Mitch Kapor - Early Life

Early Life

Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York, and attended public schools on Long Island in Freeport, New York, where he graduated from high school in 1967. In 1966, he studied astronomy at the Summer Science Program. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in cybernetics. Kapor served as Music Director and Program Director at Yale's radio station WYBC-FM.

During the 1970s, Kapor was employed as a radio disc jockey at WHCN-FM, a commercial progressive rock station based in Hartford, Connecticut. It was also in this period that he became interested in Transcendental Meditation, going on to teach it in Cambridge, Massachusetts (where he also worked as a low-level computer programmer) and Fairfield, Iowa. In 1978, he graduated with a master's degree in psychology from Campus-Free College (later renamed Beacon College) in Boston. Kapor subsequently began a career as a mental health counselor at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts.

In 1980, Kapor left his counseling career to attend the Master's of Science in Management program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, but did not graduate.