<p>Hi everyone (this is geared esp. to attendees of MIT)</p>
<p>I was wondering if you could describe the stress situation at MIT. I am a really hard worker, but I'd prefer not to get gray hairs in college.</p>
<p>Do you ever feel so overwhelmed that it's sickening?</p>
<p>How much of a difference was there from say 5APs and demanding ECs at highschool to I don't know, 3 or 4 MIT classes (how many are appropriate to take anyway)?</p>
<p>I love challenge, and I want to learn, but I want to know that my health won't sacrifice too much for it. Like really; all nighters really aren't my thing.</p>
<p>As long as I don't procrastinate, should it be okay? </p>
<p>How do you guys feel? I love intense academics, labs, and great teaching; but are the classes really manageable?</p>
<p>There are definitely periods of extreme academic stress for most people at some point at MIT, although the length and severity of those periods varies from person to person. Most people, though, are stressed, but not so stressed that they’re making themselves physically ill. And one thing to keep in mind is that MIT offers a lot of freedom to set up your academic life, so the people who are super-stressed are often taking graduate courses, or trying to complete a double major, or taking 6 classes per semester, or trying to be in several extracurriculars at once. Those aren’t things you have to do at MIT unless you want to.</p>
<p>A typical MIT class is worth 12 “units”, where one unit is supposed to represent one hour per week of your time. So a typical 4 class courseload is 48 units, which represents about 50 hours per week. Units don’t necessarily represent time faithfully – some of your courses will take more than 12 hours of your time per week, and some will take fewer – but at least for me, units were a reasonably fair estimate of the actual amount of time I was spending on class. (I actually kept data on this. Don’t ask.) 50 hours a week is a lot, but it leaves plenty of time for sleep and friends and extracurriculars.</p>
<p>The biggest difference between MIT and my high school wasn’t really the amount of time I spent doing stuff (I think I probably spent 55-60 hours per week at school in high school between all my ECs), it’s the intensity. I had to learn how to study effectively and do psets in a reasonable amount of time – I’d never had to work that hard academically in high school. But having first semester freshman year be pass-no record helped me get adjusted, and by second semester I felt up to speed.</p>
<p>I pulled exactly two all-nighters while at MIT, neither of which was academically necessary. I actually averaged about 7-7.5 hours of sleep a night as a junior and senior (again, I have the data). I wasn’t an exceptional student, but I developed really good time management skills, and I was able to take heavy courseloads, UROP, have a leadership position in my extracurricular, and spend time with my friends and boyfriend. It wasn’t easy, but I don’t think I chopped any years off my life doing it.</p>
<p>Come to CPW, and see if you think the student body as a whole is in danger of blowing a gasket. I think you’ll find that everybody’s doing okay. :)</p>
<p>I just did some subtraction based on your hour/the assumption I’ll actually want 8 hours of sleep a night and apparently, including work, sleep, and eating, the average MIT student will have 48 hours a week left for fun. Eating is pretty fun though, so maybe I shouldn’t have subtracted it.</p>
<p>And keep in mind that you can have fun and do homework and eat at the same time. My friends and I liked to do psets in big groups in the floor lounge, which often involved ordering pizza.</p>
<p>Huge, but the issue was not so much the time required, as the intensity and depth, and the higher abilities of the people around me relative to what I saw in high school.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There were times that I did, but they were occasional, not a constant.</p>
<p>There’s a message on the Harvard Bridge: “This way to Hell”. The arrow points to MIT. Of course, MIT students put that there years ago. My daughter still hasn’t pulled an all-nighter, but this fall she did go blind for about 24 hours. Her boyfriend led her to MIT Medical, where she was diagnosed with “opthalmic migraine.” Probably caused by stress.</p>
<p>Okay, so now you’ve read the above and you’re probably freaking out. But here’s the thing: I believe the sort of student who self-selects to go to MIT often chooses to enroll in the most difficult possible courses, often chooses to try to double major, or double major and also engage in UROPs (undergrad. research projects). My daughter could have made other choices. Just major in physics and don’t try for a double major in course 6. Take a semester or two without doing research. Take fewer courses. But hey, it’s her life, and these are her choices.</p>
<p>After she told me about the episode of blindness last month, I was sort of stunned. At the end of the conversation, I asked her, “So what’s your favorite class, at this point?” She said it was Junior Lab, the physics class that’s the most demanding right now. When I expressed some puzzlement, she said, “Well, if I’m not really challenged by a course, I feel like it’s just a complete waste of my time.”</p>
<p>She still really likes MIT. She still makes time for sailing, ice-skating, hiking, art, cooking, and time with her boyfriend and other friends. The students arent kidding when they say its a work hard, play hard kind of place.</p>
<p>This question is not very specific to MIT in the end – you can get sleep if you prioritize it. That’s certainly what went around many times on the Caltech boards.</p>
<p>If I might mention something, taking hard classes becomes A LOT easier if it’s somehow the way you naturally think. Getting the right major set up is important, and Mollie has posted many times at how flexible MIT is with letting you fiddle with your schedule.</p>
<p>I have also mentioned this a few times – why do people feel the need to enroll in 6 classes? One can just as easily take fewer, and just attend the others unofficially, if they’re so interesting. Having too many problem sets due may mean you internalize some of them much worse, and find that at the end of the semester, your knowledge of the subject isn’t much greater than that of someone who did a careful reading of the corresponding Wikipedia articles. How much is too much is of course an individual call, and how in depth one actually cares to go into something also depends (plus some have a natural ability to handle lots of breadth efficiently), but I’ll wager many who seem to be overloading actually are.</p>
<p>^^^ That’s actually not true - lab classes, for example, don’t let you just sit in on stuff. Next term, I might end up taking 6 classes, but a lot of them will be graduation requirements - not like I can just sit in on those. And it’s pretty boring to just take the requirements, so I’m adding a few ‘for fun’ classes too, so I don’t go nuts.</p>
<p>I feel like this is pretty close to what most MIT students are thinking when they register for 6 classes. And well, if you really think that you can pass an MIT class by carefully reading Wikipedia…</p>
<p>@molliebatmit: Awesome stats on the sleep hours! I have never heard of someone monitoring them that carefully! I guess it payed off :)</p>
<p>@everyone: thanks for all the input on this topic. I have two more semi-related questions.</p>
<p>1) how many classes do athletes usually take? (think track, cc)</p>
<p>2) can MIT students take classes @ MIT over summer so that they don’t have to take as many during the year?</p>
<p>3) for the freshman year at MIT, besides the GIRs, would I have time to take a neuro class (I think it’s with course 9)? Or do the classes of specialization like that not start until sophomore year usually?</p>
<p>1) A standard courseload is 4 classes (regardless of ECs). Less than 30-something units is a ‘light load’ and then things happen.</p>
<p>2) It depends - you can do special projects / UROPs for credit, but there aren’t really traditional classes. You can take classes at Harvard or BU that transfer, though, but you’ll still be able to graduate on time if you don’t.</p>
<p>3) Yes, you can take 9.00 in the spring, provided that you take a CI-H HASS-D first term, or you can just punt one of your GIRs so you can take classes in your major (this is also a popular option).</p>
I took six classes a couple of times, because I was a double-major, and I needed 150% more non-GIR units than a single major. Of course, I could have just not doubled, because actually getting the two degrees wasn’t as important as the material that was in my head – I wouldn’t have ended up materially worse off if I’d fallen short by a few classes, because I don’t think actually having the two degrees helped me get into grad school or anything. But once I’d started the double, I was compelled to finish it. This illustrates the fact that MIT students are impossibly stubborn. :)</p>
<p>
Karen is right that you can take 9.00 in the spring, but the “real” first course 9 class, 9.01, is taken sophomore fall.</p>
<p>To k4r3n2 – I know there are plenty of courses that have an element beyond lecture, i.e. where there are projects (for instance, in computer science) or labs (various majors). But typically there is a balance of these classes with more traditional lecture courses. Forget the number of classes, all I mean is I cannot imagine one can’t get around panicing and get as much out of one’s education (and not have one’s graduate school future, etc, etc ruined).</p>
<p>In regards to the Wikipedia reference, you’ll notice I was referring to people’s end knowledges, not whether they passed courses or not. At the end of a class, typically what you get out of it are several key points of recognition and familiarity for future endeavors, along with memory of the experience. The reality is eventually, a lot of things have to be looked up, and the purpose of the course tends to be to have a nice, consolidated source of important points, along with working knowledge which is the principal thing that doesn’t come from Wikipedia. The latter becomes significantly less strong if one is working to the point of panic. This statement I can make with 100% certainty, even if I won’t judge what the point of panic is for any given individual. </p>
<p>I’m most inclined to believe Mollie that a lot of it comes to academic stubornness, which I am entirely familiar with myself :)</p>
<p>I think you’d be surprised by how much fiddly knowledge many MIT students actually manage to retain, and how much it actually takes to get us to be working to the point of panic. For some people (myself included), 4 classes just isn’t enough work. For my friends who end up taking 8 classes, they were bored to tears when they had credit limits. There do exist people for whom it isn’t academic stubbornness but a desire to have enough mental stimulation, and these are generally the people who end up successfully taking 6 - 8 classes.</p>
<p>I guess what I’m trying to say is that just because you don’t understand it doesn’t make us stubborn. There are very, very few people I know at MIT who take extra classes out of a desire to be hardcore or whatnot, and I guess this is where our experiences differ.</p>
<p>^ Yeah, the “hardcore” stuff (like triple majoring in everything while being president of every club while UROPing while…) tends to die out very early. People eventually figure out that they’ve gotta do something because they want to do it, not because it’ll make them hardcore :D</p>
My friends and I liked to do psets in big groups in the floor lounge, which often involved ordering pizza.</p>![http://bostonclub.mit.edu/gallery2/v/album96/smoots/Picture+013.jpg.html?g2_imageViewsIndex=1]Half](http://bostonclub.mit.edu/gallery2/v/album96/smoots/Picture+013.jpg.html?g2_imageViewsIndex=1%5DHalf){kind=link}
