MIT MEET

MIT MEET — Middle East Education through Technology — is a three-year program founded at MIT that brings together Israeli and Palestinian high school students each summer in Jerusalem to study computer science, entrepreneurship, and the kind of collaborative problem-solving the region’s politics rarely models. Students who complete the program go on to top universities and technology careers, and many maintain working relationships across the political divide for the rest of their lives.

MEET represents one of the clearest examples we know of education doing exactly what we believe education can do: putting capable young people together around hard, technical work, and letting the relationships that form there carry forward into the rest of their lives. The Foundation’s involvement has been a single-engagement contribution rather than an ongoing partnership.

MEETConf — December 17, 2022

In December 2022, Lijie and Chuck traveled to Jerusalem to co-teach a full-day Saturday workshop at MEETConf, MEET’s annual student-and-alumni conference framed that year around disrupting status quos with technology. Students chose between a development track and a product-management track, with the day designed so each team had something to present by the end. Roughly the day looked like this:

Time	Topic	Lead
9:00–9:20 am	Ice breaker, overview, team formation	Chuck and Lijie
9:20–10:15 am	Product management intro · brainstorming from values, art thinking	Chuck
10:30–11:15 am	Computer science intro (using CMU CS Academy)	Lijie
11:15 am–12 pm	Empathy interviews, design thinking	Chuck and Lijie
1:15–2:00 pm	Design thinking continued	Chuck
2:00–2:45 pm	Computer science part 2 — prototyping and landing pages	Lijie
3:00–3:45 pm	Customer development and the lean startup · guest video from Zohar Alon (Dome9)	Chuck
3:45–4:30 pm	Market analysis, go-to-market, presentation skills	Chuck and Lijie
4:30–5:30 pm	Final student presentations	Students

Chuck’s product-management module drew on the same Stanford / STVP frame he uses with engineering students at home: what product managers actually do, why ethics and product management are inseparable, the Cohen–Bradford influence-without-authority model, and pretotyping / XYZ-hypothesis exercises so students could test ideas in hours rather than weeks. Lijie’s modules drew on her infrastructure-engineering background to give the students an honest engineering perspective on what working with product managers looks like in practice — strategic decisions are not yours; you’re leading without authority; you’re dealing with frequent failure — and on what the rewards look like on the other side of those tradeoffs.

What MEET said afterward

On behalf of MEET, and in particular, those who attended the MEETConf this weekend, I would like to thank you for joining us, and for your key contribution to making our event successful. Your enthusiasm and cooperation left a great impression and were very much appreciated. The students highly enjoyed the workshops you ran for them and reported gaining a much bigger understanding of both the development and product management tracks.

— Tasneem and the Y2 team, MEET

MEET also shared a public reflection on LinkedIn about the event.

Why this work matters

The students who go through MEET are not selected because they will agree about everything. They are selected because they are exceptional, and because they are willing to spend three summers learning to build technology alongside someone their political context tells them they shouldn’t trust. That is exactly the bet the Foundation is willing to make.

Foundation support, in summary

• Direct teaching and curriculum delivery at MEETConf in Jerusalem on December 17, 2022 — a one-time engagement.