<p>never before in my life have i looked forward to what is my finals week</p>
<p>I'm a MIT '09 student...just wanted to see how everybody was taking it...
The admissions letter last year (EA) was a very thin flat envelope containing a paper folder and a certificate, and a magnet invitation to campus preview.</p>
<p>Later, I got an absolutely massive folder with lots more information than I was capable of dealing with at the time.</p>
<p>I know this week is stressful. I've been there. I was a wreck this time last year. Try not to kill your friends who are so worried/happy/nervous/relieved/delete where applicable. They feel the same way you do. Also, many of my friends here got in off EA. Many also got in off deferrals. Try to enjoy your senior year instead of strssing over this year. Trite, but true.</p>
<p>A note, if you're still reading this: be careful what you wish for. I cried when I got my letter (on Saturday the 11th-- in stater) and was extremely happy. I ain't going to bed before 3:30 tonight, and I haven't for the last week. This is not because of partying. It is because I have been working. You will work here.</p>
<p>ahh the glamorous life</p>
<p>nothing glamorous about it. I have uber work. paper to edit, pset to finish and study for a test. And I didn't sleep or otherwise fritter away my weekend. Noo, that was for my OTHER psets.</p>
<p>lol, but you don't understand, i don't mind that...</p>
<p>Lol. You say that now. Wait till you're there and it's 3:30 in the morning.</p>
<p>Haha, erebor, don't scare the prefrosh.</p>
<p>It is undoubtedly hard work being an MIT student -- and, almost unconditionally, harder work to be an upperclassman than a freshman. But you learn to handle the work, and eventually doesn't seem like such a psychotic workload. You get better at being an MIT student as you get older/wiser/more indoctrinated.</p>
<p>Of course, we all love to complain about how bad we've got it -- hence one</a> of my favorite Tech articles ever.</p>
<p>I didn't think I would either. it's fun for sept and oct, but then it starts to lose its glitz, and you're like, "crap!" And lack of sleep = hallucinations. I swear I saw my high school chem teacher the other day.</p>
<p>oh please, i hallucinate even when i get 10 hours of sleep haha</p>
<p>mollie i just read that... so apparantly taking more classes and procrastinating is the way to show off your 'guns?'</p>
<p>So, are these problem sets generally busywork? Or are they planned out and do they, generally, teach concepts?</p>
<p>What's most of the workload from?</p>
<p>What's workload like in a single class?</p>
<p>I shudder to think what you will see if/when you come here. This is a cool place, but I just wanted to make sure that people knew that all those rumors about "MIT" is hard aren't rumors but truth. Actually, isn't as much difficulty as quantity. Which means I must now work on a pset. For a humanities class. For which I also must edit a paper tonight. Get my drift?</p>
<p>To be totally honest, a major reason I picked up a second major was because some of the guys in my suite were making fun of me for being course 9 rather than their macho engineering majors. Not the only reason, of course... but a factor. It's a weird form of competitive masochism we have going on here.</p>
<p>Problem sets are definitely concept-driven (although this can be less true for freshman classes). Haha, sometimes I wish they were busywork -- busywork would go a lot faster.</p>
<p>Class units at MIT are assigned on the theoretical amount of time one spends on a class each week. Most classes are 12 units (meaning you're supposed to spend 12 hours on the class each week); this is often broken up into something like 5-0-7 or 3-0-9 (hours of class-hours in lab-hours of homework). Many lab classes are 15 or 18 units (=15 or 18 hr/week). The core aero/astro sophomore course is 24 units.</p>
<p>These units are not a great estimation in many cases. Most humanities classes don't give 9 hours of homework each week (there would be a revolt!), and some science classes are happy to cheat the system -- I'm taking a 12-unit chemistry class this term for which I attend 5 hours of class and do 10 hours of homework each week. Maybe I'm just doing the math wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's not 12.</p>
<p>EDIT: Most people take 4 12-unit classes per term = 48 units.
(Flexes academic muscles) I am taking 75 this term. :D</p>
<p>Oooh, psets.</p>
<p>They are most emphatically not busy work. Maybe the first two problems of a 10 problem pset will ask you to regurgitate concepts that you learned in class. That's an easy one. The rest of it will be combining those concepts in new and painfully twisted ways to make your life as a student as hellish as possible. The worst part is when the prof presents concepts from the pset on the day that it was due, and it would have helped a lot. So I wouldn't say that they teach, necessarily, though there have been attempts to make problems a tutorial on a specific application, but I would say that psets are busywork.</p>
<p>I spend most of my time on psets. And studying for tests. 4 classes doesn't sound like a lot until you end up with all the work from them.</p>
<p>Workload varies from class to class. Freshman physics (regular, not masochistic) is, for me, about 4 hours a week on homework and study. But I took AP Phys. C in high school, and remembered most of it.</p>
<p>freshman chemistry for prospective majors (5.112) is more like 8 to 10, on a good and ideal week where I can spend that time. It is a painful, painful course</p>
<p>mollieb: I'm not trying to scare the prefrosh. I'm just telling them what I've found to be true. if they're scared, they should be. the I is for intimidating. I won't say that it isn't rewarding, but I'm being painfully dragged through more science and math courses in my freshman year than my friends combined. And that realization can be scary.</p>
<p>oh yes, the infamous short changing on the credits. 5.112 shouldn't be 12 credits. Should be 15.</p>
<p>You're course 9? That's one of the majors I'm interested in. Cool!
We've got a 21L major in our suite. She takes a lot of flak.</p>
<p>Haha, I was just teasing. And I remember exactly what freshman year felt like -- I took 5.111 and wanted to poke things with sticks on a rather frequent basis.</p>
<p>The thing I want people to keep in mind, though, is that it's possible. It's hard work, sure, but it's doable. </p>
<p>I just know that if I had really had a clue about how difficult MIT would be, I might have thought twice before coming here. I wouldn't have believed I could do it. And that would have been a huge mistake for me -- I am capable of much more than I ever thought I was.</p>
<p>After all, they say that nothing is difficult after you graduate from MIT. :)</p>
<p><em>end rosy-tinted senior sappiness and back to 21A.260 presentation</em></p>
<p>Oooh, 21A. Is it fun?
I'd wish to be a senior, but I am so not ready for real life.
Rosy tinted....hmmm.</p>
<p>Haha. Course 21 majors. Hee. =) Erebor, what dorm do you live in? (I see the word "suite" and think "yay BC!")</p>
<p>On the note of psets, I would certainly not call them busywork, although sometimes they do feel utterly useless. For example, 18.01 psets are split into 2 parts. Part 1 is supposed to be "straightforward" (no joke, that's the word they use in the instructions.) and Part 2 is supposed to be more complex. The problem is that sometimes (ok, just about all of the time) you get to part 2 and the questions are so, so insanely complicated and specific that you don't even understand the question itself and the whole thing is so far over your head that it's just useless. That's how I feel, anyway. Like, even if you know how to solve the problem you just get stuck doing 3 pages of algebra before you're done and...alright, I prety much just hate 18.01, so don't get scared or anything. But the level of frustration while doing psets can get quite high. </p>
<p>But that always makes it supernice to be finished. =)</p>
<p>So MIT turns even basic Single Variable Calc into a pain in the butt? Wow.</p>
<p>WOW - 666. I don't even want to post again.</p>
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<p>ummmm... lol</p>
<p>What amazes me are the times when I'll read a problem, not understand half the words, and stare at it for half an hour. You can sort of hear your brain grinding along (rrrt, rrrt, rrrt).</p>
<p>And then bang! Something clicks and you can solve the problem. I don't even know how it happens.</p>
<p>21A... is interesting. It's my concentration, and I go between intense bouts of hatred for the subject and moderate feelings of appreciation. Some of it is very difficult for me as a scientist to swallow (ie "reality is a social construction"... ***?).</p>
<p>And I believe the joke is that graduate school is the snooze button on real life. ;)</p>