What I Learned at MIT

Over the summer of 2025 I applied and was accepted to compete at HackMIT, one of the largest and best known hackathons in the world. In September of the same year I traveled to the MIT campus and competed, winning first place in a sponsor challenge.

I learned a few things

In education, prestige is everything

I purposely booked an earlier flight to Boston so I could walk around the Freedom trail and explore the MIT campus, so of course on the day before the competition started I snuck into a lecture class to get a taste of the world class education that MIT is known for. It was a multivariate calculus class

It was really fun, but there were only a couple differences between it and any comparative class you would find at my home university (a regional public liberal arts college).

1. The professor had a complete mastery of not only the subject, but also how to teach the subject
2. The students grasped concepts quickly

But the value of the same class at MIT is so much higher because of these two things. Intelligent professors + intelligent students = incredible outcomes

But the best professors and the best students compete to win the chance to work at MIT because MIT has a long, prestigious history of being the best

Though the class felt almost exactly the same, MIT's historical output of successful graduates makes it so anyone who goes there, by default, is thought of as more capable than someone from a lesser-known university like mine

Therefore, prestige attracts the best, which increases prestige

If you want to build something, just do it

I've had a few projects in the works for a long time, of similar complexity of what we built at HackMIT. I've been mostly sitting on them because, as a very busy person, I would think "it's going to take so long", "it's going to be a lot of work". But at HackMIT we had 24 hours to build something as cool as possible and we made an innovative, working product. Of course a large part of this is due to 3 very talented and knowledgable teammates, but if we didn't have that mindset we wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

The Project

We built a cryptographically anonymous email verification system (powered by passkeys) using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and built a system to publicly keep those cryptographic keys on the blockchain to be verified by anyone, anywhere. That allows anyone to verify that you came from a certain email address without revealing which email you used or who you are to anyone (even us).

Our code (better technical writeup there) -> github.com/ThisIsNotANamepng/diagonalize