Student Organizations

MIT students run an incredible variety of student groups - more than 480 in total - and new ones spring up every year. If you don't find an existing club or organization to match your interests, you're welcome to start your own.

Among MIT's many groups, you'll certainly find the groups you'd expect to see: a student newspaper, a debate team, a radio station, Model UN, student government, College Democrats, College Republicans... you get the point. But MIT also offers some fairly unique clubs: the Hovercraft Club, the Underwater Hockey Group, Origami Club, and the famous Laboratory for Chocolate Science. Some other groups include the Science Fiction Society - home to the largest open stack library of science fiction books in the world - and the Tech Model Railroad Club, which defined "hacker" culture and wrote the world's first video game.

MIT also features strong religious communities. There are 33 religious groups at MIT, including Hillel, the United Christian Fellowship, the Hindu Student Council, and the Buddhist Community of MIT. Students worship at the non-denominational Saarinen Chapel, or at a range of churches, temples and mosques in Boston, Cambridge and beyond. The area offers many Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, Orthodox, conservative and Reform synagogues, the Boston Mormon Temple, and the Islamic Society of Boston.

For those interested in joining a national Greek organization, there are six MIT-recognized sororities and twenty-seven MIT-recognized fraternities. MIT is also home to several predominantly African-American Greek letter organizations. Many of these organizations maintain houses in Cambridge or in nearby Boston or Brookline.

A number of MIT's clubs and organizations promote ethnic and cultural awareness through workshops, films and festivals. Examples include the Black Women's Alliance (BWA), the South Asian American Students (SAAS), the European Club, the Asian American Association, National Society for Black Engineers (NSBE), the Association of Taiwanese Students, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), African Students Association, the Chinese Students Club, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), the Native American Student Association (NASA), the Association of Puerto Rican Students (APR), the Korean Students Association, La Union Chicana por Aztlan (LUChA), MIT Haitian Alliance (MITHA), the Caribbean Club, and the Black Students' Union (BSU). Altogether, there are more than 65 cultural and language groups at MIT representing six continents.

In addition, the MIT Dean's Office makes a point of organizing cultural and social events specifically designed to respond to the intellectual and cultural needs of the underrepresented minority community.