Amount of work

<p>I've heard that MIT is extremely difficult, even for the genius kids there. How much work would you say you do a week/day there roughly? I've heard that it's between 10-14 hours of academics a day. I'm basically forced to apply here, but if it's really that rigorous I don't plan on taking the application seriously.</p>

<p>No one has it easy at MIT, but I have no idea where you heard 10-14hrs of academics a day. If you leave something like a final project undone, you may have days that are 10-14hrs, but that’s certainly not the norm. We have time to pursue extracurriculars, social lives, and even sleep ;)</p>

<p>If you’re being forced to apply, you can email the admissions office or mention it during your interview.</p>

<p>So the average class at MIT is 12 units, and one unit is supposed to be equivalent to one hour of class/lab/homework per week. The typical courseload at MIT is 48 units, so you’re essentially expected to be doing about 50 hours of academic work (including time spent in class and lab) every week. </p>

<p>Each class varies, of course, and there are some that really require more work and some that require less; as Piper mentions, the amount of work also fluctuates for each course through the term. </p>

<p>How much academic work do you think is too much?</p>

<p>It largely depends on the number of courses and difficulty. I’ve had some 12-unit classes that were really easy for me (~5 hours a week incl. attendance) and some that were quite difficult (~12-15 hours a week). If you take a mix of easy/difficult courses it shouldn’t be too bad.</p>

<p>What MITer94 said. You <em>can</em> set up a doable schedule for yourself and pace your work so that you do not have as many terrible, terrible weeks in the middle to end of the semester. It takes discipline and self-control but it is possible.</p>

<p>Honestly, though, if classes and homework almost all day, almost every day sounds like hell to you, and not in a good way, I would not go to MIT. There will probably be weeks when you are spending almost all your waking hours (and those will be most of your hours) studying.</p>

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<p>This sounds like hell for me and I still enjoyed a large part of MIT. On the one hand, my GPA wasn’t spectacular. On the other hand, I’m in a field where I can prove myself on projects and that’s enough. YMMV.</p>

<p>I’m considering doing pre-med though (not sure yet), where gpa would be a huge factor. MIT also already seemed bad for pre-med with it’s low acceptance rate vs the level of students there (74%). </p>

<p>Truth. There are lots and lots of fun things that happen at MIT that are not homework or classes.</p>

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Are there current statistics up somewhere? I haven’t seen any recently.</p>

<p>Not sure it’s there for recent years. <a href=“http://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/premeddata.pdf”>http://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/premeddata.pdf&lt;/a&gt;
This says that the average accepted gpa is 3.8 … The average gpa at MIT is reputed to be 3.1-3.2. Pulling a gpa that much higher than the average kid at such a smart school seems impossible and likely would kill your time. Not to mention that the average mcat accepted was 36, which is also really high.</p>

<p>^There is some truth to the fact that MIT students have it harder to get into professional schools. However, I do think that those statistics may be skewed by the fact that they may not include people who did not go to med school straight out of college. And the people who wait a few years, who maybe work or go to grad school in another area, are more likely to be the ones with the lower GPAs.<br>
I think if you get a 4.3/5.0 or above, I think you will be able to get into a medical school, though probably not one in the top 20. Actually, I knew somebody with about a 4.0/5.0 who got into a top 5 medical school, although it took her like 6-8 years of volunteering.<br>
This assumes that you will get a stellar MCAT score; you can probably predict this from your stats as a high schooler. If you can pretty easily get 750+ on all the subsections, you will probably not have a problem putting up an excellent MCAT score. </p>

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Sure, but premeds at MIT are not drawn from all majors equally. In past years, they’ve sometimes posted the average GPA for both accepted students and applicants, and there’s not generally much difference – the average GPA of applicants is almost as high as accepted students, and as collegealum mentions, there are also a lot of alums and grad students applying, and they are generally not as credentialed as the straight-from-undergrad applicants.</p>

<p>Nobody is saying it’s easy to be premed at MIT, but the premeds at MIT are neither smarter than nor working harder than everybody else. If your only goal is to get through MIT with a high GPA and a great MCAT score, you can probably do it – more through selective class-picking and judicious use of cross-registration than through bone-crunching hard work. It’s probably not the best use of your time at MIT, but different strokes for different folks.</p>