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The Boston Environment
The Boston-Cambridge environment offers the cultural and recreational opportunities and diversity of a major metropolis with the accessibility of a small city. The heavy concentration of colleges, hospitals, research facilities, and high technology industry provides a populace that demands and finds an unending variety of theaters, concerts, restaurants, museums, book stores, sporting events, libraries, and recreational facilities.
MIT is one of more than 50 schools located within the Boston area. Others include Harvard University, Boston University, Northeastern University, Boston College, Brandeis University, Tufts University, Simmons College, Wellesley College, and many specialized art and music schools. The concentration of academic, cultural, and intellectual activities in the Boston area is one of the largest in the country, and there is an extraordinary variety of young people, over 250,000, from all over the country and the world.
Within a two-mile radius of the Institute are the Museums of Science and Fine Arts, the Gardner Museum, the New England Conservatory of Music, Symphony Hall, the New England Aquarium, and the Boston Public Library, as well as Fenway Park and the Fleet Center—venues for professional baseball, basketball, and hockey games. Students can travel easily to the theatre district where Broadway productions tour and local productions are staged. Among the numerous cultural organizations in the area are the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Pops, the Boston Ballet Company, the Opera Company of Boston, the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston University's Huntington Theatre Company, the Loeb Drama Center, and the American Repertory Theatre.
An hour or two away from MIT by car are the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, the ocean beaches of Cape Cod, the lakes and rivers of Maine, the small clusters of fishing towns along the New England coast, and many places of historical interest in Massachusetts alone—Salem, Sturbridge, Lexington, Concord, and Plymouth. The four distinct seasons of New England, combined with the varied landscape, offer unlimited possibilities for recreation—skiing, mountain climbing, hiking, sailing, canoeing, kayaking, swimming, and camping.
And science and engineering, too, are to be found not just in the museums, like the Museum of Science, and not just in the colleges and major research facilities and industrial plants, but also in nearby garages and warehouses. As with the arts, this environment fosters creativity; and important research efforts and corporations sometimes have their beginnings in the most humble of surroundings. MIT alone has spawned over 700 new companies in the past forty years.
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