In today's episode, two MIT professors reflect on this question: In an academic culture obsessed with making a name for yourself, what does it look like to care about something bigger than your own success?
You'll hear from Desireé Plata, an environmental engineering professor at MIT, and Cullen Buie, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT. In this conversation moderated by Mia Chung, they discuss where ambition crosses into ego, how they order their priorities between faith, family, and work, and what sustains them through personal loss and professional pressures.
This forum was held at MIT in March, 2026. Thank you to the student planning team for making this event possible.
Recognize what's most important and keep those things important all the time. Other things are gonna wanna creep in. Those things are important, but they're not existentially important. No one has ever on their deathbed said, "Hand me my Nobel prize. I want to hold it one more time."
There's a famous story in the Bible called the Tower of Babel. If you read the actual language from the story, the people say, "We're going to make a name for ourselves." In the story, that's the thing God directly opposes. And I think that is the temptation as a young scientist, to make a name for yourself. You have to decouple your ego from the work.
I think God can do more with six of my days than I can do with seven. And so taking a Sabbath is like acknowledging that I can't get my work done anyway. I might as well honor my humanity, take some rest, and give myself some space to be.
Am I going to write a paper that 100 years from now people are still going to be studying? Possible, but probably not. What's more likely is one of my advisees, or one of my mentees, or someone I taught in class will have a life that's on a different trajectory because of our interaction. So I've tried to put time into that as much as possible.
A teacher once said to me, "Live like you'll die tomorrow and farm like you'll live forever." You have to make some plans for tomorrow—we can't all be out on a rager every day. But what would happen if these were my last moments in the world? Would I be happy doing the thing that I was doing?
