A different sense of pride

By Sydney Lester

In 2008, Stephan Boyer was a top student at his California high school. Interested in electrical engineering, Stephan traveled to MIT to enroll in Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science (MITES) during the summer before his senior year. Through six weeks of new challenges and a college-level engineering curriculum at MITES, Stephan discovered there was much to learn from his peers.

“I had no idea what a top-caliber student, an MIT student, looked like,” said Boyer. MITES exposed him to other students who excelled at school and inspired him to pursue his interests in engineering and computer science. “The people I met were passionate and cared about their fields,” Stephan says. “They were independent thinkers.”

During MITES, Stephan found himself and his peers working harder than they ever had before. “Everyone in the program is united by one thing,” Stephan says. “They have this fire that can’t be put out.” That fire shifted many of Stephan’s preconceived beliefs. “MITES put me in an environment where everyone was passionate,” he says. “They made me more open minded to things I’d never questioned before. I’d never had the opportunity to see things from a different perspective.”

Confident before MITES, Stephan met people who showed him that there was room to grow. “If your ego leads you to believe you’re already at the top, then you don’t have that drive,” he says. “There’s no motivation to push it further. MITES removed that sense of pride and replaced it with a different sense of pride. I come from a family of people who push me every day to be better than I thought I could be.”

As a graduate student at MIT and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Stephan now uses his MITES foundation to move forward in his computer science career. While at MIT, he has taken on a number of challenging projects, which have led him to build a self-balancing unicycle, develop and implement a new computer programming language, and launch an app with 72,000 registered users.

Through his journey, Stephan has found creative motivation in people. “I draw inspiration from my closest friends, mostly at MIT,” he says. After MIT, Stephan hopes to start his own company in order to explore new ideas in a collaborative environment – a dream that started at MITES and continued through his education. “I want to push boundaries and do things that haven’t been done before,” he says. “I want to push the frontier of what’s possible.”