Happiness and Work/Life Balance at MIT

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1

Hello,

I am highly interested in applying for MIT’s undergraduate program. I am most concerned about MIT students’ work/life balance. Specifically, I am asking former/current MIT undergraduates how happy and balanced they felt/feel during their studies.

Thank you!

2

All in all, I’d say my undergraduate experience went well. I enjoyed and did well in most of my classes, and felt I was able to balance school, a part-time job, and a personal life.

That being said… it was not easy for me at first. I struggled my first semester. But I learned a few things that really helped me succeed at MIT.

  1. My first semester, I tried reading every page of the current chapters from the textbooks. But being a slow reader, I found this took up so much time that I was feeling like I was falling behind.
    At the advice of a professor, I stopped reading the textbook for classes like physics and biology and focused more on learning the course materials from lecture notes and office hours. That helped filter out a lot of extraneous information and helped me focus on learning content the professors considered most important.
  2. Office hours really saved me. Professors and Teaching Assistants routinely offered office hours, periods of time where students can ask questions. These office hours routinely had only a fraction of the class' students attend, so I was able to receive more individualized help. It also gives you opportunity to hear other students questions... some you may have had too, and some that you never even considered before and would have missed out on otherwise. I made it a habit to always attend office hours for every class, whether I thought I needed the help or not. It really helped me learn and reinforce the course material. It also helped me catch incorrect assumptions in class content I thought I understood.

By relying on lecture notes and office hours to learn course material, I was able to both save time and significantly improve my grades.
I went from having having a failing grade in 6.042J 4 weeks in to getting an A by the end of the semester.
It was my 8.02 professor who gave me the advice about using lecture notes rather than the text book. At the time, I was struggling to find time to read everything and keep up. By the end of the semester, I got an A+ in his class and was asked by the professor to be a TA.
Once I got my study habits in order, I found that a personal life and extracurricular activities magically became possible to have.

So yes, it is possible to have a balanced school life. It took me several weeks of hell to figure out how to succeed at MIT, but I consider myself lucky that I learned how to ask for help and changed how I studied.

A lot of MIT students don’t know how to ask for help. They used to be the best of the best in high school and impose a sort of pressure or expectation on themselves to excel without needing help. Some manage to succeed on their own. Some learn how to adapt. Unfortunately there are those who struggle alone and end up dropping out of MIT.

MIT provides many avenues of help, from office hours to free tutorial services. Yet alone such things as Sophomore Exploratory Option and Junior/Senior Pass-Fail, which can help relieve some of the grading stress you may face when taking classes you feel weaker in. You just need to learn about these various offerings and take advantage of them.