<p>I am applying to Harvard for the Class of 2010. I know I will be totally swamped with work if I make it in, but I was wondering how common/possible it was for people to take classes at other schools. The Boston School of Music is right across the river, for example, and you pretty much have a college on every corner.</p>
<p>Please don't jump down my throat. I was just curious.</p>
<p>Wow, that's perfect! It's like the double major program for Peabody/Johns Hopkins, only better because it's in Boston (don't much like Baltimore). Thanks a bundle.</p>
<p>Apparently that's really hard to get into, though. Just warning you.</p>
<p>It's not really hard to get into. It's completely and totally impossible to get into. Unless you're winning national competitions musically and are way above the requirements for Harvard academically, I wouldn't count on it.</p>
<p>That being said you can still take lessons at NEC with some excellent teachers, as well as at BU's School of Fine Arts which also has some equally excellent teachers. I know a lot of Harvard-ites who are/have taking lessons at BU/NEC.</p>
<p>Harvard and MIT have full cross-registration as well....</p>
<p>From talking to people who go to/have gone to both Harvard and MIT, though, it really seems to me like it's mostly MIT students who go to Harvard for classes (anything humanities and Math 55.) Harvard students might take statistical physics, linguistics, or engineering courses at MIT, but otherwise it sounds like it's a somewhat lopsided exchange.</p>
<p>It's kind of sad that people are such vultures on these boards that people have to say "please don't jump down my throat" whenever they start a thread...</p>
<p>All MIT students have a requirement to take 8 humanities classes to graduate. Most take the classes on our campus but having Harvard to increase the amount of humanities offered is useful. Most Harvard students are not engineering or science students so they aren't required to take what we at MIT excel in (science, liguistics, and engineering classes).</p>
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From talking to people who go to/have gone to both Harvard and MIT, though, it really seems to me like it's mostly MIT students who go to Harvard for classes (anything humanities and Math 55.) Harvard students might take statistical physics, linguistics, or engineering courses at MIT, but otherwise it sounds like it's a somewhat lopsided exchange.
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<p>Well, I'm not sure that it's really as lopsided as you think. Perhaps at the undergraduate level, it is, but overall, I don't get the impression that it is. The way cross-reg works administratively is that the cross-reg relationship holds only if roughly the same number of Harvard and MIT students (grad or undergrad) cross-reg each year, for otherwise, if the balance gets too lopsided, then one school has to start paying the other school significant compensatory registration fees. From what I've heard, neither school has had to pay any significant fees to the other for many years now. </p>
<p>What I think happens is that many Harvard graduate engineering students are students who, quite frankly, couldn't get into MIT for engineering graduate school, and so they basically 'camp out' at MIT using crossreg. I heard of one guy who was taking so many MIT graduate EECS courses and hanging out in the MIT CSAIL building so much that everybody simply assumed he was an MIT graduate student, and were surprised to find out that he was actually a Harvard CS graduate student. </p>
<p>Then of course there are those Harvard undergrads who really want to take some business classes, yet it's quite difficult for Harvard undergrads to get into classes at HBS, so they instead cross-reg at Sloan. </p>
<p>But the basic point is that there must be some kind of cross-reg balance, otherwise Harvard would be presenting MIT with a bill for educational services rendered, which I understand hasn't happened in years, if it has ever happened.</p>