As MIT’s Title IX Coordinator, it is my job to work with our community to ensure that MIT properly responds to complaints of sexual misconduct, including sexual harassment.

Editor’s Note: Professor Anne McCants of the History Department contributed to the editing process of this article.

Over the course of 2010-2011, while I was a graduate student at MIT, I struggled to find help with harassment. I encountered both bureaucratic ineptitude and a culture of denial and silence that made the situation needlessly difficult for me, my advisor, and others in my lab. I am writing because I hope that by sharing my experience and insights into how MIT’s system can fail, I can help those working to improve it. While I understand that there have been some changes on campus since I graduated three years ago, I think MIT still needs to improve the way it handles harassment on campus.