<p>I anticipate that my comments will die down for a while, lidusha, as we move into the reading season. There were a great deal of questions here regarding new changes to our application, and I hope I’ve been able to address them. Undoubtedly, the same questions will arise as Regular Action comes into view, so I’ll pop back in then.</p>
<p>You all have such an amazing resource in MollieB. There’s a great deal I’ve learned from her, especially with regards to her great communication style. She’s the master question-answerer, IMHO, and has been a constant, unwavering source of support for applicants.</p>
<p>Thanks for the warm welcome, and be sure to check out our blogs!</p>
<p>Now we have another reliable source of information and support for prospective applicants. That’s good. However, I’m going to be working on other applications as well so I’m probably not going to be here as often.</p>
<p>It would be interesting if the MIT rep would honestly address the issue of how the school’s culture of admissions has changed since the unmasking and departure of Marilee Jones.</p>
<p>How about this question? Why the need for so many essay questions on the application? I think there are 5. Why not just accept the common application and add maybe one supplemental essay? Also, if engineering students are required to write esoteric essays perhaps English majors should have to solve a few calculus problems on the app to make it equitable. If I’m driving on a bridge I really don’t care if the engineer who designed it can discuss a problem he once encountered…I care if he knows calculus and physics. Your application first states that you are not looking for long essays, then you ask for five.</p>
<p>The total word count for all five is significantly less than those of the common app and supplements put together.</p>
<p>I like the many short answer Q’s, as conciseness (an important skill) is emphasized and many facets of the individual applicant can be effectively conveyed. </p>
<p>The essays, I argue, are not esoteric at all. The prompts are very comparable to those of the Common App and supplements.</p>
<p>There will always be a Q about what major you want and what you like to do on your free time.</p>
<p>Two of the Q’s also deal with universal questions that colleges love to hear answers from. One is about significant challenge and where you come from (both of which can be topics on the common app essay).</p>
I think the prospective MIT English majors have much more difficult non-major-related hurdles to overcome than prospective MIT engineering majors – after all, the prospective scientists and engineers just have to write a few essays. The prospective English majors have to prove they can and want to handle the General Institute Requirements.
My husband is an aerospace engineer, and although you may not care whether he can write as long as his airplanes fly, the US government (which funds most of the projects at his company) most certainly does, as they award grant money to the best proposals. And a great proposal has to be both well-engineered and well-written.</p>
<p>There’s also the further issue that the essays on the MIT application aren’t just there to see how well you can write – they’re there to convey information. The admissions officers aren’t really interested in the process of you discussing the problem you encountered, they want to know about the problem itself.</p>
<p>Would anyone from MIT please respond to the oft heard remarks that TAs do most of the teaching at MIT , Profs making very rare appearances, classes being very large, etc. In fact most LAC colleges bring this up as something you wont find at their campuses.What is the realstory ? Are TAs that bad?</p>
<p>^I’m not at MIT, so your question wasn’t addressed to me, but i think that’s a problem you’ll find for most introductory classes at all universities, although I could be mistaken. For higher level classes that are usually smaller, I think that’s less of a problem?</p>
<p>It is certainly not true that TAs do most of the teaching at MIT. </p>
<p>The typical structure of a large lecture class at MIT is that a professor or several professors give all the lectures, something that typically happens three times a week. Twice a week, students from the class meet in smaller TA-led recitation sections to discuss homework problems and review material from the class. TAs are often graduate students, although I had a few faculty TAs during my time at MIT. And for most courses, there are a large number of recitation sections, so if you don’t like the TA leading the recitation section you were assigned, you can usually pick another one with a better TA. </p>
<p>There are some large classes at MIT (300-400 students), especially for freshmen, but classes tend to get smaller as one moves into a department and takes upper-level electives. Most of my upper-level electives had 20-30 students in them, and I was even in classes with a total of 5 or 6 students. You can find the actual numbers for MIT class sizes at the [Common</a> Data Set](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/ir/cds/2009/i.html]Common”>MIT Institutional Research).</p>
<p>I didn’t have any problem with this system as an undergraduate – even for large lecture courses, the professors hold office hours, so a student can go and speak with them without involving the TAs. And now that I’m a graduate student myself, I see the value in the system – graduate students are future professors, and there’s really no way to get teaching experience in academia other than TAing as a graduate student or postdoc. The TAs at MIT are some of the most qualified graduate students in the country, and often they have a very good grasp of what material is confusing to undergraduates, having recently been undergraduates themselves.</p>
<p>At any rate, not all research universities are created equal, and LAC backers tend to paint all research universities with a broad brush. MIT is not nearly as large a school as most state universities, and the student population is small enough that all students get attention from faculty members.</p>
<p>I find Objective’s comment fascinating for several reasons. Mollie hit the nail right on the head here, but there’s even more to this.</p>
<p>I would not necessarily call our questions “esoteric.” They are broad-based, are answerable by the vast majority of our applicant audience, and provide necessary and wonderful information about our applicants, as well. When we are in selection, we utilize these essays to help us understand more about the personality of the applicant.</p>
<p>We’ve designed our application questions (or essays, prompts, inquiries, or what have you) to get at the heart of an applicant’s desire to balance the good with the bad, to learn of their interest in STEM fields, to understand the types of communities in which they have thrived, and to understand more about their creative energies. We’ve also asked for some editing here, and the cumulative word count of 800 to 950 words is in line with the large majority of applications out there.</p>
<p>In the STEM fields, the ability to communicate effectively is one of the strongest abilities to bring to the table. If I am driving on a bridge, I would very much care about whether the engineer who designed it can discuss a problem he once encountered. Open, vigorous discourse during the design process allows both loud and quiet voices to be heard, contributing in this particular case to the design and structural integrity of the object over which I am driving! The go-it-alone model does still exist for some folks, but at an Institute like MIT, collaboration is at the heart of the educational experience. Communication is critical to that collaborative experience.</p>
<p>I suspect that there are vestiges of a perception out there that MIT is a “technical school.” We do put science, math, engineering, and technology at the center of our educational philosophy, but we desire for our graduates to have fluency in a number of other areas, too. Hence, all students take eight or more humanities before they graduate. I loved that part of my MIT experience, and I learned a great deal from it. Many of my favorite instructors were in the Anthropology Department and in our Writing program.</p>
<p>Actually, any engineer who is incapable of discussing a problem he once encountered is unlikely to get a job on any significant bridge project. So I don’t have to care, as I know that the engineer is capable of that.</p>
<p>I thought the essays were great. They felt like standard topics, but with a lower word count. This restriction actually made my essays better imo, because every word I used had to tell something - I couldn’t waste space on redundancy. I also felt that I learned more about myself through the writing process. </p>
<p>The MIT app seems endless, but it was pretty fun to do it too.</p>
<p>That’s not a very objective point of view. As the Interstate 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis illustrates, it is LIFE-AND-DEATH IMPORTANT for bridge-designing and bridge-building engineers to be able to communicate well in writing with one another and with people who maintain the bridge decades later to make sure that the bridge continues to be a safe structure. (My son used to go home from his math class at the U of Minnesota with me driving him and his car pool buddies across that bridge at the same hour of the same day of the week when the bridge collapsed, so I feel this issue very personally.) No engineer can know too much about thoughtful, clear communication. If MIT’s educational program attempts to help persons for whom mathematical problem-solving comes “naturally” (= by long practice) also make clear writing second nature, I’m all for that.</p>