<p>An admissions presentation I went to mentioned an option for junior year to be spent abroad, namely at Cambridge University. How popular is this really? How many students actually do this?</p>
<p>General information about studying abroad can be found here[/url</a>]. The Cambridge-MIT Exchange is the standard program for studying abroad (info can be found [url=<a href="http://web.mit.edu/cmi/ue/%5Dhere%5B/url%5D">http://web.mit.edu/cmi/ue/]here</a>).</p>
<p>Note that only certain departments participate in the Cambridge-MIT exchange (departments here</a>), so if you're interested in doing the exchange, you'll have to major in a department that participates.</p>
<p>In the most recent story I could find in the Tech, about</a> 35 MIT students were projected to participate in the exchange per year.</p>
<p>Have you ever met anyone who's been through the program? How is it considered among students at MIT?</p>
<p>The daughter of the people who live 5 houses down from me participated a couple years ago during her junior year. She had a fantastic time and had no regrets about it at all.</p>
<p>Edit: She mentioned the different style of teaching and the concentration of courses solely in your major for the year as a challenge but a great experience.</p>
<p>I don't personally know any of the MIT students who have been through the program, although I have met several of the kids from Cambridge who replaced them junior year! :)</p>
<p>One of my cheerleader friends is studying abroad in the Turks and Caicos Islands this semester (poor thing, right? gets to lounge in the Caribbean all semester?), and I know she's really enjoying it. But studying abroad is definitely a personal choice -- most people really enjoy it, but that's because they know going into it that's what they want to do. (And the student opinion of it is generally similar -- people are very supportive of those who choose to study abroad, but everyone recognizes it's not something everyone wants to do.)</p>
<p>MM brings up a good point -- classes are taught and graded very differently at Cambridge. Also, given the fact that only classes in the major are taken at Cambridge, MIT students have to do a bit of a shuffle in order to get all their MIT requirements taken care of as well. It's not terribly difficult, of course, but requires some planning and forethought.</p>