<p>MIT was my dream. Now that I didn't get in, I'm aiming for MIT grad. What are the differences between the two (not in academics, but more in the "MIT culture and experience")?</p>
<p>Sent from my SGH-T959V using CC</p>
<p>Grad school is academically very different from undergrad, and, as a result, you’ll almost certainly have a lot less time and inclination to participate in campus life. As a grad student, you’re involved almost exclusively with your lab/research group, and to a lesser extent with your department, but not really with the school as a whole.</p>
<p>There are social and extracurricular groups for grad students at MIT, and grad students are welcome to join a lot of undergrad groups, but they generally don’t. By the time you’re a grad student, you have other things in your life – a significant other and a pet in your apartment, dinner to get on the table, gym time, an outside interest; and all of those things wait at the end of a commute, since you likely don’t live on campus. </p>
<p>It does take a while to get quite as old and jaded as a final-year PhD student, and first-year grad students are a little more starry-eyed and eager to participate in campus life. But I can tell you that I spent six years as a grad student at Harvard without ever feeling that I was really part of the Harvard community.</p>
<p>I guess what I mean to say, though, is that by the time you’re a grad student, you will have other things in your life – you will have lived your college experience already, and you’ll be ready to move on to something a little more… boring.</p>
<p>Yeah that’s a good summary. One needn’t at all feel part of the school community, because you wind up spending a lot of your time in some overspecialized segment of the school world. </p>
<p>Unless you already knew that you want to do a certain specific thing at MIT, I’d say wanting to go to MIT for grad school at this stage is pretty likely to be only on the basis of the fact that it’s a terrific academic atmosphere in lots of things. There’s a culture of migrating schools when you move from one position to another, so the make-up of a given school’s faculty/grad students can be pretty diverse, and unrelated on a pretty large level to the so-called school culture.</p>