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M.I.T. is not the most obvious place to go in search of a writing course. In the Boston region, you would go to Harvard, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern or the University of Massachusetts, each of which has a large school of the humanities. But a technology school where pointy-headed "nerds" and "geeks" in horn-rimmed glasses are presumably being trained to travel to Mars, who construct robots to see you from the cradle to the grave and who pore over squiggles on glass slides till blindness or the bomb overtakes them?

I had tried other, more reassuringly reliable centers of arts education. I taught in those picture-postcard colleges of New England where apple-cheeked young women were committed to regular attendance. Yet, when an offer was made by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I dropped the postcard world and came, exhilarated by the premonition that I would experience the unexpected here.

Seven years ago, the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies (a title reached after lengthy debate and discussion) seemed exactly what I was searching for: A tiny, almost overlooked niche or corner in a vast maze of labs and corridors that resembled nothing so much as an ant or termite hill whose inhabitants scurried about, giving off waves of concentration and activity - yet one who was not part of it was left alone. Could there be a more suitable condition for a novelist?

My son, a graduate of M.I.T., thought it might not be ideal. Everyone who knew me warned against it. In a place geared for success, scientific and industrial, the imaginative lives of artists were unlikely to be understood or appreciated, posited as they are upon chance, instinct and illogic.

It is true that a certain hostility exists, leavened with laughter, but the sense of being embattled and precarious gives the writing program a particularly stubborn determination to exist, like that of the runt in the family. And encouragement and appreciation often come from unexpected quarters: scientists and engineers seem not only intrigued by the creative process but genuinely sympathetic to it, seeing a parallel with their own methods and breakthroughs. It is often other departments in the humanities that express more doubt and suspicion, less understanding and acknowledgement.

And yet the students come. Who are these misled believers in this improbable creature, this unicorn - the imaginative life - who seek us out? They do not harbor ambitions of becoming dancers or sculptors or playwrights. Not one of them has come to M.I.T. to obtain a degree in creative writing. Still, they are haunted by the need for another dimension to life, beyond the rigors of science, a dimension in which their individual and secret and essential selves can find expression. So they search out the music or the dance department, literature or foreign languages.

Some of them find their way to the program in writing. I see them as refugees, in need of shelter and rest and nourishment. This is admittedly a dramatization: many of them turn out not to care very much about creating a piece of good prose, or even to recognize one when they see it. Having spent their school years in ferocious concentration upon calculus and labs, they have read nothing, have no idea to which country or century Tolstoy or Joyce or Kafka belong. (They are like the schoolboy who was asked to write "everything you know about Keats" and replied "I don't know anything about Keats. I don't even know what they are.") But I found there was a particular pleasure to be had from such tabula rasa, in witnessing the first innocent delight in reading Gogol or Conrad and so discovering an entire hitherto unsuspected world unfolding before them, and participating in it.

What the writing program accomplishes for these students may appear minimal. It provides them with two essential conditions for creative work: time and space. The world has little tolerance for an unproved young artist. Who is willing to provide the two or three or five years needed to write a novel or a poem sequence or a play that will be the proof (not only to the world but to the aspirant too)? The writing program is the first step. When asked to justify my presence on the campus - the question is usually phrased

"Do you really believe it is possible to teach someone to write?" - my reply is "I give them the time and space in which to try their hand at it." I think of the student who came from Pakistan to study engineering; secretly, without informing his parents, he switched to philosophy and film theory, then began to write short stories in my class. Each was an improvement upon the last, the final one a small triumph.

For apprentices, joining a guild where a trade or a craft may be acquired with the help of a practiced craftsman in the company of other apprentices can be a convivial and encouraging experience. But writers have always suffered from working in solitude; the writing program provides a kind of apprenticeship where an older, experienced writer may share confidences with young, aspiring ones. I am sure it is not very different from what happens in a lab.

Writing students at M.I.T. are, of course, not typical aspiring young writers. For instance, they have an inordinate love of science fiction; it is a genre with a natural appeal for them (although not always for the teacher). I am always bemused by the way discussions of such stories lead to an animated exchange of technicalities; these are students who know exactly what force it takes to lift a rocket into space, what DNA reveals, what chromosomes do.

What is much harder to awaken in these classes in the alertness of the five senses that a writer must possess - it is what provides the texture of prose and poetry, after all - or a sensitivity to language, the quality and effect and value of words and sounds and rhythms that are as breath and air to the writer. Still, these students whose focus has been on logic and reason and calculation can be open to such ideas, showing a frank fascination with them.

The writing program also functions much as a reading group where texts are studied and discussed. The course reading list may be the only works of literature a student will read during the semester; their selection is crucial. The critical sense that is honed in discussions that can border on the ferocious is essential to developing the students' own creativity.

What makes the writing program at a tech school very different from the famed writing schools of such universities as Stanford and Iowa is that even students who eventually take their degrees in writing arrive with the aim of making a career in science or engineering. So there is an absence of competitiveness, that fierce ambition that can make professional writing programs such frightening experiences for all but the most ruthless. And so at M.I.T. one has the luxury of a class of students who are there for pleasure and the adventure of literature itself.

Of course there are students who have fitted in a writing class simply as a break from study and lab work. They tend to end up surprised by unpleasant results. One student came to me to say "I did all my assignments on time, I did all the revisions you suggested and read all the books I was asked to, so why haven't I got an A?" - not having noticed a difference between excellent and merely passable writing. The end of a semester and the handing out of grades is invariably a painful time one would heartily like to avoid.

Then there are students with such potential that one is saddened to think that all will be shed as they go out to make their careers as biochemists and aerospace engineers. Every year there are also a few graduates who have discovered that they cannot stand science or engineering for a moment longer and instead proceed to graduate programs that will allow them to work on screenplays or poetry. Those are the ones one watches with a mixture of pride and trepidation, even guilt at being complicit in their decision. Life for them will surely not be easy - but it will be interesting.

Anita Desai divides her time between teaching and writing. Her fiction includes "Diamond Dust" and "Fasting, Feasting."