<p>I'm looking for things I should be working during the summer to succeed during the first year.
What subjects to take or not, whether or not take credit for calculus or physics etc.</p>
<p>Thanks in advance.</p>
<p>I have heard that people take the calculus and physics classes even if they have AP credit for them. Email snively, he will be able to answer this question better than me or anyone else. Mollie is also a good choice to ask to.</p>
<p>You should probably read</p>
<p>MIT</a> EECS - New Curriculum 6-1, 6-3, 6-2 in EECS</p>
<p>Without knowing more about your background, in particular what type of exposure you have had to computers and abstract math, it's hard to say what you should do to prepare. You can always go to OCW or the class home pages to get more specific information about classes.</p>
<p>I would not be the one to ask about 6-3, or about any major that's not 9, 7, or 16 (which is, incidentally, 9 + 7).</p>
<p>The MIT EECS primer linked by yagottabelieve is a great source.</p>
<p>OCW is always good. In terms of getting credit for classes, IMO if you're not going to be a physics major, get credit for 8.01 if you can. Also, a good portion of the freshman class takes the credit they got for 18.01, and I haven't heard of many (any, for that matter) people struggling in 18.02 because of it.</p>
<p>Strickly speaking you don't actually need to do anything specific before you get to MIT, as MIT provides a couple of paths that make it possible for freshman to enter course 6 in the Spring without pre-MIT programming experience:</p>
<p>MIT</a> EECS - Note to Freshmen about entry to Course 6</p>
<p>However, as explained in the link, pre-MIT programming experience makes things easier.</p>
<p>I did something very similar. Skip out of 18.01, 18.02, 8.01, and 8.02 (so study for those ASE's, they aren't hard). Your first semester at MIT launch into as many course 6 courses as possible. Push off some of your GIR's to your sophomore / junior year. This results in having a huge advantage in terms of what you can get out of course 6. </p>
<p>The summer before you go to MIT, it helps a lot if you take a look at the courses on OCW and the faculty just to get a sense of how things work at MIT. Look around on Wikipedia about things you don't understand just to become familiar with jargon. For example, you should know at a very shallow level what Information Theory is, even if you don't know any technical information about it. It makes it much easier to explore and look through the course catalog.</p>
<p>If you're ambitious, and you think you have learned good study habits in HS and got a good grounding, I advise not worrying too much about missing this or that, and just hit the ground running at MIT.</p>