<p>Im interested in psychology, engineering, economics/business, and computer science. I'll probably start out declaring business/econ. MIT is the natural choice here, what Im trying to decide is whether going to Dartmouth is ever preferable to MIT given my tastes.</p>
<p>Concerns:
Research: Dartmouth College is composed primarily of undergrads, and the focus is entirely on them. I hear students can often walk up to their professors to discuss a new research idea. UROP at MIT is great, but it seems like all the projects just coattail on professor's research, with the undergrad student doing menial work. Is any independent, student initiated research ever done through UROP?</p>
<p>Setting: Im more outdoorsy and am not a fan of urban settings. Not sure how much this affects QL at MIT though.</p>
<p>Social: other posts suggest the social scene is pretty weak outside of Greek life. Is this the case?</p>
<p>Concerning research, you will have more interaction with the professors at Dartmouth when you are doing research. This is not to say there is no student-prof interaction; I’ve seen many profs at MIT teaching the discussion sections (being TAs.) People have done student-initiated research at MIT; it is rare only because it requires more effort. There is a lot of money for research at MIT, so it is easier to pursue random ideas (and there are so many profs that it is very likely you will find a prof with the same interests and a lab with equipment to examine it. The money issue is more important for wet labs, obviously, because you need grant money which is set aside to study specific questions by utilizing certain instruments/equipment. For theoretical projects, I would think there would be no reason why you couldn’t think of your own project at either place.</p>
<p>Greek scene is pretty dominant but people find their own friends in the dorms; half the men are in dorms and almost all the females. If you are a girl, I wouldn’t worry about this issue at all as the sororities aren’t as cliquish as the frats. Frats can be isolating.<br>
There is plenty of stuff to do as Boston is right across the bridge.<br>
The worst thing you can do is live in a frat and then move to live in the dorms, though maybe it’s not as bad now since people don’t live in frats their first year and thus get to meet people who are non-affiliated.</p>
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<p>Dartmouth is really beautiful. MIT is in a more urban. I suggest you visit both to see how you feel.</p>
<p>Also, think about whether you want a liberal arts education or not (and also what type of atmosphere you want to be in.) MIT does require 8 humanities classes and there are good classes, but it’s not quite the same pedagogy there. There IS a difference, and it is not just in terms of being better/worse. I was in engineering, which is less like philosophy than economics, so it’s possible that the education at MIT as a whole wouldn’t feel quite as different for you in terms of getting a liberal arts education.</p>
<p>Engineering at MIT and Dartmouth couldn’t be more different. It’s hard to know where to start on that one. At MIT, it’s like you get a firehose worth of material in lectures and then be sent off to do problem sets and/or projects with your friends. At Dartmouth, you would get more guidance from faculty, more direct teaching, but I don’t think Dartmouth has specific engineering disciplines. You’d have to check on that. Other than Cornell, ivy league engineering tends to attract a lot of premeds that are interested in a flavor of engineering. I don’t know if I would do it if I really wanted to be an engineer.</p>
The flip side of this, if we want to be equally unflattering, is that MIT undergrads get to work on interesting, field-changing, cutting-edge research projects, while Dartmouth undergrads are working on cute little projects they thought up themselves.</p>
<p>Undergrads at MIT are doing the same work as grad students at MIT, given a few months to learn the ropes and get comfortable in a research lab. And both undergrads and grad students are working within the limits of what their particular faculty advisor finds interesting and worth doing – this doesn’t mean that students can’t and don’t come up with original ideas or pursue research that derives from their own intellectual effort, just that the professor who runs the lab is the ultimate arbiter of what research projects will be investigated. If you have a really great idea, and you want to pursue it in a lab at MIT, you can absolutely propose that idea to a professor. But just like any grad student or postdoc at MIT who proposes a project to his or her advisor, you should be prepared for the professor to say no, or to give a lot of suggestions.</p>
<p>The typical path for a UROP at MIT is to start out freshman or sophomore year assisting a grad student or postdoc with his/her project. This allows students to learn how to do the kinds of things they need to learn to work in the lab, and to contribute to an ongoing research project. When students get authorship on a publication during undergrad, it’s often due to their contributions on this kind of project. Then, junior and senior year, it’s typical for a student to design and execute his/her own research project.</p>
<p>For the record, there are very few UROPs at MIT who are doing really “menial” work. In contrast to other schools, there’s enough money at MIT that labs and departments can hire staff to, e.g., wash glassware or make media, and there’s no culture of hiring undergrads to do those jobs. Undergrads at MIT certainly have to do things sometimes for their research projects that are very boring, but they’re not things that the other researchers in their labs aren’t doing. It’s just that some aspects of research are really boring sometimes.</p>
<p>I am not sure how much of this is true or not, because it isn’t my field, but my impression is that at a large number of schools, in lab-based fields, the graduate students won’t exactly have exceptional freedom to pursue their own brilliant ideas when they want. It’s supposedly a move-up-the-hierarchy thing (and many never make it to the final, most desired, step). EDIT: OK, this part seems to be confirmed by above posts :)</p>
<p>In a theoretical field, I have heard many times that even at the highest level schools, students are generally not very ready to choose their own problems (particularly in a very background-heavy area), though they have varying levels of influence on their ultimate dissertation topics. Many times, the adviser is already thinking about some things and will suggest a few problems somewhat related to this.</p>
<p>While the latter case isn’t necessarily of direct relevance to you, both serve to highlight why using the word “independent” to describe your research may not even necessarily be a realistic thing past the undergraduate stage. Particularly because in theoretical fields, there is no glassware to be washed, and you are probably not helping your adviser make progress in his research at that stage (although it would be pretty awesome if that were genuinely the case…).</p>
<p>I feel mentored by my research advisers, not smothered. All of my first research meetings have started with the adviser asking what I was interested and what I wanted to do and then the two of us discussing different projects that I could work on.</p>
<p>My current research adviser has been working on our collection of knowledge for over 10 years. She has a great idea of what sorts of things we know and what sorts of things we don’t know, and she’s a priceless resource when I’m trying to figure out how to use our data. I selected my research group because I thought the stuff that they did was really, really cool, and a large part of that is due to my PI’s influence.</p>
<p>I guess what I’m trying to say is that, as an undergrad, you probably won’t have 10 years of experience working in the lab that you’re doing research in, but your PI might. Why wouldn’t you want that sort of perspective and guidance when you’re trying to develop your own research project?</p>
This is absolutely true in wet-lab fields, too, and I think it’s precisely the point – most people aren’t ready to devise their own novel research ideas as an undergraduate or graduate student. Those who are ready will generally find support and encouragement from their faculty advisors, assuming that their advisors don’t suck, which admittedly is a source of variance in the research experience.</p>
<p>^ Plus, with helpful and friendly graduate students around, it’s not so tough to avoid advisers who suck I have found those who have a reputation for being tough to work with usually are pretty easily spotted.</p>
<p>My impression is that there are actual original contributions one can make by just filling in a lot of the research supervisor’s ideas, which ought to be quite challenging to someone who is new (that doesn’t sound menial to me). It keeps one learning the fascinating stuff going on while actually proving at the end that one can produce things in that direction.</p>
<p>I’m choosing to write a little more because all this used to rather puzzle me when I wondered how on earth one can actually “do research” suddenly. I used to think of the academic career path as a long, unfairly frustrating process, and maybe it is, but what seems clear is that there’s a large period between having good ideas and actually knowing how to bring them to fruition (to expand a little on why it seems an undergraduate or even graduate student may not be ready to do things 100% independently).</p>
<p>Let’s face it, the real question here is a matter of location.
Dartmouth is over an hour’s drive from the nearest 7-11.
MIT has three located within 10 minutes walking distance.
I think we have a winner!</p>
<p>You’re at risk of getting mugged anywhere. Mass. Ave. isn’t any more dangerous than anywhere else in any city, and the MIT campus overall is very safe. As an average-sized female, I feel fine walking around by myself at night - but I also stay aware of my surroundings and don’t act like an idiot.</p>
<p>This was probably not your point, but that was an unintelligent and unsubstantiated comment, and I wanted to set the record straight.</p>
<p>I’m not a student yet, but I committed to MIT yesterday. I had a similar choice to you, and I had the Thayer Scholarship at Dartmouth too. I ended up feeling lonely and isolated when I visited Dartmouth, and the complete opposite at MIT. In terms of the outdoors thing: MIT has a surprisingly large amount of green space and gardens. MIT has a fantastic outing club (not to the extent of Dartmouth’s obviously, but still good), with lots of opportunities to camp and hike and climb. They have trips called Circuses each month. Transportation is not a problem, because many grad students are involved and have cars. They have lots of gear that you can rent for a low cost. I felt completely safe on campus as well, walking back to the dorm at 3am by myself as a small-sized female. Dartmouth, while pretty, is in the middle of nowhere. Student groups try to raise money by reselling fast food in the student center, because the nearest Wendys is miles away. MIT has the assets of the city, while having more space than you’d expect.</p>
<p>Son looked at Dartmouth and even arranged to speak with an engineering professor while there. While it’s a wonderful institution, ultimately he decided not to apply because of what Justforcomment alludes to – feeling isolated. At MIT, you will be surrounded by peers who have similar academic interests, whereas at Dartmouth, he noticed that the engineering building was a bit removed from the main campus, and didn’t want to be the “math nerd” at Dartmouth. Professor there even told him that he rarely gets undergrads who have done any previous research, and that his undergrads are typically stronger than his graduate students in engineering (different pools of applicants). Dartmouth is wonderful, but it really depends on whether you want more of a liberal arts education/environment, or stronger engineering/ math & science environment.</p>
<p>Another plug for MIT, in addition to having Boston right across the river and Harvard up the road (where you can take classes, if you wish), is the sailing pavillion. You can walk from your dorm to MIT’s sailboats on the Charles. Take a class and learn to sail; if you’re interested, you can start racing and join a team. Any MIT alumnus can return in later years, check out a boat, and sail on the Charles. It’s one of those MIT perks.</p>
<p>Then there are all those weird and wonderful MIT traditions. One of my favorites is also the most horrifying (from a parent perspective): graduating MIT seniors can parachute out of an airplane the week before commencement.</p>
I have found those who have a reputation for being tough to work with usually are pretty easily spotted.</p>