<p>So how many hours of studying does the average MIT student do? How much free time do you guys have? Is it possible to have a life, do well at school, and sleep 7 hours? What do you guys do on your free time?</p>
<p>The typical freshman schedule has 48 units (4 classes), which is supposed to translate to 48 hours of work, including class, per week. In reality, you may find that some classes demand much less than the 12units (hrs/week) you get for them, and some require more. I am currently taking 66 units and I still have free time, but mostly on weekends. Many students get involved in extracurricular activities or sports, do stuff with friends, go to parties, go into Boston, etc. when they have free time. It’s difficult to say exactly how much free time students generally have at MIT, because some people take more classes than others, some do UROPS, varsity sports and the like. You really have the amount of free time you choose to have. If you’re taking the standard 48 unit course load, you should have plenty of time to get involved in other activities or just chill and still do well in your classes. But again, it varies a lot depending upon which classes you’re taking and your other commitments.</p>
<p>From my admissions blog, during first semester of my senior year ([here](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/learning/life_after_mit_careers_grad_school/quick_and_dirty.shtml]here[/url]):”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/learning/life_after_mit_careers_grad_school/quick_and_dirty.shtml)):</a>
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Absolutely, but you have to be really good at time management.</p>
<p>So I kept [sleep</a> statistics](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/mollieb/Public/Sleep%20Statistics.pdf]sleep”>http://web.mit.edu/mollieb/Public/Sleep%20Statistics.pdf) during all four years of MIT. If you scroll to page 3 of the PDF I just linked, you will see that I got significantly more sleep as a senior (7.43 hours +/- 0.01) than I did as a freshman (6.16 hours +/- 0.16). This is not because MIT life got easier – it’s because I got better at not starting problem sets at midnight the night before they were due, for example.</p>
<p>I once graphed my sleep per semester against GPA, but it was really screwed up because the semester I started dating my now-husband, I got almost no sleep but did really well in class. 
So there’s not actually much of a correlation in my case.</p>
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<p>Omnia vincit amor. ;)</p>
<p>^Truly – I also basically stopped eating for two weeks and lost five pounds. 
I got hit pretty hard with spring fever that year.</p>
<p>Yeah I mean, if you don’t do very much outside of school, which for instance I don’t, I imagine at any school basically you can have spare time. However, most of that ends up being spent thinking about classes </p>
<p>I for one tend to stay at my desk when stuck on math problems, and at times get on the internet (<em>cough</em> like I am now!) simply to relieve anxiety, because I don’t want to invest copious time going elsewhere. My personal choice. There are people who seem to be able to do everything at once – e.g. I marvel at:</p>
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<p>EDIT: Also, I think math majors have more “spare time” than many other majors, e.g. engineering, biology, etc, which have lots more assigned class meeting times, for instance for labs and such things, even at the upper division level. My classes meet 3 hours a week, so I can end up with very little class on average, even if I have a stressful workload outside of it. The thing with the stressful workload is that you have to work, then refresh, work, refresh, in little bursts if you’re like me. </p>
<p>So moral of story – also depends on major. Many majors have significantly less “free” time, loosely used to include time you’re gonna spend thinking about class. Also, might I add that if you want, you can think about class material 100% of the time, if you’re just the kind of person who can’t get off the subject. I usually end up having homework problems to think about almost all the time after they’re assigned, and having been stuck on them for a while, I struggle to go back and verify the details to proofs in the textbook so I’m keeping up with the current material covered. Yet…none of this is “forced” on me, so to speak.</p>
<p>My son is a freshman. First semester, he took 50 units and had time for MITSO, an a cappella group, a fraternity, a new girlfriend, and private piano lessons. He’s taking 75 units this (second) semester (he’s considered a sophomore now) and has time for all listed previously. He tells my wife and I that he typically has a couple of free hours each day during the week, and several hours each weekend day. That said, he’s doing substantially more than his friends.</p>
<p>I’m a sophomore. I do 54 credits. (but feels more like 60 because there’s a lab class inside that 54). I direct a SAT preparation program on Sundays (450 kids), I go on MUN conferences (went to Harvard and Holland this term), I am starting my own student group soon, I serve as a committee chair on another group, I write blogs on the admissions website, I’m in a fraternity, I do a half-UROP (volunteering on a project), I’m starting to volunteer, and I do random other things that come my way (I translate, I watch an absurd amount of youtube videos and asian dramas…)</p>
<p>Free time?</p>
<p>If I want to get all As in my classes = no free time at all ~3 days leading up to each major exam. on the weeks when i don’t have exams i have about ~4 hours of free time per day (because I’m lazy…) =p</p>
<p>If I want to get a mix of As and Bs = ~4 hours of free times always, pretty standard.</p>
<p>ps. IMHO, I would consider neuron39’s son to be a genius. He’s definitely at least one standard deviation above the norm when it comes to the amount of activities+schoolwork that people do here.</p>
<p>I’m taking 96 units and I have enough free time to post here :D</p>
<p>Nice If you don’t mind me asking, which courses (#s) are you taking? Just curious…</p>
<p>Just wanted to point out that the 2 previous posters came from Taiwan an asian country. And thus, they probably had a better math/science preparation that what US kids had. Especially if they got into MIT as internationals (this is unfounded inferrence by the way).</p>
<p>How much free time depends also on your intellect.</p>
<p>@ isomorphism -</p>
<p>People who come from Taiwan to MIT, are already clearly one standard deviation above the norm (except me), so you don’t have a right to say that. =D</p>
<p>@ faraday -</p>
<p>I went to a pure international school for high school, so I really do feel like just a regular US high school student (incidentally, my school is probably the worst international school in Taiwan in terms of sending people to good universities - I was only the 2nd one to get into MIT in 50 years, we just had a Yale this year (after who-knows-how-long), but we haven’t sent people to Harvard for like 20+ years). I can tell you already that my science training prior to MIT is probably only around the 75th percentile compared to the science ability of the kids that MIT admits. isomorphism went to a hardcore government-established magnet high school that’s recently been sending a lot of people to really selective universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT…are plentiful there), which would explain his brilliance and his 96 units 
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<p>oh and ps. - both isomorphism and i are US citizens.</p>
<p>Hey, I had several 75-unit semesters, and I a) am American, and b) didn’t take a single AP science class in high school.</p>
<p>I think free time at MIT is dependent mostly on your ability to manage your time. People who are really smart (and I do not include myself in that category) just find more challenging ways to fill their schedules.</p>
<p>I’m taking 51 units currently (I was taking 63, but I dropped one class not because I couldn’t handle it but rather because I just hated the class) and have time to do more theatre than is good for me (rehearsal and everything else included, it ends up taking 4-5 hours per night, Sunday through Thursday, or 6+ hours per night during prod week), and I rarely have to do work on Fridays or Saturdays. And I have a social life. There is more to life than tooling here, I promise. =]</p>