<p>I've not seen a Carleton vs. MIT thread. I've seen a Swarthmore one which made some good points. So here's the specifics:</p>
<p>My child is accepted ED at MIT...right now it's his dream school and he'll probably go there. He's waiting for RD for Carleton and Swarthmore. I like all three of the schools a lot, but they are very different. So I'm wondering what to consider, besides the obvious.... LAC vs. tech/ivy...Philly burbs vs. Northfield vs. Cambridge.... before he commits. </p>
<p>He's interested in engineering, hard sciences, political science and economics. And he's an accomplished musician who will want to belong to an active string quartet plus other musical ensembles. </p>
<p>(I've posted this in the other school's threads as well)</p>
<p>If your son is seriously interested in the hard sciences and engineering, then MIT is the clear choice. MIT’s programs have far greater depth and breadth than those of the liberal arts colleges. He’ll be able to engage in undergraduate research starting his freshman year, if he chooses. On top of that, MIT’s poly sci and economics programs are among the very top in the country, and MIT fields dozens of outstanding musical groups. </p>
<p>A science and engineering school like MIT is going to be far more rigorous than either Swarthmore or Carleton, even though both are outstanding liberal arts colleges. A friend of mine attended Caltech years ago and transferred to Swarthmore after his freshman year because he found it too intense, almost overwhelming. After one year in Swarthmore, however, he transferred back to Caltech (amazing that they took him back, but they did). He’s always put it something like this: “I got to Swarthmore, and the professors were always telling the students there that they were the best, the brightest kids in the nation. But I’d been to Caltech, and I knew this wasn’t true. It was all so easy and unchallenging. I knew I’d have to go back. It became a question of really believing in myself.”</p>
<p>If your son wants the hard sciences and engineering, then send him to MIT, arguably the best science and engineering university in the world. He’ll have many opportunities to develop as a musician.</p>
<p>Thanks CalAlum. Those are the kind of thoughts we’re having. I keep checking to see if he’s truly ready for a serious ramp-up in intensity. He’s been very self-driven and intense in high-school, but he’s not in a big intense community–but he wants to be.</p>
<p>We’ve been impressed with the MIT music department and community. It’s the math/music/Boston linkage I guess. It’s one of the reasons he applied there and not CalTech</p>
<p>MIT has a lot of music groups (band, orchestra, chorus, a capella etc. etc.) as well as various scholarship programs to help kids pay for music lessons and such. In addition, your son would be able to cross-register at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (unclear how strong their program is, but the opportunity is there). People I’ve spoken to are also generally very pleased with MIT’s music program - the department is small, so you get a lot of personal attention.</p>
<p>Also, your son should come to CPW. Just sayin’.</p>
<p>^^ I agree that your son should visit the schools he’s considering. And I can’t argue with the fact that Swarthmore has a good engineering program. I admit my bias in favor of MIT, not because I’m a former student, but because my daughter, who’s a junior physics major, is having such an incredibly good experience there. </p>
<p>I do think you can encounter some well-entrenched myths at the liberal arts colleges. For instance, when I took my daughter on college visits during her junior year in high school, we went to Wellesley after an overnight at MIT. At MIT, she’d visited the physics department, which arranged for her to talk with two professors, have lunch with a physics major, and visit two classes. At Wellesley, the chair of the physics department went into a big spiel about how MIT didn’t care about women students, and that to really succeed, she would need the close supportive environment at Wellesley. Of course, we found out during that visit that physics majors at Wellesley don’t have the resources there to complete the research requirement for the major; they usually do that over on the MIT campus. The physics department at MIT was very welcoming to my daughter, and the professors there have continued to be very supportive. It’s been a great experience.</p>
<p>She visited Yale the spring of her senior year, largely because her high-school English and history teachers convinced her she should not reject Yale without a look. I think they were shocked that she would pick MIT over Yale. But when she visited the physics classes at Yale, they were showing students video clips of experiments conducted at MIT. And when we met with a representative, one of the things Yale said, to recommend their engineering program, was “We’ve recently hired some MIT graduates.” My daughter’s conclusion: “Wow – makes me just want to go to MIT.”</p>
<p>We live in Silicon Valley and have relatives and friends who are MIT alumni, so we were really familiar with “IHTFP”, and we’d heard stories of people who had been crushed by the intensity of the work. So we sat our daughter down and explained the choice like this: “You could go to a place like Yale, where perhaps you’d be a top physics student. Or you could go to MIT, where you might be an average student. Could you handle that?” I think those were good conversations. It helped that she had sat in on classes at both schools, and she had seen the differences first-hand. In the end, she decided that she’d rather be average at MIT than a top student anywhere else. And for her, this decision has turned out really, really well.</p>
<p>Swarthmore and Carleton are really similar. Swarthmore may be a bit higher-octane, and a bit warmer, and a bit more convenient to a bigger city, and it offers a stronger engineering program than Carleton. And it’s plenty beautiful, with a sensational gorge in its back yard. So I would think that between the two LACs, Swarthmore has the edge, unless there’s something about Carleton that really tugs at your student.</p>
<p>As between either LAC and MIT, though . . . that’s really a series of fundamental choices about how and where he wants to be educated. Swarthmore has a decent engineering program if you start by wanting more than anything to go to a LAC and to study engineering; MIT is the center of the engineering world. People at Swarthmore work hard and are very smart, but nothing there will match the intensity of MIT, in or out of the classroom. MIT is smack dab in the middle of a really vibrant city that is the capital of American higher education. MIT has frats and hacks; Swarthmore lots of earnestness. On the spectrum of American elite undergraduate experience, they aren’t exactly at opposite ends, but they are about as different in feel as any two institutions that might appeal to the same kid could be. Either would be fine – kids are pretty adaptable, and both have lots to offer – but one HAS to seem more right than the other.</p>
<p>Great post, CalAlum!
“But when she visited the physics classes at Yale, they were showing students video clips of experiments conducted at MIT. And when we met with a representative, one of the things Yale said, to recommend their engineering program, was “We’ve recently hired some MIT graduates.” My daughter’s conclusion: “Wow – makes me just want to go to MIT.””
Looks like I have to attend MIT now.</p>
<p>I was also accepted EA. When I applied, MIT was not my favorite in terms of the environment, but based on all my accomplishments and interests, it seemed to fit me better than any other college. My Princeton interviewer told me that I would probably have a great time and learn a lot at any of the schools I applied to, the deciding factor should be how happy I will be at the college. A MIT alum offered another point of view. He claimed that although the students at other top schools are really bright on average, few will be doing high level science. Many advanced science classes that are readily available at MIT are not available at other high ranking schools because there are less people doing science. He told me that when he saw the list of courses offered at MIT, he felt like a kid in a candy store.</p>
<p>I’ll probably end up drawing a happiness vs. academics production possibilities curve at the end of the year to evaluate my choices.</p>
<p>Exactly Hitman. That’s the kind of thing my son would do!</p>
<p>These are all great posts, really thoughtful. Thank you.</p>
<p>A couple of comments in response: I’m think my son will go to MIT. He’s pretty sure, but he’s going to CPW before he committs. And of course he doesn’t even know if he could go to Carleton or Swarthmore because those are RD decisions. I think I’m the one holding out a little, just in case.</p>
<p>He’s gone to a small, nurturing high school where he’s had very close relationships with his teachers. And he’s very stable with a good sense of humor. These are the things that make me feel confident that he can handle MIT.</p>
<p>As another parent with a D currently at MIT I have to second some of the comments by JHS and CalAlum. If your kid loves science or technology, MIT is where the action is. It is an extremely intense environment, not because of any pressure imposed by the school, but largely self-imposed. Most students are highly driven and you will always find somebody who knows more than you do. </p>
<p>My D was commenting recently that when she got back over the holidays she met with some of her former high school classmates who attend other very selective colleges. Several claimed that they worked harder in high school than in college and that they could maintain nearly perfect GPAs without great effort. Our D, who was a straight A student in high school, was actually proud to respond she had to work hard for a B and even got an occasional C. But she would not switch for anything. She gets stretched to the limit at MIT and she enjoys the challenge. She is not competing against other students, just against herself. As a junior, she is now taking graduate level classes in her department (neuroscience), doing research at the very frontier of science with a lab Director who is Nobel prize winner, taking advanced English lit seminars in a class of six students, all the while having a great social experience in her sorority, just across the river in Boston. This year when many of her friends could not get any good summer jobs, she had no problems landing a great internship. While a lot of schools also have smart students, it is pretty much assumed that MIT students are in a special category.</p>
<p>I would not worry about your S making it at MIT. If he was admitted EA, he is obviously qualified. Admissions does not really make mistakes. He will be challenged, sometimes even frustrated having to drink from the notorious MIT “fire-hose”. But he will experience an adventure that will always stay with him and his “brass rat” that he would have worked hard to earn will always remind him of it.</p>
<p>I feel this thread has lots of good stuff in it, but really wanted to highlight the following as a very important theme:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Outside of the fact the research, faculty, etc are cutting-edge, it should be highlighted that when there are simply more classes and other opportunities in the sciences, often the option to sample these or at least hear from people who did at close range can be invaluable in deciding what one wants to do in the future. Because realistically, many high schoolers don’t know what a lot of the good stuff out there is, good students or not.</p>
<p>I love the foregoing as a compendium of different ways to be right and wrong.</p>
<p>The Princeton interviewer is right.</p>
<p>The MIT alum is wrong. If you are comparing MIT with HYPS, there are NOT so many more people doing science, and students at those universities have plenty of opportunity to do high level science. (Not as true for Swat or Carleton, of course, and unfortunately.) (Also, Yale engineering was almost completely moribund until a few years ago. Of course you would pick MIT over Yale for engineering.)</p>
<p>But the MIT alum illustrated the Princeton interviewer’s advice: He went to MIT because the MIT catalog made him feel happy. Good choice, and one that doesn’t require any BS justification, either.</p>
<p>And, grouptheory, if you regard “happiness” and “academic production possibilities” as conflicting values, that clearly isn’t how the MIT alum saw things. Drawing curves to make decisions may make you look like an MIT type, but if academic production isn’t hotwired to your libido, MIT may not be what makes you happy.</p>
<p>Drawing the curve was just a joke idea. (By the way, production possibilities curve is a basic topic from economics.) You are right that happiness and academics are not mutually exclusive. The Princeton interviewer was trying to convince me to look at college as a social environment rather than a strictly academic environment. MIT is the best fit for me academically, but I don’t know what kind of social environment I want and how much I should value it. At the moment, I don’t really value the social environment, but I suspect that I might miss out on some things because clearly there are others who seem to value it very highly. Maybe there are other aspects of life that I need to improve upon but don’t know about?</p>
<p>^^^ that’s why I confirmed Chicago without even hearing back from MIT. </p>
<p>*** Just my humble opinion for my personal situation****</p>
<p>For me,</p>
<p>it’s a better fit socially, and though I’m more concerned with academics now, I know I’ll want a set of college friends that will last into the real world. Not that someone can’t get that at MIT, but I don’t think I could. I also was considering a double major with Biophysics and Art history… can’t exactly do that with any seriousness at MIT with the “humanities” major. I want to be friends with people who are serious about the humanities, something I’ve never really been serious about, just so I can grow as a student, and as a person. at MIT, it’s clearly, yes, you can have fun with your arts and humanities, but let’s be serious that science is the real focus. At least that’s how it came off to me in my interview and all of that. I can’t say that it will be science for me. If you can say for sure that it will be science for you, then go. It’s the best tech/science school in the world, hands down. If you want to have a college experience where you can question who you are and what you want without a restriction to get serious and do science, then I’d reconsider (like I did). </p>
<p>I felt I had to chime in on this tech school vs. liberal arts and how to choose conundrum because I recently decided what’s important to me. Just consider what you want and how that fits into the overall goals of each school and the support they provide. (I know MIT has amazing pottery and glassblowing studios and all the extra-curricular arts one can thing of… yes, there are arts. There just aren’t the kind of arts I want. That’s my opinion.)</p>
<p>I was talking to a physics teacher (doctorate from cornell) whose three children have all gone to harvard for physics (all accepted at MIT, too). I mentioned that I was going to consider double majoring in history. Her response: “Yes, it’s all well and good to explore your options, but Chicago is a great place for starting a serious, high end biotech career.” I get the same kind of feeling from tech schools. </p>
<p>Just my view on things. And I’m kind of a weird person, so definitely don’t take my word as gospel.</p>
<p>Hey kitkatkatie, I’m glad to hear you’re happy at U. Chicago, because I remember your post about not gaining admission to MIT during Early Action. Chicago is a great school, and it sounds like a good fit.</p>
<p>Again, I’m impressed with all the great replies. I think the LAC vs. Tech is probably the meat of the issue. Even though MIT is bigger than a strictly tech school, it does have its gaps. I know I was excited about the Open Courseware and searched it to match my personal interests–there was no match. But that’s me, not my kid!</p>
<p>“But that’s me, not my kid”
Wow, that brings back some memories. I recall sitting in a high-school auditorium with my then-sophomore daughter, listening to Matt McGann giving a presentation about MIT. When he finished, I thought to myself, “I wouldn’t be interested in this school. I doubt if my daughter is interested.” To my surprise, she turned to me, eyes lit up: “I want to stay for awhile and talk with him. I would love to go there! Is that okay?” Of course it was okay. I remember that day as if it were yesterday, because that is when I learned some important things about my daughter.</p>
<p>When we left the talk, we walked out with an MIT alum, a man who had stayed at MIT to obtain the BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees. He was MIT-cubed, as they say. As we walked to the parking lot, he asked my daughter, “So what do you think about MIT?” She said something like, “At MIT, it sounds as if you can do many things, like explore the arts, music, and take great humanities courses.” I’m like that — I’m interested in many different things!" He was puzzled. He looked at her with some concern and said, “MIT is an engineering school, though.” </p>
<p>What he missed, and what I understood on that day, is that my math/science geek daughter, who also loved poetry and the arts, had finally found what she believed to be the ideal school. She wasn’t drawn to MIT because it offered only humanities and the arts, but because it was an amazing science and engineering school that ALSO offered opportunities for her to develop in other areas.</p>
<p>Visit MIT. You’ll see what I mean. Your son will understand whether it’s a good fit, or not.</p>