Meet the president: Stephen Baker ’84, MArch ’88

A longtime volunteer, Baker is a 2017 recipient of the Bronze Beaver, the best award bestowed by the MIT Alumni Association for service to the Institute and the Association. He additionally acquired a Lobdell Distinguished Service Award in 2013. He served on the Alumni Association’s board of administrators from 2013 to 2017 and was later a member of the Association’s Corporation Nominating Committee. From 2009 to 2017, Baker served as a member of the MIT Corporation’s Visiting Committee for the Division of Student Life, which supplied recommendation to the Institute’s senior management on issues together with scholar counseling, extracurricular actions, residence life, and fraternities, sororities, and impartial residing teams. Baker has served on the board of his fraternity, Theta Xi, since 1984 and was a board member of the Association of Independent Living Groups, 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, significantly as a volunteer. What evokes you to remain concerned?

Partly what evokes 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 effective and rewarding in its personal proper. Also, I benefited vastly 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 Department of Architecture). 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’ve 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 workers. It’s extremely beneficial to work with people who find themselves not precisely such as you, however with whom you’ve shared values. Although we come from many numerous backgrounds and experiences, and have numerous views, as alumni we now have 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 way in which you strategy this position?

We’re nonetheless within the midst of recovering from a very unprecedented interval of disruption, not simply as an MIT group however as a world group. I wish to attempt to perceive the way in which the pandemic has modified how we have interaction as an alumni group and the way we relate to at least one one other. We have had some constructive 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 stay removed from campus and might’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 due to this fact is probably not feeling as related leaving the Institute. I’d prefer to attempt to perceive as a group what sorts of challenges these elements impose and the way the pandemic has modified us and adjusted our group.