The MIT New Colossus Project

“The heart of the MIT New Colossus Project is celebrating immigrant identity—people who dream, who are trailblazers, who take risks, who want to be gamechangers. The goal is really to inspire the next generation and to create a community of like-minded builders,” says Raafet Azzouz, a 2024 graduate of the Sloan Fellows MBA program, and the founder and host of the podcast and web series the MIT New Colossus Project.

At MIT, students learn by doing, said Azzouz, who hopes the MIT New Colossus Project will further that ethos by helping students learn by showing them how others have done it, whether that be launching ventures, fundraising, or pursuing academic goals. The first season of the podcast consisted of six episodes, and included guests such as Fiona Murray, the Associate Dean for Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Vice Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund; Claude Grunitzky, CEO and Managing Partner of the Equity Alliance; Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Moungi Bawendi; and others. 

The MIT New Colossus Project has brought together people from across the MIT community; in addition to Azzouz, Sara Zeidan, MFin ‘25, and George Masterson, MFin ’24, serve as a researchers and Ben Shields, Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management, serves as an advisor. 

Born in Tunisia, Azzouz’s immigration story began when he left home at 18. “I was a kid—I was dreaming of being excellent and doing big things and changing the world. And I was looking for brighter opportunities on the horizon than what I had.”

The idea for the project began in a class at MIT Sloan when his professor asked Azzouz to reflect on the things in his life that had driven him to aim for the impossible and to never take no for an answer. “For the first time, I understood and appreciated that my immigrant experience shaped me in so many ways. It taught me great resilience and ambition and it taught me to be bold in every undertaking I had. And that immigrant journey has changed me, but it has also changed millions of others.”

However, he says, there is a gap between the narrative around immigration and the truth of immigrant success. He hopes the New Colossus Project can help rewrite that narrative—and the podcast is only the first part of that. Azzouz has dreams of expanding the New Colossus Project to create opportunities to share knowledge, build community, foster mentorship and—down the line—invest in promising entrepreneurs, develop scholarships for brilliant students who want to come to America. “This is just the beginning.”

The new season will start soon with guests like Noubar Afeyan, co-founder of Moderna and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, and Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate in Economics and Institute Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT. You can listen to all the episodes on YouTube and Spotify, and follow the Project on LinkedIn and Instagram