 Hey, welcome to MIT. I'm Quentin McArthur, the Associate Director of Admissions. But I actually prefer the title Director of Overall Inspiration. Are you ready for this? I'm here with Frankie Pena from McAllen, Texas. Frankie is a dancer, and he is a graduating senior in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Good to see you. Likewise. Was MIT always the dream? Or did MIT come about a little bit later on in your thinking? So until I got to ninth grade, I didn't even know about MIT. I come from a family where my parents didn't even go to college. My father worked from a very young age, but he's always been very hardworking. And now he opened up his own business. And my older sisters did go to college, and they went to the University of Texas Pan-American, so they could still live from home. And so it seemed like that's what I was going to do. I was just going to follow in their footsteps. And then I got to the Ivy School. And it's basically a concentration of all the nerds. And I found familiar. I saw this one student that I just related to a lot. He was from a low income background, and he was Mexican. He's so relatable. And his name is Jesus Uniga. Jesus. Yes. He came here. Right. He was of course 16. Yeah. Good job. I told him about this, too. I told him about this. He was taking all the card math classes, and he got into MIT that year. He was a senior. But then I found out what it was, and I thought it was just awesome school for people interested in math and science. And I thought, if he could do it, I could probably try. Yeah, there was just a switch that year. And I just got really focused. I was like, this is not an easy place to get into. I've got to really focus. I'm going to have a set plan. I'm going to take all the math classes I'm going to do as much as I can, and I'm going to make it happen. So that must have been really exciting for you getting into MIT. Now, you said your parents hadn't graduated from college and may not have known all that much about MIT. Did they have any reservations about allowing you to come out here to the East Coast? In their mindset and their culture, it was you stay at home until you get married and then you go off and do your job. But you stay at home with your family because that's so central to what's important in life. And to them, this idea that I would go 2,000 miles away, they almost took it personally at first because they didn't even know about MIT. And so I had to tell them how I just have this dream and I want to pursue it. And that helped them realize, well, it's not about leaving us. It's about you pursuing your dream and we're more than happy to support you in doing that. But it was a talk at first. And now they were obviously still super proud and stuff. So they brag about it to their friends and things. But at first. Tell me about your major at MIT because it sounds like you started out in physics and then you transitioned. When I was in high school, a friend introduced me to this book called The Fabric of the Cosmos. It's physics for popular readers. So they didn't go to technical details, but to the extent that he could, he explained huge steps, the whole history of physics today, like how Newton came up with classical mechanics and then how people totally flipped the story with quantum mechanics and then how at the same time, people like Albert Einstein flipped that story as well about general relativity. And so what they hoped to get to is a theory of everything. So something that explains not just what's happening out in the galaxies and how they rotate or how they gravitate, but also how things going on at the levels smaller than an electron, how those events also occur. But marrying those two huge levels has been a huge struggle of physics for the last decades. And so that's where they were going. And I thought, maybe I could be a part of this. So I came into MIT thinking, you know what? I'm going to do physics. And I'm going to help with the theory of everything or some part of this huge story of physics. And then I took the classes. And they were a lot more difficult than the high school classes, but I did OK. And in particular, I got involved in a research group led by Alan Gooth, who basically put the bang in the Big Bang theory. And so I was like, wait, wait, God, I got it. This is going to be so cool. It turned out that what Brian Green writes about is all the cool parts after all the hard work has been done and after people have done all the technical details. And for me, getting into the nitty-gritty of the equations and the MATLAB programming or whatever programming used, they ended up not being my cup of tea, I suppose. I realized that there's still so much more to explore at MIT. That summer, I read another book, this time by Stephen Pinker, called How the Mind Works. He didn't talk about the biology of the brain. He talked about, for example, why do we love and how does that work or why do we have emotions at all? A lot of interesting things. And I thought, but that assumes that the brain is a black box. And I want to know what's in that black box. And there's some pretty interesting researchers here at MIT doing that. So I started going in that path. And I have loved it ever since. I know you're affiliated with a fraternity here on campus. Could you tell me a little bit about your fraternity community? So I'm part of the New Delta fraternity. It is MIT exclusive. There is no other chapter. I got to know the brothers of New Delta. And it just seemed like the kind of people I'd want to hang out with. We were comfortable with each other. I immediately felt like I could totally be friends with all these people. So that got me interested. And then I think the real reason that I joined was also because I like being in a home. That's how I always felt in McAllen. And the dorm life didn't seem too much like that, at least in my perspective. It seemed like this building with 400 strangers. And I wanted to be a part of a home with everyone knows me and I know them. And we hang out often. Delta's good. I like New Delta. Cody Coleman is an alumni of New Delta. That's episode one through your history. So Frankie, have any of the MIT faculty members been particularly helpful or supportive of you since you've been here? Yes. I could not have gotten into graduate school without way thing Sue. She's the professor whose lab I've joined two years ago now. And when I told her that I'm interested in graduate school, she immediately was like, there's this bar here and you're going to meet it. Because I know I see it in you and you're going to meet it. Well, actually, the bar was over here. That reminds me of a very famous quote by a social psychologist who was a guy named Asa Hilliard, who was a professor at Georgia State. And he said, I see the genius in you. And it was like a motto that he had for educators to really help empower students. I see the genius in you. And I am not going to let you fall short of that. You are going to not just meet but exceed the standards that I have for you. Because sometimes, especially when people are young, they don't always carry their dreams for themselves yet. Sometimes it requires parents or teachers or mentors to see the greatness in the person before they see it in themselves. It works best when they see it in themselves from day one. But we all need some time to grow and develop. But it's important to have those people too. We can't do it on our own. Not at all. There's so many people that have helped me, my teachers in particular. Best part of your MIT experience? Mocha moves. Mocha moves. I don't know why. I joined when I was a sophomore and I still ended. What is Mocha moves? It's a hip hop team. It's this place where I can forget about all the P-sets and the research and just on top of that, also go into my hip hop alter ego. So Frankie, what is your hip hop dancing Mocha moves alter ego name? FX. So we're here with FX and he's about to show us some of his Mocha moves. So FX, I understand that you are excellent at a number of different types of dance, but you are gonna teach me a little bit of salsa. Okay, I'd love to. Who is this? This is Sonora Dinamita, which roughly translates to sound of dynamite. Dynamite sound. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One, one, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. There you go. Come on, come on, come on. Frankie, this is what I do. Do the robot, do the robot. I'm here. Mocha moves. If we want to go into hip hop, we can do that at some other time. Okay. Okay. All right. We'll work on that. I have no moves to teach Frankie. Frankie is the master. FX. We could do some Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Oh, Jesus.