One MIT senior traveled the planet’s most remote areas before landing at the Institute, where he now works on engineering better thermoelectric devices.

Emily Finn, MIT News Office

Plenty of students take a year off between high school and college. Very few of them spend it staving off frostbite and carrying wooden boards across a continent most people will never see.

Yet Antarctica — along with other latitudinal extremes such as Greenland and Siberia — was a stop on senior Ian McKay’s circuitous journey to MIT, where he’ll receive his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering this month. Upon graduating high school, McKay, a native of Seattle, says he was less concerned with attending college than with “exploding out into the world.” 

“I was really, really obsessed with living the exact kind of book that I would want to read someday,” he says. 

An avid ski racer, McKay had heard legendary tales of fellow skiers who had traversed the snowy continent. He spent his savings on a ticket to Denver, where the annual job fair for the U.S. Antarctic Program is held. Having read up on employment needs and conditions in the extreme south, he convinced recruiters to give him a position as a construction worker.