<p>Is it common for engineering/physics people to drop out of MIT, transfer out, fail immoderate number of classes, regret their stay at MIT, not being able to graduate in time?</p>
<p>I can find general statistics, but as we all know, it's always worse for engineering/science kids.</p>
<p>It's not common for students to transfer out of MIT. The freshman retention rate, the last time I saw it, was 98%. It's not terribly common to fail lots of classes, either. Drop Date, the last date students can drop classes without penalty, is around three weeks before finals, so if a student is doing very poorly in a class, he or she will often just drop it and take it again another term. </p>
<p>If a student does fail several classes, the Committee on Academic Performance (CAP</a>) will review his case and make recommendations as to further action, often in conjunction with Student</a> Support Services. Sometimes students are required to take time off and show satisfactory progress in courses at other schools in order to be readmitted. Many of these students do eventually complete their MIT degrees. These actions aren't taken lightly, and they don't apply to the vast majority of MIT students, but this is the process in place for students who struggle (or for students who face other challenges like severe medical issues).</p>
<p>Anyway, in MIT's case, the retention and graduation statistics for the school as a whole are likely to mirror the science/engineering statistics much better than at many other schools -- there aren't very many non-math/science kids, so the overall numbers overwhelmingly reflect science/engineering graduation and retention.</p>
<p>I'll throw out my own personal experience.</p>
<p>I was originally 2011 and, due to medical AND family issues, took time off - now I'm class of 2012. MIT has been quite rough on me in the past - but I don't regret coming here one bit. I do love it here. Some students with similar experiences regret coming to MIT, others don't - but even within this, we're talking a very small population. I think most people have extraordinarily high highs and low lows at MIT, but it averages to something worthwhile :D</p>
<p>I too am interested in this, do any of you know of anyone who has "failed" at MIT, and their stories?</p>
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I too am interested in this, do any of you know of anyone who has "failed" at MIT, and their stories?
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<p>Can you define "failed"?</p>
<p>If someone is doing poorly in physics/engineering, they will switch to easier majors. Therefore I haven't actually heard of anyone in physics dropping out of the school. A bunch drop out of the major though. Can't say specifically about engineering but I imagine it is similar.</p>
<p>That's not to say I don't hear about people dropping out in general. These folks have generally already switched majors a couple of times and can't find anything to hold their interest at MIT. MIT doesn't flat out kick anyone out of the school (under normal circumstances), it puts students on leave. It doesn't show up on paper, so the retention rate is still beautiful, but MIT definitely has a cloud of students on "indefinite leave", who "will come back at some point to finish their degree". I can only speculate on what keeps these kids around, if it were me and it wasn't working I'd just bust out of here and try again somewhere else.</p>
<p>Keep in mind, though, that all of this represents a small proportion of MIT students. As a prefrosh, you probably don't need to immediately start obsessing over the possibility that this could happen to you.</p>
<p>I knew a few people who took time off from MIT for various reasons -- medical issues, not-sure-what-I-want-to-major-in issues. Almost everybody eventually came back to finish his or her degree -- the two exceptions were a girl who was very homesick and ended up transferring to a college back home, and a guy who took time off for academic issues and decided he'd be more successful staying at the school he was taking classes at.</p>
<p>I have known people who flunked out of MIT, or who left because it was driving them toward mental and/or physical collapse. The large majority of them came back and finished their degrees. A couple decided to go elsewhere and are happy elsewhere. But the six-year graduation rate is over 90%, so the number of people who leave for good is quite low.</p>
<p>I strongly believe you won’t be one of these faraday! I think if you choose a major after having really thoughtfully reflected on why it’s fitting to you, it’ll be easier to you than other majors. I look at CS majors, and gawk at the amount of time they spend in the basement of the CS building at my school. Then my roommate who’s a whiz at EECS says CS is easy, but struggles with what I’d call pretty simple math problems. It’s quite a bit about fit + steam you have to do what is necessary. </p>
<p>The funny thing is, all those engineers who may sing that song about biology probably couldn’t pass biology themselves! I know I couldn’t. Hence, to pebbles, I would have to conjecture that the physics/engineering students who switch out probably didn’t choose the right major. They may like the idea of physics/engineering, but actually doing it is different from liking the idea of it. If someone is very into something from an early stage, I really don’t think there is a question of any college major being too hard, at any school, as tall a claim as this may seem to be.</p>
<p>Well, my post reflect the antsy bantsy feeling of going to be challenged for the first time :D… I’ve heard all the horror stories, the mental hospital tragedies, and now, it’s my turn. After all, I’m just an 18 yr old guy trying to figure out how college will be like :D… so it does lead to some dramatization tendencies.</p>
<p>No I understand, I recall being worried that I’d suddenly become useless, unable to solve a single problem in real college work, and that it’d just be overwhelming. That’s part of the reason I thought I’d give my few cents – you have the right attitude, and I strongly believe (and a few professors have heavily backed this up) that if you don’t let anything in college sound scary, it won’t be as scary as it’s made out to be, and you’ll actually notice people around you dropping out of hard majors because they let the intimidation get to them. </p>
<p>The biggest advice I can give is – when you go into a course, think about what you want to do with it for the future. Don’t let it be a challenge by itself. I find that if one views an advanced class as a means to some end, the advanced class no longer seems advanced…because there’s something right after it you’re looking forward to!</p>
<p>Some subjects (classes) are clearly intrinsically harder than others. Put a bunch of these subjects together to create a curriculum and it’s natural that some fields of science/engineering/math would be harder than others conceptually. This is clear as day to me and should be to anyone who has taken any classes inside or outside of their major. </p>
<p>Now, what affects the difficulty of a major at a particular school is a whole bunch of factors, one of which is definitely the subject content. If you have low tolerance for the kind of work involved in a major on top of that, yes, that will make the major harder, also if it has a lot of requirements at your school, if it requires you to do a thesis, labs, projects, whatever. But in order to even start considering all these other things, you have to first be competent at the material. If CS turned you off due to the long hours in the basement, that means that you evaluated your abilities, deemed that you were capable of the level of critical thinking abilities required in computer science, and realized you just weren’t up to the grit and work, and now you are happier in a major that suits you as well as challenges you intellectually but not to the point of going over your head which is what we all want in a major.</p>
<p>Listen, does that mean you should feel superior on account of your major to other people in other majors because yours is “hard” and theirs isn’t? God, what a joke, of course not. People study what interests them, it doesn’t make any damn sense to choose major solely based on difficulty so it doesn’t actually mean anything. But it’s a little disingenuous to defocus on it to the point of denying that it is there at all. It might make people feel good in the short term, but the biggest mistakes I see people make (here, at least) is not getting out of a major that is clearly too <em>hard</em> for them. They spend years thinking that because they like what they’re doing then it’s a good fit, when they’re failing classes left and right. It’s not worth it, it’s not true, a student has to be open to concede when something is simply beyond their abilities. I think almost everyone runs into this at some point.</p>
<p>I am not, believe me, overly optimistic about what people can and can’t realistically do in a college setting. I come from a school whose engineering department is reputed to flunk students out with pretty few safety nets. I think the main difference between how you’re putting it and how I’m putting it lies in the following statement:</p>
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<p>I honestly have not seen a single student run into huge trouble in a college major that he/she really, really likes * having given much mature thought to why he/she likes it *.
The reason I was encouraging to faraday is that his posts indicate that he proactively reads physics in his spare time for fun, solves interesting problems for fun, etc. These are really promising signs. The key to a student’s success in math or physics, in my opinion, is essentially independence in being able to find the right material to study. When professors ask questions, typically they’ll ask what comes to their mind as people who know their fields very well, and the proactive student will probably figure out what’s important to know. </p>
<p>There are certainly subtleties, in that someone may love EECS as a field, but dislike how the courses are run. But that comes down to the fact that such a student doesn’t really like his/her major. I know at least a few people like this. </p>
<p>Believe me, I have come across oh-so-many people who think they like math, but have a very immature perspective on what college math is like. I mean, if all someone majoring in math knows about is that college math involves writing proofs, and that they like proofs, that in and of itself signals trouble to me. Someone who really has a mature idea on why he/she likes the given subject probably will not run into problems. It’s different when someone thinks the subject looks fun, likes the idea of it, but has no clue what actually doing it involves.</p>
<p>Hence, instead of advising that students go into majors prepared to “fail,” I would advise that they become informed on what the given major’s death traps are, and if these are really something they will want to go through.</p>
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<p>That’s part of the thing, while I know some fields are traditionally considered harder for most people, it’s about finding one’s niche. Even in subfields of math – some are considered to just look more daunting on average, and others are considered “easier” – I happen to be interested in what is traditionally a very tough subfield. However, the funny thing is that it’s ten times easier to me than some other fields of math, because I simply can’t pay attention as much when I’m doing the other ones. So not only would I call such superiority complexes foolish, I’d rather say they’re misplaced and baseless. </p>
<p>You’ll have to explain in depth why you’re so convinced that someone who’s given his/her major mature thought can eventually find it too intellectually challenging.</p>
<p>No thanks, i dont care that much</p>
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<p>It has to show up on paper. There is a federal rule about how to track students longitudinally once they enroll, and I have every reason to believe that MIT follows that rule. Anything reported by MIT to IPEDS (the federal data source) or to the Common Data Set (a consortium of publishers, using the same data definitions) will be comparable to figures from other colleges. MIT’s rate of graduating students on time is quite high compared to most colleges. That is doubtless because the admission committee takes care to look at issues that predict student success once enrolled.</p>
<p>98% of students stay in MIT freshman year…If only I could take on of those drop-out’s spots… lol</p>
<p>at all the colleges information sessions and talking with admissions people, it is clear that they accept those who can handle the work (and they even reject people that can do the work). If they accepted you, you should have no issue keeping up with the work if you have good time management skills and do not take extra courses (both big problems at MIT according to a current student).</p>
<p>Mollie, it appears that you barely passed your courses during 1st semester… What was your schedule? And do you attribute that lack of success due to a lack of preparation in HS? Or b/c MIT is not sth you can prepare for?</p>
<p>(I hear all those things about going to MIT means you should be prepared to be unprepared… It’s not really helpful!). </p>
<p>Also, I am planning to have a 1st semester like this. I want to take advantage of P/NP to do some academic risk-taking. With this schedule, I’ll probably get 3 problem sets a week.</p>
<p>8.012, 5.112, 18.02, HASS GIR (humanities requirement). Is that too much? 8.012 and 18.02 will probably be partly new to me (I’m done with Physics C AP, and the vector analysis part of multivariate). I’m pretty confident with chemistry (I have some olympiad experience in it, although I didn’t make the IChO team, I was able to qualify for the national exam). So for the 3 math/science classes, I expect some new stuff, but I covered about 50% of the material already.</p>
<p>Things in 5.112 I’m familiar with: electrochem part/quantum part/ crystal field theory/ MO theory/Localized Electron model. THings that will be a bit new: thermo part/ and 5-7 other lectures (out of 36).</p>
<p>uh you’ll be fine</p>
<p>just throwing this out there - 3 problem sets will probably take you 30+ hours in those classes. add a HASS paper and you’re going to be screwed for the week.</p>
<p>and the national chem olympiad test had nothing on 5.112.</p>