‘I missed talking math with people’: why John Urschel left the NFL for MIT
The former Baltimore Ravens guard had a lucrative career in professional football. But he chose to concentrate on his first love in academia
John Urschel lifts the blinds in his second-floor office in the mathematics department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Outside is Cambridge in all of its springtime splendor on a mid-April afternoon. Everything about his office says “college professor” – the computer on one side of the desk, the stack of papers on the other, the books on the shelves behind him.