Boston-Based Nepali Tech Entrepreneur Sanjay Manandhar’s MIT Experience

When you hear that someone went to MIT, you probably imagine someone effortlessly smart, always acing every test, building rockets on the side, and inventing the next big thing.

But for Sanjay Manandhar, a Nepali student who studied Electrical Engineering there a couple decades ago, the experience was very different.

From Top of the Class... to Just Average?

Back in Nepal, Sanjay was always a top student. But the moment he stepped into MIT, everything changed.

“I worked so hard… and I was still just average.”

At MIT, being smart wasn’t enough. Everyone was smart. Everyone was driven. And no matter how much effort you put in, there was always someone who finished the exam in half the time — and still got 100%.

It wasn’t about being bad — it was about being surrounded by the best of the best. And that can mess with your confidence.

“It makes you question yourself. You start wondering, ‘What am I doing wrong?’”

MIT = Mental Gym

Years later, he realized something powerful:

“MIT is like a gym. If you train hard there, everything else feels lighter after that.”

Even though it was tough, it built him up. It made future challenges — in work, in life, in entrepreneurship — easier to face.

The Lighter Side of MIT: Hacking

But MIT wasn’t all stress and studying. There’s a tradition there called “hacking.”

Not computer hacking — but clever, anonymous pranks.

Like the time students put a real police car on top of the MIT dome — lights flashing, half-eaten donuts inside. No one knows how they did it. No one knows who did it. But that’s the point: it has to be anonymous, creative, and harmless.

Another time, a student came back to his dorm room… and everything was gone.

His furniture? His posters? His desk?

All of it was perfectly reassembled — in the middle of the frozen Charles River.

What Sanjay Learned

At MIT, Sanjay met brilliant minds, survived brutal exams, and saw creativity at its wildest.

“MIT is very irreverent. The types of people that go here are also slightly... we’re different. And they don’t thump their chest as much. They don’t need to scream from the rooftops. I call it quiet confidence.”
— Sanjay Manandhar