MITERS Alums Build Own Hackerspace

View an audio-described version of the video here.
 

If you can’t stay at MIT forever, why not bring MIT with you?

Peter Krogen SM ’14, PhD ’16 and Ethan Perrin ’20 were so inspired by their experience in the MIT Electronics Research Society, better known as MITERS, that a couple years ago they decided to re-create it on the West Coast, where they live now.

MITERS, which has been a fixture of campus life since the 1970s, is a student-led and operated shop where hackers work on a wide range of mechanical, electronic, and software projects. Notable MITERS projects include a Tesla coil and a Rubik’s cube–solving robot. 

As an undergraduate, Perrin joined as soon as he discovered the shop and says he made some of his best friends at MITERS, including Krogen. The MITERS community is so strong, he says, that alumni often continue to talk through projects online years after graduating. Still, Perrin found that once he moved to California, he missed the camaraderie of working on projects in-person with like-minded techies. 

Krogen felt the same way—and they weren’t the only ones. “Every year at graduation season, there’d be a crop of seniors from the MITERS at MIT who would move to the West Coast to start their new job at some fancy startup,” Krogen says. “With each passing year and with more and more people moving to the Bay Area, it just became increasingly obvious that we needed to form that same community here.”

In the summer of 2022, Krogen and Perrin founded MITERS-West—named in honor of the MIT makerspace—and today the group shares a 2,000-square-foot shop in Silicon Valley. “It’s a private place where we can hang out, work on projects, and build a social atmosphere just like we had on MIT’s campus,” Perrin says.

The group today has 12 members (including seven MIT alums*) who work on rockets, lasers, electric bikes, racecars, and other techie projects. “Pretty much all of us are either working at a startup or forming our own startup. While we may or may not be using MITERS for our professional work, it gives us that opportunity to build whatever it is that’s in our mind and bring it to reality,” Krogen says.

It’s an impressive space, with plenty of sophisticated tools—from computer numerical controlled (CNC) milling machines and a forklift in the shop to a scanning electron microscope and high-speed oscilloscopes in the lab—as well as what Perrin calls “a very robust inventory of broken things” (colloquially known as cruft) for parts and general tinkering. Still, it is the community that makes both men most proud.

“Really what makes it worth it was trying to reproduce that community that we had all come to love at MITERS at MIT,” Krogen says. “It was a lot of work to get this place up and running. You cannot overstate just how many hours we put into building the community and moving all the stuff in, dealing with the state and all that sort of thing, but it’s absolutely been worth it.”

* As of August 9, 2024, the MIT alumni members of MITERS-West were: Roderick Bayliss III ’20, MEng ’21; Kevin Chan ’17, MEng ’18; Steven Gerasimoff ’17; Peter Krogen SM ’14, PhD ’16; Luis Mora ’18; Ethan Perrin ’20; and Bayley Wang ’14.

MITERS on campus is overseen by the MIT Edgerton Center.