The MIT 24-Hour Challenge Returns on Pi Day 2024

In 2023, dozens of student-led conferences took place across the Institute. Action Learning labs paired student groups with companies to innovate solutions to real-world business problems. Students from many of MIT Sloan’s degree programs received over 3,000 hours of career coaching.

Over 3,000 MIT Sloan alumni and friends made these activities and many others possible through their MIT Sloan Annual Fund gifts. Students, faculty, and alumni continue to enjoy an enriching educational experience, both on campus in Cambridge and across the globe, thanks to your generosity.

With the MIT 24-Hour Challenge fast approaching, celebrate Pi Day this year by making your MIT Sloan Annual Fund gift on Thursday, March 14. That day, you can help bring the school one donor closer to completing three unique challenges.

J. Thomas Bentley, SM ’75, and James C. Foster, SF ’85, will contribute $55,000 through the MIT Sloan Annual Fund if 552 donors make MIT Sloan Annual Fund gifts.

Rohini Chakravarthy, MBA ’99, who is celebrating her 25th MIT Sloan Reunion, will contribute $25,000 through the MIT Sloan Annual Fund if 125 alumni celebrating their Reunions this year join her in making MIT Sloan Annual Fund gifts.

And Eric Soederberg, LGO ’92; Chris Lin, LGO ’10; and Julia Chang, LGO ’04, and spouse, David Douglas Kuo, MBA ’04, will make a challenge gift of $25,000 if 150 donors give to the Donald B. Rosenfield (1971) Memorial Fund or the William C. Hanson, Don W. Davis, and Janice A. Klein LGO Leadership Fund.

Your gift, and the challenge dollars it will help secure, will be put to work immediately to benefit the MIT Sloan community.

During last year’s MIT 24-Hour Challenge, 612 donors gave $218,967 through the MIT Sloan Annual Fund. These gifts greatly impacted the MIT Sloan community by supporting:

• Student-led conferences that attracted hundreds of attendees from around the world, including the Healthcare and BioInnovations Conference; the first-ever ESG and Impact Finance Conference, featuring a keynote by Andrew Lo (Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor; Director, Laboratory for Financial Engineering); and the annual Africa Innovate Conference.
• Action Learning labs like Entrepreneurship Lab (E-Lab), which, through immersive teaching methods, pair student teams with companies to apply their classroom learnings to real business challenges.
• The Student Life Office, which provides student clubs like the Africa Business Club and the Student Veterans Club with funding for invited speakers and community-building events, as well as end-of-year C-Functions.
• The iLead Speaker Series, which, with the MIT Leadership Center, presented fireside chats with business luminaries like Ginny Rometty, former chairperson and CEO of IBM, and Ron Williams, SF ’84, former CEO and board chairperson of Aetna.
• 1,200 hours of career coaching for EMBA and SFMBA students, and 2,600 hours for MBA, LGO, MSMS, MBAn, and MFin students.
• The launch of the Consumer Finance Initiative (CFI), a new research center co-directed by Antoinette Schoar (Stewart C. Myers-Horn Family Professor of Finance) and Jonathan Parker, PhD ’96 (Robert C. Merton (1970) Professor of Financial Economics), dedicated to empowering individuals, financial institutions, and policymakers to navigate the changing world of consumer finance.

To make an impact on the MIT Sloan community in 2024, visit the MIT Sloan 24-Hour Challenge website on Pi Day, March 14.