<p>Haha, I don’t make that much! I mean, I suppose it could, if I fed my paychecks back into my MIT education, but in my family, we’ve worked it out so that my dad pays my tuition and I keep my UROP paychecks for personal expenses like food, books, and entertainment.</p>
<p>So in your case, I would suggest joining a lab that’s investigating those sorts of problems. MIT doesn’t own the fMRI machine, that’s generally owned by the individual lab or by a group of labs, so you’d get access by doing research in a particular lab.</p>
<p>I’m not aware of any funding that’s available for students to pursue projects individually; all the funding of which I’m aware is distributed through a student’s affiliation with a lab (UROP funding, for instance, requires that a student be associated with an approved UROP supervisor). Science in general is highly collaborative, and in the fields with which I’m familiar, it would be very unusual for anyone, whether an undergrad, grad student, or postdoc, to pursue a research question without the guidance of a faculty member. After all, it’s not normal to see a paper authored only by one person…</p>