The Media Lab is a community of inventors—a community where faculty members and students from numerous, seemingly unrelated disciplines work together, “atelier style,” as members of research teams, doing the things that conventional wisdom says can’t or shouldn't be done.

Students come to the Media Lab through the Program in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS), based within MIT’s School of Architecture + Planning. Each year, the program accepts approximately 30-40 master’s and PhD candidates. Their backgrounds range from computer science to psychology, music to graphic design, architecture to mechanical engineering.

Once here, they work on:

• tools for learning and expression
• human adaptation and augmentation
• ways to interface with information and each other
• community and communication in both the virtual and physical worlds

All graduate students are currently fully supported (tuition/medical insurance, plus a stipend), and spend a majority of their time on research activities.

MAS offers approximately 30 graduate courses, several undergraduate subjects, and an alternative freshman year program. Media Lab courses explore several themes, including, for example, human-computer interaction, communications, learning, design, and entrepreneurship.