Advantages/disadvantages of more intellectually diverse student body

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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<p>tl;dr: distribution of majors is not actually a particularly accurate way to characterize the intellectual culture of an academic institution, nor determinative of your opportunities for development </p>

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<p>I think I have grown at least as much as a writer at MIT as I have as a scientist/software engineer thingy.</p>

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<p>Things must have changed because 2.00B is no longer listed as CI-H. Also some CI-Ms (even for technical majors) are also HASS classes so I don’t think the 10 minimum is actually true. </p>

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<p>I don’t think political economy and quant econ are the opposite sides of econ. There are some very famous political economists at MIT (Acemoglu, Banerjee, Olken) who all definitely heavily use quantitative methods. I think MIT econ does tend toward the empirical though in contrast to places Chicago where the emphasis is more on theory. </p>

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<p>You’re right - the “opposite ends”/spectrum metaphor was probably not the right one. By “political economy,” I (lazily) meant classical political economy, but there is that too, at least in what remains of the Keynesian/Samuelson tradition. I personally tend to skew more towards heterodox economic approaches than the conventional saltwater/freshwater divide anyway (I did my undergrad at UMass where Bowles/Gintis have had a long legacy), and I don’t know what kind of home heterodox econ has at MIT, mostly because I haven’t looked. </p>

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<p>The point, of course, being that these are conversations which require more precision than distribution of majors :wink: </p>

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<p>dear lord that animated winking smiley face is horrible </p>

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<p>I don’t believe you are allowed to count CI-Ms towards the HASS requirement regardless of whether or not they are HASS classes, but I’m not quite sure and I’m about to run out the door so I can’t look into this.</p>

<p>That said, if your CI-Ms are HASS classes, you are probably in a HASS major or in a major that overlaps significantly with HASS, so the point becomes moot :)</p>

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<p>I wouldn’t characterize the 40-50 humanities majors per year plus the 20 or so students per year that do a second major in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences as “many students.”
<a href=“Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar”>Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar;
<a href=“Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar”>Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar;

<p>Just as the few world-class athletes on the MIT campus do not make MIT a place with a sporty feel, the relatively few students with significant humanities expertise do not give it a “well-rounded” feel. You will have to seek out other students with your particular interests. As other posters have indicated, art, theatre, music, and cultural groups exist, and you can have really satisfying experiences in these groups.</p>

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<p>Piper I’ve never heard of a restriction that CI-Ms can’t count towards the HASS requirement but one may exist. I know 14.33 counts as a course 18 CI-M although that may be a very unusual case.</p>

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<p>^ Huh, those numbers are lower than I expected. Maybe I’m thinking of minor stats, but I can’t seem to find those.</p>

<p>In any case, there are many students (like me!) who did not major, double major, or minor in humanities subjects, but are still deeply interested in them (ie, writing for creative writing publications). </p>

<p>I think it might be worth looking at ESP. ESP lets students teach *anything they’d like<a href=“within%20reason”>/i</a> to middle school and high school students. Here is the catalog for this past Splash:</p>

<p><a href=“https://esp.mit.edu/learn/Splash/2013/”>https://esp.mit.edu/learn/Splash/2013/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Students want to teach things like “Basics of RSA Encryption” and “Introduction to Neuroscience”, sure. But there’s also “Introduction to 20th Century Classical Music” and “Casual German”. It’s definitely slanted in the science/engineering direction, but I don’t think it’s a wasteland for the HASSes :)</p>

<p>EDIT: Crossed posts with UMTYMP student. Yeah, I may be wrong on the CI-M/HASS thing, but as I said before, I think in practice this doesn’t have much of an effect in lowering the amount of HASS/writing you do.</p>