<p>Hey,</p>
<p>Does anyone know what is the partying scene at MIT? (and how it is compared to Harvard) And besides what is the work&play balance?</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>there isn’t really a short answer to your question. I’d suggest reading the blogs, especially those filed under ‘The Work/Play Balance at MIT’ - more time consuming than posting here, but you’ll get a more accurate answer.</p>
<p>This has been discussed umpteen times in this forum. Do a search and you should find more than enough info.</p>
<p>Or come to CPW, where you can see the social scene for yourself.</p>
<p>I can’t make it for the CPW; read the blogs but thought someone might just have another perspective here. Thanks anyway</p>
<p>It’s a big question – there are a lot of different varieties of social life at MIT. Some people do the traditional college frat party thing every weekend, others go to dinner and movies, and still others hang around their living group and play video games/build stuff. Many people do a combination of all three, depending on their particular proclivities, and of course there are many, many more types of choices than those three. Since you get to pick your living group at MIT, and the different living groups attract different personalities, you get to choose in a sense what the average weekend will look like for you and your friends.</p>
<p>The balance between work and free time depends largely on your personal courseload and your time management skills. The average MIT undergrad takes 4 12-unit classes per term; a unit is supposed to represent one hour of time per week, so the average undergrad spends around 45-50 hours a week on school. That’s not trivial, but it’s also not every waking hour. There’s plenty of time for extracurriculars and for fun in general.</p>
<p>Yeah, Mollie hit the nail on the head. You can find almost any sort of social life at MIT (with the one exception, I think, being 24-hour-party-people, because even the hardest partiers actually have work to do).</p>
<p>Ironically enough, MIT is considered to have one of the best party scenes of Boston-area colleges - to the point where people sometimes have to be careful to stop word of parties from getting out to the wider world to stop sketchy idiots from other places showing up - because MIT has laxer rules about parties (and student life in general) than most Boston-area colleges.</p>
<p>And yeah, theoretically, each unit represents an hour of time per week, so the “normal” schedule is a 48-hour workweek. Of course, some classes’ unit numbers are lies. I spent 30 hours/week on old-version 6.170, which was a 15-unit class, for example, and there were a couple of intro-level 12-unit humanities classes where I probably spent 8 or 9 hours/week.</p>
<p>^Not to mention that it’s tough to define an “average” week – I think it’s probably generally accurate to say that most classes require a mean of 12 hours per week over the course of a semester, but the distribution of hours spent per week is wider than one might expect. ;)</p>