<p>This is a question directed towards the MIT alumni or current MIT students, but are there any criticisms about MIT? Criticisms can be about anything: life, psets, dorms, city, food, etc. I ask this question because I realize that for everything, there is always a good and bad, and I want to know more about MIT. I have seen many qualities that are favorable to me in MIT, but its kinda scary for me to see an institution that has no faults.</p>
<p>Being surrounded by people who are cooler than you can make you feel inferior sometimes. Dating geniuses can get complicated.</p>
<p>Was it a big shock for a lot of people to go from top of their class to the bottom half?
Thanks for making a thread with this question! I’m also wondering a lot too.</p>
<p>
Oh, absolutely. It’s also a big shock for a lot of people that they have to work for their grades for the first time, and that they have to learn how to study. And that there’s no longer time to do ten extracurriculars. There are a lot of ways you have to adjust your attitude.</p>
<p>As for the original question, the Dean of Student Life was quoted in the school newspaper when I was at MIT, saying this:
In a way, the worst things about MIT are the best things about MIT – that there are unlimited resources available, and unlimited ways to academically challenge yourself, and unlimited activities and opportunities. And MIT admits the kinds of students who can’t help but gorge themselves on the buffet available. It just doesn’t breed a lot of moderation.</p>
<p>MIT’s had some criticisms…I heard that there were like, three suicides last year (or the year before), however that’s unusual. Meal plans are expensive (which is partly why I skipped it). 8.012 psets are hard. Overall, MIT is still #1. :D</p>
<p>@liahfiale, yeah, it was a bit of a transition for me (I’m a '16) but now I’ve pretty much gotten used to the psets and everything.</p>
<p>I’ll second a couple that others have posted. From my sophomore son’s perspective, time management (or simply, lack of enough time, ever!) is the biggest negative. I have an older son at a different college and he seems to have WAY less homework, psets, studying, etc. than my son at MIT.</p>
<p>From a parent’s perspective, the mandatory number of meal plans for some dorms and not others is frustrating to pay for if you have a kid who wants a certain dorm/location/culture but not to have to pay for 19/14 meals a week when people in other dorms don’t have to. Also, the food is very average - decent selection and choice, but my son was sick of it by the end of first semester for sure. We toured other schools with WAY more variety. Again, I was glad he was in a dining dorm and wouldn’t starve as a freshman, but now I think he’d rather have the option of not eating (or at least paying for) all the meals on the meal plan.</p>
<p>Yeah, students at Maseeh, Simmons, Baker, McCormick, and Next have to enroll in the meal plan. That’s why I listed them towards the bottom in the housing lottery. It’s far cheaper to eat out or go to nearby Star Market.</p>
<p>I can’t really say if “time management” is a negative aspect of MIT. I think the intensity of psets and classes actually teaches time management. Within the first week or so I found my ideal strategy for doing psets and it seems to work well (with some extra free time).</p>
<p>Hi marciemi! :-)</p>
<p>Well, if you have a kid who balked at the idea of cooking for himself (he really can do it, he just chooses not to!), the meal plans are very convenient and the 14 meal plan is ok.</p>
<p>From my son this week: “I am motivated to do well because everyone around me is motivated to do well.” He finally knows what it’s like to work hard and I think that’s a really good thing.</p>
<p>Yes, doing 25-30 hours of homework a week is intense but yes, even my organizationally challenged son is learning to manage his time.</p>
<p>My son isn’t raving about his first semester profs-says one is sort of senile, one is kind of flaky/spacey, and I haven’t heard about the others but I think they’re ok.</p>
<p>Um, he’s learned to skip class (in fact his analysis teacher encouraged them to skip since he’d be reading from his textbook) to do homework and to self teach certain topics. Whatever!</p>
<p>To be honest, one of the criticisms of MIT that I see on CC is their admissions process but if you meet the students at MIT, you’ll will see very quickly that they belong there.</p>
<p>I’ll echo others about the meal plan. I live in a non-dining dorm and elected to not have a meal plan because it was considerably more expensive than the quality and flexibility justified. I think it would be nice to eat some meals at the dining halls though but under the current setup for freshmen you have to get at least 14 per week which is too many.</p>
<p>Another thing I dislike is the large number of computer science (there are almost as many Course 6 which is EECS majors as in the entire school of science) and very small number of humanities majors. This affects not only the culture but the opportunities available which skew heavily to computer science or at least require decent amounts of programming. There are decent opportunities in social science though.</p>
<p>These problems are pretty minor though compared to the good things at MIT.</p>
<p>UMTYMP,</p>
<p>That’s a good point. Students with little programming experience (like my son) really need to step it up and get experience in programming in order to take advantage of many of the UROPs.</p>
<p>sbjdorlo (Hi!) brings up a good point I’d forgotten. I was very surprised (maybe shocked) to find out that many freshman classes are in the 500-700 student range for the lectures. Guess for the cost of attending, I was expecting smaller classes. My son also stopped going to lectures last year since most of the material was in OCW or online and he preferred just studying with friends to actually learn the material. According to him, the “MIT experience” doesn’t really start until at least sophomore year and freshman year is just “high school on steroids”. This year he’s in much smaller classes, that he actually attends (as far as I know!). </p>
<p>Also, I wasn’t trying to say it was bad that he had too much to do; just that if you asked him what he liked least about MIT it wouldn’t be that the classes were too hard or anything but just that there simply wasn’t enough time to do everything he wanted (and there are a heck of a lot of cool things to do there in addition to academics!).</p>
<p>@marciemi, really? My largest size lecture this year is 5.111 (chemistry) which has around 250-300 students. I think the 8.01/02 and 18.01/02 lectures might be larger though (I’m in 18.022, 8.012).</p>
<p>Each lecture has roughly two recitations a week, which can be helpful. Recitation sessions only contain 15-25 students, so there’s more teacher-student interaction.</p>
<p>I agree, the homework and psets are taking me a lot of time as well…had to skip a couple activities in order to allocate time for them.</p>
<p>8.01/8.02 I thought were more classes of 50-60 students due to TEAL. But I know when my son had 5.111 and 18.02 that those were 500+ last year. 7.012 was the 700+ one. Even his 5.12 class second semester I think was more than 300. They split 18.03 last spring so it was more around classes of 250 (and held in 10-250 instead of Stata) but this semester my younger son is in it and there’s only one section.</p>
<p>The problem with the recitation sections is that of course they’re taught by TA’s, not professors, and vary widely in quality. I know my son last year had recitation sections where he felt he could just go there and not bother with the lecture and others where he felt all they did was do problems on the board but never really explained the material.</p>
<p>rspence,</p>
<p>Just curious-how many would you say are in 8.012 since that’s what my son’s in.</p>
<p>
Actually, most of the recitations sections are taught by professors. This does of course vary with the department, but Institute-wide, a large majority of recitations are led by faculty.</p>
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</p>
<p>The relevant statistic is not what percentage of recitations institute-wide are taught by faculty but what percentage of GIR and other introductory class recitations are taught by faculty. My impression is that the vast majority of GIR and introductory class recitations are taught by graduate students.</p>
<p>@sbjdorlo, my 8.012 lecture has around 100-120 students.</p>
<p>My 5.111 and 18.022 recitations are taught by TA’s; my 8.012 recitation is taught by a professor. 5.111 has so many students that it’s almost impossible to get professors to teach recitations.</p>
<p>My course 8 and 18 recitations were almost always taught by faculty. Course 5 often uses TA’s. It is true that for most students, the class in which they are most likely to have a TA is a freshman recitation, it is also true that the class in which they are most likely to be taught by a Nobel laureate is a freshman recitation. A couple of MIT’s most storied faculty, who could teach ANYTHING they want, or indeed nothing at all, choose to teach freshman. Part of this is the ability to “make the sale” to students choosing a major at the end of their first year along the lines of “I chose to devote my life to Physics, and let me try to convey to you why that is.” Storied professors who don’t have Nobel prizes also often teach freshman. For example, Professor Eric Lander (the first author on the publication of the human genome) normally teaches freshman biology.</p>
<p>@Mikalye are you referring to 7.012? I might be taking that next semester :)</p>
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[emphasis mine]</p>
<p>I think you mean a freshmen lecture of several hundred people in the latter case.</p>