen. I hope to continue working in lunar-soil enrichment, which I believe is important to the future of space travel. But, if there’s one thing MIT has taught me, it’s that I can’t plan too far ahead.