Young Mark Ain arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the tumultuous fall of 1960. Vietnam War protests would be rampant in a few years, but right now citizens were focused on the recent discharge of one Army sergeant, a Tennessee native named Elvis A. Presley. The Space Race was in full swing, as dreaded Cold War foe Russia sent Sputnik 4 into orbit. And there was a well-documented voyage to the bottom of the sea as explorers Jacques Picard and Don Walsh descended nearly 36,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Massachusetts senator and war hero John F. Kennedy was squaring off with Vice President Richard M. Nixon as the 1960 presidential election turned down the back stretch. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. fired people up with his rhetoric as the Civil Rights Movement pressed for equality for all. And a brash eighteen-year-old Cassius Clay captured the imagination of the country and the Olympic gold medal in heavyweight boxing.

The aggregate revenues generated by companies founded by MIT alumni would today rank as the eleventh largest economy in the world. Companies like McDonnell Douglas, Texas Instruments, 3Com, Raytheon, Campbell Soup, Intel, and even Koch Industries each shared a common bond. They, among tens of thousands of other organizations, were all founded by MIT alums, resulting in the employment of more than three million people and generating collective annual revenue north of a staggering $1.9 trillion. For a single university, that is nothing short of mind-boggling. But that didn't matter too much to Mark Ain after he arrived in Cambridge and checked into his freshman dorm room that September. He had far bigger concerns.

“I soon discovered that I was not the smartest person ever born in math and science,” he recalled. “And, truth be told, I struggled to keep up right from the start.”

“Mark overcame great difficulties in his first year at MIT,” mother Pearl recalled. “He hadn't had calculus or any of the advanced placement courses because our high school didn't offer them. So, when he got there he was at the bottom of the heap, and he had a great deal to overcome.”