<p>Hey all,</p>
<p>I was wondering if anyone who is an undergraduate at MIT, was an undergraduate at MIT, or has close friends at MIT could answer my question:</p>
<p>What kind of time do you need to dedicate to studying at MIT? Is it possible, with reasonable effort, to earn a 3.8+ GPA (on the 4.0 scale), or do you need to be a super genius? :P Any comments, advice, or anecdotes would be greatly helpful.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>This is a hard question to answer. Yes, it is possible. I would say that most people who do this are pretty engrossed in their studies their first two years. In other words, they don’t take on major responsibilities like say a varsity sport. This is especially true on majors which build on the fundamentals, like say chem E and EECS. If you don’t ace thermo (5.60) on pass/fail, I don’t know if you can turn it around later in the harder classes. It would take an unreal amount of effort I think. For bio, for which the progression is less vertical (i.e., building on each other,) performance in one class is not as dependent as your prior performances. If you mess up in Cell bio, you can still ace biochem. The key is not to be willing to only spend X amount of hours on work. You have to be willing to put in whatever amount of time so that the material gels in your mind. </p>
<p>It’s important also to pick a major that you truly enjoy, so that doing problem sets isn’t painful. Don’t pick a major just because it’ll look good. If you want to learn biology, don’t pick Chem E…</p>
<p>I echo what collegealum said. Yes, you have to work fairly hard, but if I had had
my adult time management skills back then, it would have been so much easier.</p>
<p>For example, if you need to work for pay 12-15 hours a week and also choose to do a
sport seriously, you will be in a time (and energy) crunch. Duh. What was I thinking?</p>
<p>If you make best friends that think B’s and C’s are fine you will find it hard to hang on
to your motivation to get A’s. Actually, you might hang around those super geniuses -
sometimes they have habits of thought, or ways of looking at problems, that you
could learn from them that accounts for their “genius”.</p>
<p>Do your studying at a time of day when you learn well. I’m a super morning person
so I never understood study groups that planned to <em>start</em> at 9pm. Obviously
that works for some people, but I always wondered if most of those students
wouldn’t have gotten more out of their study time earlier in the day.</p>
<p>Here’s some tips I wrote on another thread where a students asked a similar question:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/4060046-post9.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/4060046-post9.html</a></p>
<p>Also, drinking to excess makes you stupid and wastes time. Yes, it’s fun sometimes.
That doesn’t negate the previous sentence.</p>
<p>Geomom: I read your post, very informative thank you 
but why would reading the daily paper be a waste of time?</p>
<p>Reading the daily paper is a waste of time because:</p>
<p>1) You usually underestimate the amount of time you spend doing it.</p>
<p>2) It often is emotionally upsetting. After all, they are trying to grab your
attention, so “if it bleeds, it leads”, as the saying goes. This is an
energy drain.</p>
<p>3) You can keep up on what’s going on by reading a Sunday paper, or a news
magazine once a month.</p>
<p>4) This is just my opinion, but reading/watching too much news makes
you timid. Certainly the steady stream of violence and improbable accidents
make you overestimate risks. I just think you’ll do better as an MIT student
with a bold, optimistic outlook.</p>
<p>geomom, I just had to post about your comment: “I always wondered if most of those students wouldn’t have gotten more out of their study time earlier in the day.”</p>
<p>Maybe not . . . I definitely preferred to work later in college, and still do.</p>
<p>For the night-owls out there (and please skip the next two lines, geomom ):</p>
<p>A Georgia engineer, the dad of a good friend of mine, came up with the adage (think Poor Richard’s almanac): “Those who rise early . . . are conceited in the morning and stupid in the afternoon.”</p>
<p>geomom, please return here: Seriously, though, aside from the general time-shift that applies for college students, I thought I’d read that a DNA region had been identified, where the number of tandem repeats influences the sleep schedule.</p>
<p>Overall, it makes sense to me that diversity in natural sleep schedules would be a group survival advantage–of course, as long as people with different sleep schedules weren’t throwing rocks at each other (<em>sheepish smile</em>).</p>
<p>LOL. OK, you night owls can put up with me, then, as a “survival advantage.”</p>
<p>I did say:
"Do your studying at a time of day when <em>you</em> learn well, " not, “…when <em>I</em> learn well.”</p>