I said in my last post that the MIT OCW lecturers deserved their own post. This is that post.
Self-studying off OCW means you spend a lot of hours with people who have no idea you exist. You watch them explain the same concept in the same tone, in the same room, recorded years before you ever started. They've aged since then, moved departments, probably forgotten the lecture entirely. You haven't. So here's a record of the people who've been teaching me, course by course.
18.01SC, Single Variable Calculus
The main instructor is Prof. David Jerison. He's excellent, genuinely one of the better teachers I've come across, but there's a catch: he assumes you already have a solid foundation, which I guess is the default once you're at MIT. So when he moves into a new concept, he doesn't always stop to explain the basics first. Sometimes that's fine, it's just revision. Other times it means I'm quietly lost while he keeps going.
I got stuck somewhere in differentiation, especially once we hit applications of it. Not lost-lost, more like I understood most of what was being taught but struggled when it got deep. Right now I'm at definite integrals and their applications, and honestly, I'm a bit lost here too. I keep going anyway, sometimes leaning on AI to break a concept down, sometimes just sitting with the confusion until it resolves itself later. It usually does, eventually.
The course also has two TAs who run the recitation videos. The first is Joel Lewis, young, clearly sharp, you can tell from how he talks that he knows exactly what he's doing. He jokes around occasionally, which makes the recitations easier to sit through.
The second is Christine Breiner, and she might be my favorite of the two. I look forward to her recitation videos specifically. She explains things well and there's a warmth to how she teaches that I appreciate.
All three of them made this course back in Fall 2010, which means they're all sixteen years older now than they are in the videos. I looked for them online hoping to follow what they're up to these days, but none of them are really on social media. Understandable, honestly. Academics tend to live their public lives in journals and papers, not on Instagram.
8.01SC, Classical Mechanics
This one has five instructors: Prof. Deepto Chakrabarty, Dr. Peter Dourmashkin, Dr. Michelle Tomasik, Prof. Anna Frebel, and Prof. Vladan Vuletic.
Prof. Chakrabarty mostly shows up at the start of each section to give an overview of what's coming. I don't have a ton to say about him from the lectures themselves, but he clearly knows physics at a deep level. Something about his delivery reminds me of Chatur "Silencer" Ramalingam from 3 Idiots. I sent him a LinkedIn connection request and found out he's currently the head of the physics department at MIT, after over thirty years there. That's a long way from wherever he started. Funny detail: he barely smiles in any of the lecture videos I've watched, but his LinkedIn photo has him smiling.
Dr. Peter Dourmashkin does most of the actual teaching across the course, and I really like his style. He's currently a senior lecturer in physics at MIT, according to his LinkedIn, where he has just two followers, which tracks, since none of these professors seem to use social media much. Like Jerison, he assumes a foundation that I don't always have, so I'm lost more often than not when he teaches. Same approach as always: lean on AI when I need to, or just keep moving and trust that it'll click later.
I haven't gotten to Dr. Michelle Tomasik or Prof. Vladan Vuletic yet, at least not knowingly. There's a chance Tomasik did the voiceover for one of the videos without an on-camera lecturer, something like the vectors review, the voice matched how I'd imagine she sounds from her photos. I might be wrong. I might also just have a weird ability to match voices to faces from nothing.
Prof. Anna Frebel is one of my favorites so far. She doesn't show up as often as Dourmashkin, but when she does I'm always glad. Her accent is great, and I like that she's active on LinkedIn, unlike basically everyone else on this list. I sent her a connection request and she accepted, which genuinely surprised me. I followed up with a message:
Hello Prof. Frebel,
I'm very glad to connect with you!
I'm self-studying with MIT OCW, and your past self is teaching me Physics. 😀
I look forward to staying in touch.
She saw it. She hasn't replied. That's fine, I still like her posts when she puts them up, mostly about astronomy and space. She has 5.6k followers and posts often enough. I used to read about astronomy on my own, even got through A Brief History of Time at some point, but these days I'm too locked into building toward financial independence to make time for it. Maybe on weekends, eventually.
She's also the division head of astrophysics at MIT now, with an h-index of 77, which from what I understand is a solid number in research circles. She has an X account too, but it's basically dead. Her last post and last reply there were both from March 20, 2024.
That leaves Prof. Vuletic, who I haven't seen in a lecture yet either. Sent him a connection request anyway, just in case I get there later.
This course was made in Fall 2016, so all five of them are roughly a decade older now than they appear on screen.
5.111SC, Principles of Chemical Science
The instructor here is Prof. Catherine Drennan, and she's another favorite. She tries to be funny, and it doesn't always land, but I appreciate the effort. What I like more is how practical she gets, she ties what she's teaching to real applications, pointing to how past students or people in industry are actually using the concepts to solve real problems.
One small thing that's stuck with me: she's always wearing a different shirt, and most of them have chemistry on them, structures, formulas, that kind of thing. It's given me an idea to buy a bunch of plain t-shirts and print science stuff on them. I know it'll make me look like a nerd. I'm fine with that.
She's also got a business streak, joking sometimes about accepting cash or stocks if a former student wants to give back after making it big. She's been a professor of chemistry and biology at MIT for 27 years now, and apparently went to college with Lisa Kudrow, sorry, Phoebe Buffay, from Friends. I don't remember if they studied chemistry or biology together, but it's a fun detail regardless.
I sent her a connection request a while ago. She hasn't accepted, and given how inactive she is on LinkedIn, I don't think she will. Her h-index sits at 69, solid by any measure.
21W.011, Writing and Rhetoric: Rhetoric and Contemporary Issues
This one's different. There's an instructor listed, Dr. Andrea Walsh, but unlike the other three courses, there are no lecture videos to watch her teach through. So I haven't actually met her, not even in the one-sided way I've met everyone else on this list. She's just a name attached to a syllabus I'm working through on my own.
Where that leaves me
Four courses, eight names, and not one real conversation. A few connection requests accepted, one message seen and never answered, a handful of LinkedIn profiles I check more often than I'd admit. It's a strange kind of relationship to have with the people teaching you, one direction only, frozen at whatever age they were when the camera was running.
Still, I'd rather have it this way than not have it at all. They're good teachers. I'll keep showing up to their lectures, even the ones where I'm a little lost, and maybe one day Frebel replies.