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A longtime volunteer, Baker is a 2017 recipient of the Bronze Beaver, the best award bestowed by the MIT Alumni Affiliation for service to the Institute and the Affiliation. He additionally acquired a Lobdell Distinguished Service Award in 2013. He served on the Alumni Affiliation’s board of administrators from 2013 to 2017 and was later a member of the Affiliation’s Company Nominating Committee. From 2009 to 2017, Baker served as a member of the MIT Company’s Visiting Committee for the Division of Pupil Life, which supplied recommendation to the Institute’s senior management on issues together with scholar counseling, extracurricular actions, residence life, and fraternities, sororities, and unbiased residing teams. Baker has served on the board of his fraternity, Theta Xi, since 1984 and was a board member of the Affiliation of Unbiased Residing Teams, which he chaired for a few years. He additionally helped discovered the Graduate Alumni Council in 2016.
You’ve maintained a robust reference to MIT through the years, notably as a volunteer. What conjures up you to remain concerned?
Partly what conjures up me is only a need to provide again. To step out of our personal particular person roles and do one thing that helps a bigger group is efficacious and rewarding in its personal proper. Additionally, I benefited enormously from interacting with alumni each as an undergraduate (working with alumni volunteers at my fraternity) and as a graduate scholar (when alumni got here again for visiting opinions and critiques within the Division of Structure). I wished to do the identical.
“It’s extremely beneficial to work with people who find themselves not precisely such as you, however with whom you could have shared values.”
Stephen D. Baker
I additionally stay related to the Institute for the folks. The folks at MIT are actually exceptional—the alumni, college students, school, and employees. It’s extremely beneficial to work with people who find themselves not precisely such as you, however with whom you could have shared values. Though we come from many various backgrounds and experiences, and have various views, as alumni we’ve this frequent thread of getting been college students at MIT. It’s rewarding to work with individuals who have that shared expertise.
As you begin your time period, we’re greater than two years right into a pandemic. How does this have an effect on the best way you method this function?
We’re nonetheless within the midst of recovering from a extremely unprecedented interval of disruption, not simply as an MIT group however as a world group. I want to attempt to perceive the best way the pandemic has modified how we interact as an alumni group and the way we relate to at least one one other. We’ve had some optimistic takeaways from this expertise, in that we’ve found that not the whole lot must be head to head and that there are strengths typically in assembly nearly, particularly for alumni who dwell removed from campus and may’t simply return.
There are additionally some challenges popping out of this time, one being for latest MIT alumni and soon-to-be alumni who’ve had very completely different experiences as undergraduates and graduate college students throughout this time and subsequently will not be feeling as related leaving the Institute. I’d wish to attempt to perceive as a group what sorts of challenges these components impose and the way the pandemic has modified us and altered our group.
What are your priorities in your function as MITAA president?
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