(keyboard chiming)
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- The name, The Muddy Charles, is a pub,
but in reality it's much more than that.
It's a community.
The Muddy started as a cooler in the corner
of the Graduate Student Counsel office,
and later transitioned to being a keg
in the corner of the office,
and has grown to be the wonderful space that it is today.
(lighthearted music)
I think The Muddy's success for the last 50 years
has come a large part from the diverse voices
that it draws input from.
And these come from all across MIT's community
including, students, faculty, staff, and alumni.
- I love The Muddy.
I still come back to The Muddy.
I come back maybe once or twice a month now.
I think the thing that I like about The Muddy now
is the same thing that I liked
about The Muddy many years ago,
which is that it's a very egalitarian neurodecratic place.
It's really a crossroads on campus for everybody.
So you can be in The Muddy and you can be spending time
with engineers or business students.
You can be spending time with entrepreneurs,
or faculty, or staff.
- When I first got to MIT this was one of the first
places that I frequented with all of my department.
So it's a really cool opportunity for me
to come and meet everybody in a very relaxed manner.
So we didn't have to talk about work,
we didn't have to stress about things in our labs,
we're able to talk to each other over a few brews
and to laugh and just like share comradery.
Other than that I actually really enjoy coming to study here
because it's really nice.
There's big windows and there's lots of natural lighting,
which I don't really get in my lab.
So I've seen a bunch of people just come
and bring their laptops, put their headphones on,
and get a lot of work done.
Seems kind of counterintuitive because it's a pub
and people don't associate productivity with a pub,
but it's actually a really, really nice place
to get work done.
- In my early days as a grad student I would walk in
and there was this table that had a flag on it
and it was where all the students and faculty,
who used to talk about energy, used to meet.
From that table, where they used to kind of hold
court informally, you have perhaps a quarter
of the people who were in the department of energy
research programs, you have people who end up at Google X.
And so the network at The Muddy is kind of
the premier network in a lot of other industrial
and public sector settings a result of that.
- MIT teaches the community to think and to do.
And I think The Muddy really embodies this.
And the students have really taken this power
to the next level and they've said,
"Hey fellow students, let's go run a bar."
And they have for the past 50 years.
- You know, I would encourage those who aren't familiar
with The Muddy to come by and realize
that it's not a space where students drink beer, right?
That does happen in the space.
What The Muddy is isn't what it represents.
And what it does so well is mix different departments,
different people, all walks of life together.
The Muddy is kind of the one place on campus
which has remained the same.
I think the fact that it embodies some of the best
traditions of MIT, and it has done so for 50 years,
makes it that main stopping whenever
an alumni comes back to campus.
We know it's there and we know it's good.
(lighthearted music)