<p>
</p>
<p>No, I would advise against this. You’ll take about the same number of classes anyway regardless of when you take HASS classes, so you’re not gaining anything, and it causes your learning of various subjects to be oddly distributed and possibly to feel less natural.</p>
<p>A tip regarding physics itself (I was not a physics major but I heard this from pretty much every physics major I knew) is that you can’t really decide whether you have serious liking or aptitude for physics based on 8.01 and 8.02 (the required physics classes that most people take as freshmen), because those classes are not representative of physics classes in general. 8.03 (waves & vibrations) is considered something of a weeder class, and also not representative. A lot of my course 8 friends said that 8.04 (the first quantum class) was when they really fell in love with physics, and that until then they had been dithering (and some of them had not been in the major at all; they had only been planning to minor until then).</p>
<p>You’re already aware that other people might be ahead of you, but if you’ve spent your whole life being ahead of your peers, you likely aren’t emotionally prepared to be behind and struggling, even if you are intellectually - this isn’t a knock on you, it’s something that’s pretty much impossible to prepare for emotionally (even struggling at, say, a sport, or other EC, doesn’t do it, though it may be the closest approximation you can get, because a sport doesn’t have the same impact on your future, and being good at it probably is less intertwined with your identity). The best way to prepare is to realize that you will probably be unprepared, and to start figuring out support mechanisms before it hits.</p>
<p>Along similar lines, find something that you can do outside of classes (and probably outside of academics in general) from which you can take pride and a sense of identity. Many, many students coming into MIT come in with pretty one-dimensional identities that have been imposed on them by others. Encouraged by the people around them, they see themselves as brains and little else. Their purpose in life is to be smart and do well in school, and their self-image is based around that purpose. The farther ahead of their peers they have been in their pre-college life, the more this is true. One of the wonderful things about MIT is that it pretty much forces most people to develop a more complex identity, because in such a talented crowd and at such a difficult school, very few people can maintain that one-dimensional identity. But the downside to that is that people become massively disoriented when that old identity breaks down. They don’t know who they are or what they’re good for anymore. Their entire basis for self-worth and meaning seems to have been ripped out from under them overnight, and so they fall into a pit of despair. They recover as they develop a new, multi-dimensional identity, and are often happier in the long run for having done so (I sure am), but if you want to avoid the pit-of-despair phase, it helps a lot to already <em>have</em> other things that give you pride and meaning.</p>
<p>Also, definitely start looking for research early, but realize that in some departments you may have trouble finding it, because they will want more coursework and experience than you have. Don’t be discouraged, keep trying, and update your resume as you progress. For something like physics, you might want to look outside your intended department as well as in it when it’s early in your career, because a lot of disciplines use physics, and their department’s UROPs will require less physics background than a physics prof’s UROP might, so it might be easier to get those UROPs as a frosh. Biology, neuroscience, applied math, materials, nukeE, mechE, bioE, and earth/atmospheric/planetary sci all use physics, and that’s only a partial listing.</p>
UROPs have real work to do.</p>
</p>