<p>OK, so I recognize that there will be a lot of math and computer nerds there. However, how "balanced" on average are the people there? What's the social scene like? Is there any sort of political awareness among students?</p>
<p>The average isn't really the interesting thing at MIT -- no matter what interests you, you can find a pocket of students (or many pockets of students) interested in the same thing. For some pockets, that thing is building stuff, and for others, it's playing football.</p>
<p>Most people do something extracurricular, whether it's a varsity sport, a club sport, an intramural sport, performing arts, or student government. (There are a lot more than that, too, but those five together cover the vast majority of the student body.)</p>
<p>What you do socially is also pretty dependent on the type of group you happen to hang around. In my group of friends, you were likely to find us at frat parties on the weekends, or else (window-)shopping and going out to dinner. My husband's group of friends was more likely to be found playing video games or watching movies together.</p>
<p>I'm sure Jessie will have something to say about political activity among students, so I'll let her say that. :)</p>
<p>the most annoying people are people who think they're politically aware. how hard is it by definition to be "politically aware"? Pick up a newspaper every once in a while, read the economist, surf the internet... big deal. You don't want to be around those people. It's much better to be politically curious, politically interested, politically engaged, politically open-minded.</p>
<p>:) Read the blogs: there's definitely a social life.</p>
<p>Totally off topic but I thought I'd mention it:
Politically aware has more to do with philosophy than a newspaper. If you want to be less annoying and more politally aware start with; Kant, Hobbes, Locke, not Hegel (no I'm kidding, read if you like) and Rousseau, not the USAtoday or NYtimes.</p>
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However, how "balanced" on average are the people there?
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<p>This is such a common and loaded question, because for some reason terms like "balanced" and "well-rounded" have come to have interesting and non-value-neutral connotations in the college context. I would say (and I'm speaking as an academic generalist) that generalists are definitely a minority. That doesn't mean that people won't be interested in things besides science and technology. A common pattern I've seen is that in addition to their rather unbalanced interest in, for example, computer science, or biology, a student will have unbalanced interests in a couple of non-technical things, such as literature, gaming, knitting, punk rock, political philosophy, whatever, that they pursue with great zeal as hobbies. This is by no means the only pattern, but I've seen it a lot. Such hobbies vary widely, and whatever you like, you'll probably find others who enjoy it.</p>
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What's the social scene like?
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<p>There is no one social scene. It will depend on where you choose to live (and which other living groups you have social ties with), and to some extent on which extracurricular activities you do. Some departments have thriving social scenes as well, and some do not. If you want details, ask individual students to characterize their own social scenes.</p>
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Is there any sort of political awareness among students?
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<p>In my experience, yes. However, there's a phenomenon that I noticed at MIT that tends to lead people to believe incorrectly that there isn't.</p>
<p>A lot of MIT students are pragmatists. They genuinely care about political issues, but they dislike the idea of action for the sake of action. They believe that the purpose of involvement is to have an effect on the outcome. If they don't see a way for their involvement to have a useful effect, they tend not to get involved (and to become frustrated at their lack of power to be useful). To illustrate this phenomenon, I recently heard a friend (a poli sci major who keeps a political blog, so someone who cares about political issues) sneering at an email asking people to go to an anti-Iraq War protest. He said something along the lines of "What do they think this is going to accomplish? Do they think that a group of a few dozen college students with signs is going to affect policy?" He wants to become a foreign policy analyst with the ear of government officials.</p>
<p>So people see the lack of, say, student demonstrations, and assume that MIT students don't care. But if you look harder, you see plenty of evidence of political involvement. There are thriving Democratic and Republican groups. There's a non-partisan group that brings speakers on political issues to campus. There's a lot of environmentalist activity, which tends to focus on greener engineering and energy, because that's an area in which students feel that they can contribute usefully. There are student ACLU and Amnesty International groups. There's a summer internship program where students can work for Congress on science and engineering policy issues. There are classes in which students engineer low-cost products for developing nations, and one in which they design products for humanitarian demining, several of which are now actually widely used by the demining community. Individuals get involved on their own too - a friend of mine, his freshman year, ran off to campaign for Kerry in a swing state.</p>
<p>There's also campus politics of course, and it suffers from the same problem that other politics do on campus - if people do not believe that their involvement will have a useful effect on the outcome, they do not get involved. So there's a constant battle to get students to believe that getting involved WILL help. But it still gets plenty of participants. I was very involved in campus politics as an undergrad, and I'm involved in wider-world politics now (and was, to a lesser extent, before and during college).</p>
<p>Pragmatists? I suddenly want to get in more!</p>
<p>Almost everybody I know just...follows the propaganda. The vast majority are flaming liberals, but there are a few wacko conservatives too. Not very many in the middle, certainly.</p>
<p>^ That is something that is really awesome about MIT. One of my friends (not at MIT) is conservative/religious, but not incredibly so, and she gets a ton of flack for it at her school. I can't really imagine that here, at least not from any of the people I talk to. Pretty much everyone is really open-minded.</p>
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Almost everybody I know just...follows the propaganda. The vast majority are flaming liberals, but there are a few wacko conservatives too. Not very many in the middle, certainly.
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<p>Be aware that the number of political wackos and impractical idealists at MIT is not zero. I think it does better on this account than most places do, but you're going to get some of these anywhere, and I don't want you to have a completely utopian image. :)</p>
<p>I don't know that I would say that it's full of moderates, which is not the same thing as pragmatists. I would say that it has a lot of practical [insert political orientation]s who might have very strong opinions but understand reality and put a great emphasis on doing useful things, as opposed to simply being loud about their opinions to no actual effect, which is derided as "wanking".</p>
<p>Also be aware that in my experience, conservatives are very much a minority at MIT. Granted, I did not live in areas or hang out in social circles that were prone to attracting conservatives (too counterculture), so I may not have the clearest perspective on this. But I used to joke that the real political divide was between liberals and libertarians. There's a lot of people on campus with a libertarian bent, and I knew more of them than I did true conservatives.</p>
<p>I came to MIT as a conservative (and a Protestant fundamentalist), and I definitely felt like I was in the minority. I did feel that my views were respected -- they were frequently challenged, certainly, and I had to defend myself, but I didn't ever feel picked on.</p>