<p>How competitive is MIT?
What is it like for the bottom half/quarter of students? (academically and socially)</p>
<p>well, half of the students will be at the bottom half of the class, so… :)</p>
<p>MIT is tough, but isn’t competitive in the way people usually mean the word – everybody helps each other, and the standard of behavior is to do problem sets, and often to study, in groups, with everybody doing the work together. (Actually, I think that truly competitive behavior is facilitated more by easy classes than by difficult ones – at a place like MIT, the work is tough enough that everybody realizes they’re best served by going it together, and that selfish behavior is highly disadvantageous to their chances of doing well.)</p>
<p>The thing about MIT, though, is that much of the pressure on people to do well is internal. And if you’re really not doing well (as opposed to the garden-variety working hard and occasionally sucking that everybody goes through), it can be very demoralizing, because you want to do well so badly. And if you’re really doing badly, there’s always the worry that you might have to go up in front of the Committee on Academic Performance and be required to take some time off.</p>
<p>So academically, it’s very stressful to be in the bottom decile of students, although frequently other people won’t know if you’re in the bottom decile. People at MIT don’t talk about their grades much, so I don’t think it’s inherently more stressful to be in the bottom half of the class on average, at least socially – it’s not like other people will know your GPA unless you tell them explicitly. (Actually, it’s not like you yourself will know if you’re in the bottom half of the class, anyway. I know what my GPA was, but I don’t know the average GPA of people in my major, nor do I have an up-to-date figure for the average GPA at MIT overall.)</p>
<p>My experience is that people in my frat were competitive while people in the dorms were not. I think frats can either be supportive or really not helpful. I remember people making fun of other brothers’ academics and complaining about people in their classes with “effing 5.0’s”. I also remember lending a guy in my frat my homework, having him lose it the morning it was due, and acting like he didn’t care. There was a lot of insecure people there. I left the frat a few months later.</p>