<p>Can any current and previous students comment on how interesting and good the professors are? Obviously MIT is a top-notch school but how are the classes exactly? Very interesting or a detached intellectual rambling? </p>
<p>What about class sizes? Generally speaking, how large are most of the classes? How big are GIR classes taken during one's freshman year? </p>
<p>Any other general comments deviating from these questions are also welcome. I just want a good feel of what MIT is like directly from students' experiences.</p>
<p>Professors and classes certainly vary, but I can’t think of any of my classes that I’d categorize as “detached intellectual rambling.” Of course, they weren’t all very interesting, either.</p>
<p>Class size varies quite a bit by major and by year – GIRs and some of the sophomore introductory lectures in certain majors are rather large, but upper-division courses are often quite small. Large classes are almost always divided into smaller recitation sections.</p>
<p>I think the biggest class I took was 7.013, which had 282 students the semester I took it. On the small side, I took 7.345, which had four students, and 21A.260, which had six.</p>
<p>Also, all professors that I’ve dealt with have been really approachable, even those who taught big lecture classes. Often they’ll show a different side of themselves if you talk to them one-on-one during office hours. You can even email them and set up meetings, many even encourage this.</p>
<p>I can think of a couple (and ONLY a couple) for which that was a fair description of many of the lectures. But in those cases, the profs were brilliant people who turned out to be much better at teaching if you went to their office hours.</p>
<p>Teaching quality and style vary. A lot. Even making a generalization is just pointless.</p>
<p>Class sizes also vary a lot, with science core GIRs tending to be very large. If you really don’t want large lecture classes like this, you could join one of the special frosh programs, like ESG (the Experimental Study Group), where you can take GIRs in a small-group setting.</p>
<p>Thanks for the insightful feedback. Do most classes tend to be smaller during one’s sophomore year or is it not until junior and senior year that the class sizes decrease dramatically in size?</p>
<p>Depends on the major. In a major where there’s a set of core classes, and then you can choose electives that build on those, sophomore classes will be larger (unless it is a very small major) and junior and senior classes will be smaller, because everyone in your year in the major is taking those sophomore classes. In majors where the curriculum is less rigid (e.g. math, brain & cog sci), this is less true - fewer classes that everyone in the major is required to take means fewer big classes, and looser prereqs for classes means that not everyone is taking certain classes at the same time.</p>
<p>However, even in the majors with many large core classes, those classes are usually smaller than the big frosh GIRs.</p>