Engineering at MIT vs Princeton?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>I applied Early to MIT and I really want to Major in Electrical Engineering and Economics.</p>

<p>But I also heard that the undergrad experience at Princeton is amazing even though it's engineering program may not be as top-notch.</p>

<p>Yes I know getting accepted first will be tough, but Can other people weight in on the pros and cons of both?</p>

<p>I know MIT has way more research opportunities and flexibility with majors. Princeton only allows for one major with some very specific concentrations</p>

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<p>You can’t double major at Princeton.</p>

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<p>yes srry I forgot to mention that. It is part of the personal cons that I know about Princeton</p>

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<p>Everybody I’ve met who attended an Ivy League school (okay, it’s not many people, I don’t hobnob with elites) has said they would not send their kids to one for an undergrad degree, as the actual quality of education at the undergrad degree is terrible, in the sense that you are not taught by real faculty but by grad students, every class has fifty bajillion people in it, etc. Ivies tend to have very high undergrad dissatisfaction rates.</p>

<p>OTOH, people who’ve been to MIT rave about it, even at the undergrad level.</p>

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<p>Oh really?</p>

<p>Then perhaps you could explain the IHTFP acronym.</p>

<p>[MIT</a> Admissions | Blog Entry: “IHTFP”](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/student_life_culture/ihtfp.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/student_life_culture/ihtfp.shtml)</p>

<p>[IHTFP</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHTFP]IHTFP”>Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Wikipedia)</p>

<p>Or perhaps one could ask why the MIT Brass Rat class ring is worn with the rat facing away from you until graduation day, whereupon the rat is turned to face towards you. </p>

<p>[MIT</a> class ring - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“MIT class ring - Wikipedia”>MIT class ring - Wikipedia)</p>

<p>An MIT education was once infamously described as drinking from a firehose. </p>

<p>[IHTFP</a> Hack Gallery: Fire Hose Drinking Fountain](<a href=“http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1991/fire_hydrant/]IHTFP”>IHTFP Hack Gallery: Fire Hose Drinking Fountain)</p>

<p>Don’t get me wrong - I’m a fan of MIT. However, I have heard it described, and I tend to agree, that MIT is a great school to be from, but not necessarily to be at.</p>

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<p>At some Ivies, I’m sure that is true. But Princeton is the smallest of the Ivies. </p>

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<p>Well, dissatisfied or not, at least they graduate at very high rates. Princeton graduates a highly impressive 90% of its students within 4 years; how many other schools can say the same? If the students were really so dissatisfied, why don’t they all just transfer elsewhere?</p>

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<p>I can only report what I hear on MIT.</p>

<p>As for dissatisfaction rates, they don’t necessarily tell us what the retention rate will be, as other factors besides satisfaction with one’s particular school determine a person’s retention.</p>

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<p>The general consensus regarding MIT is that it is an extraordinarily rigorous and demanding school. MIT freely admits it to be such. </p>

<p>[MIT</a> Admissions | Blog Entry: “MIT is hard”](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/learning/majors_minors/mit_is_hard.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/learning/majors_minors/mit_is_hard.shtml)</p>

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<p>If Ivy undergrads truly exhibited high dissatisfaction rates, one would think that more students would transfer out. After all, these aren’t mediocre scrub students here: these are Ivy undergrads. Surely most of them have the qualifications transfer to an average school if they really wanted to, for it’s not that hard to transfer to an average school. Moreover, as a group, the Ivies exhibit some of the highest yields, both absolute and cross, of any group of schools in the country. </p>

<p>Hence, it begs the question of, if the Ivy undergrad experience is so unsatisfactory, why do so many admittees choose to go, and while there, why do so many of them choose to stay and graduate? Clearly that must mean that there is something desirable about those schools.</p>

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<p>I think you underestimate the power of the human ego. A person will stick to a place or situation they absolutely hate if it has the unbelievable reputation that the Ivies have.</p>

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<p>I can only offer three anecdotes, but they are the exact opposite of what TomServo offered.</p>

<p>One went to MIT and graduated with an engineering degree with a good GPA. He is now fairly successful and happy at his job. However, although he admits that his MIT degree and education serves him well, he would not do it again if he had the choice. He considers it the most miserable four years of his life. </p>

<p>One Yale graduate said that the school was O.K., but that the best part was the people and that he would easily do it over. The Harvard graduate shared these sentiments.</p>

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<p>Yes, there is something desirable, Harvard and Princeton are world-famous names that open many doors. Butt State U. isn’t, even if you learn the exact same things. It’s the same reason people trust brands they know and may steer away from cheaper, generic brands that they are less familiar with. Brand names are a risk management technique, a way of economizing on scarce information.</p>

<p>Anyway, student dissatisfaction rates <em>are</em> high, and that’s because these schools, at the undergrad level, don’t live up to people’s sky-high expectations. You may never even see the Nobel Prize winners the brochures and websites mentioned, as an undergrad. You may realize that your physics class is studying from the same text, and covering the same material, as your friend at Butt State U., but for much more money. Not to mention the enormous pressure on students at these schools.</p>

<p>But unlike Butt State U., students at Ivies have more incentive to tough it out. They make invaluable contacts there that will help them for the rest of their lives. They know the value of their degree when getting that first job/grad school/etc. And their dissatisfaction rates are generally unrelated to the difficulty of the material, so it’s not like they can’t hack it.</p>

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<p>silver, what did those Harvard and Yale grads you talked to major in?</p>

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<p>If you are dead-set on engineering or something technical, I say MIT. Princeton for anything else.</p>

<p>However, it’s too early to count your eggs and I think you should wait until you get your acceptance letters and then visit the colleges.</p>

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<p>Which is exactly my point: however dissatisfactory the Ivies may be, the vast majority of students will still choose to stay to finish their degrees. </p>

<p>I said it before and I’ll say it again: if the Ivies were truly terrible schools, students would transfer away. Lots of students would love to transfer from Butt State U (to use Tom Servo’s example) to an Ivy, but hardly any students want to transfer from an Ivy to Butt State. </p>

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<p>The same is true at MIT: when was the last time that Samuel Ting taught an undergraduate course? MIT’s textbooks are the same textbooks used elsewhere; it’s not as if MIT provides secret textbooks. The laws of science and engineering, and therefore the formulas and pedagogical techniques, are the same at any school. MIT is also just as expensive as the Ivies. Given MIT’s brand name - which is more arguably more powerful than many of the Ivies - students would be justifiably expected to enter with high expectations. And, if anything, MIT students are under far more pressure than the Ivy students are; whereas Ivy students may feel pressure to do well, MIT students feel pressure to simply graduate at all. Subjected to a high grade curve, Ivy students know that the worst that will happen is that they’ll earn mediocre grades, but they’ll still pass. {As an example, both George W. Bush and John Kerry - both self-admittedly unmotivated students - still managed to graduate from Yale.} So, on this score, I don’t see how MIT would be any more satisfactory than the Ivies. </p>

<p>To be clear, I am hardly an MIT basher. Far from it, I consider myself to be largely pro-MIT. However, I am mystified as to what the sources of the supposedly high levels of satisfaction at MIT are, relative to the Ivies. If the Ivies have problems with student satisfaction, then so does MIT. Again I ask - what does the acronym IHTFP stand for and why does it exist?</p>

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<p>“silver, what did those Harvard and Yale grads you talked to major in?”</p>

<p>I’m not sure, but it wasn’t engineering. This may indeed be the factor that accounts for the differences.</p>

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<p>“I said it before and I’ll say it again: if the Ivies were truly terrible schools, students would transfer away.”</p>

<p>All other factors aside, yes. But we’ve discussed the other factors which prevent that from happening.</p>

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<p>All of those other factors are part and parcel of satisfaction. At the end of the day, if you really don’t enjoy something, you would stop doing it.</p>

<p>This whole story reminds me of a guy I know who’s always complaining about his job: that the office politics are suffocating, that the company policies are nonsensical, etc. But then when I asked him why he just doesn’t quit and find another job - which he could easily do given his strong qualifications - his candid answer is that the job pays extremely well. Hence, whatever problems he may have with the job, at least he enjoys the paycheck. Overall, if he truly hated all of the aspects of the job, including the pay, he would quit.</p>

<p>I’m also still trying to identify what specifically about MIT would improve its satisfaction level over the Ivies. That undergrads never interact with certain prominent professors, that the competitive level is intense, that the same textbooks and course materials are used at cheaper state schools - all of these characteristics are just as true at MIT as at the Ivies, if not more so, particularly in the case of the competition. Ivy students have to compete to earn top grades, whereas MIT students have to compete merely to graduate at all. </p>

<p>More Ivy students would not have graduated at all had they gone to MIT than are MIT students who had gone to an Ivy. Certainly both George W. Bush and John Kerry would not have graduated had they gone to MIT rather than Yale, and while perhaps that would have been better for the rest of the country, but it wouldn’t have been better for them. Put another way, students who flunk out of MIT would have been better off going to an Ivy and graduating - perhaps with mediocre grades in a creampuff major - but still graduating.</p>

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<p>sakky, just shut up if u’re a pro-MIT. the whole world knows that MIT’s one of the best. u said that ur “mystified as to what the sources of the supposedly high levels of satisfaction at MIT are” - because it’s a kick-ass school that opens up a lot of doors when ur applying for jobs after u’ve earned ur degree.</p>

<p>and as for the IHTFP acronym, read a portion of the article from the MITadmission that i’ve included in this post urself:</p>

<p>"Under most conditions, you will love MIT. You will think, “I Have Truly Found Paradise.” You will love the living groups and the fact that you get to choose where you live and stay with something like a family for years, and you will love the way that grades are flexible and dependent on the class average because you’ll feel that even if the material is hard you’re all in it together with your classmates. Then you will go frolic a meadow somewhere with some bunny rabbits, and strangers will give you cookies without razor blades in them for trivial reasons, and life will be a beautiful place.</p>

<p>Under certain other conditions, however, you will hate MIT. HATE IT.</p>

<p>These conditions might be finals week, the weeks before Thanksgiving and spring breaks, and random other times of the year when life explodes in your face."</p>

<p>it’s written there that, under MOST conditions, u will LOVE MIT. and there are only certain conditions that will make hate MIT. mostly though, u will love it.</p>

<p>anyway i dont really care about this MIT stuff. my point is, sakky, ur so annoying cuz u hv the tendency to spit on people’s posts. alright, u may be smart and include heavy doses of facts and stats into ur posts, but ur posts are somehow insulting, annoying and they make people wanna slap u dead on. and when people actually snap back at u, u deny whatever people throw at ur face and play innocent cuz u spit on people’s posts not with direct sentences, but with subtle, hinted and indirect jabs of lines somewhere within ur lengthy posts just like a coward. ur tone, the way u construct ur sentences, is really what makes u a d…bag.</p>

<p>the mad (and sad) 11600ish number of posts that u hv, somehow shows that u lack of social skills. now im not sure about this, im just assuming. lol. but imo, the number of ur posts shows that u dont really hv much of a social life and therefore, u spend more time being in front of ur computer rather than being with ur friends. ur probably a sad someone who spends most of his time alone, who takes his frustation out on the people here on this forum. lol.</p>

<p>and this isnt the only thread that i’ve found u spitting on other people’s posts, being a j3rk. i’ve found several, which i wont even be bothered to search and provide u with the links cuz that wud be a total waste of time.</p>

<p>anyway, u can spit fire back on this post all u want (im sure u will), but i dont give a damn and i cudnt care less bout u and ur sad life. and yes, ur life’s sad, just look at the number of ur posts. lol. i certainly hope that i’d have long forgotten about this site when i earn my degree.</p>

<p>p.s: sorry for the bad english. english isnt my first language, i havent even moved to the us for college. but i will be, soon. and by moving to the us, i hope my english will improve ;)</p>

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<p>All I can say is there are real people behind posts. Anything you feel you have to say, please exercise judgement (assume you where saying it to someones face in the real world) before saying it.</p>

<p>Thank you,
Lacero</p>

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<p>[MIT</a> Admissions | Blog Entry: “What happened since the end.”](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/what_happened_since_the_end.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/what_happened_since_the_end.shtml)</p>

<p>"IHTFP is a timeless motto of the Institute. People who don’t understand the concept claim that it means different things to different people. This is false. The true nature of IHTFP is that it holds a dual meaning for all of us. Sometimes it means “I have truly found paradise. Other times it means I hate this f?$%!@# place.” Sometimes it means both of these things at the same exact time. "</p>

<p>Everyone I know who goes to MIT absolutely loves it.</p>

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<p>@techy233 exactly. thats what i said. eventhough its sometimes I Hate This eFfin Place and not always I Have Truly Found Paradise, thats okay, its normal.
wherever u go, u’ll have times when u feel like hating just everything. u’ll feel down from time to time and u’ll hate the experience when ur down. how can u expect to be always up without any down or whatsoever? we will have our ups and downs but all we can do is just enjoy the roller coaster ride :slight_smile: - okay, cant help myself with the corniness
and in the case of MIT, most of the time u’ll love MIT. most of the time.</p>