What can we tell you that will help you make your decision?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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<p>^ I think the OP meant coffee shops to study in, not just to buy coffee =p</p>

<p>Well, I love studying in coffee shops too, and although there’s really not any in West Campus, I sometimes study in Au Bon Pain in Kendall (before the cleaning ladies start vacuuming loudly) or Cosi’s (right next to ABP). Otherwise, I occasionally go to other coffeeshops near Harvard or Porter square (when I’m on my way to the Japanese supermarket there) to study on the weekends.</p>

<p>However, I think there are already a lot of excellent places to study on campus that aren’t drab and depressing. For example, you can study in the basement lounge of E51 (Tang Center), the niches in the Roche Library, and (this is more restricted) the lounges in the Bio building. For me, the main motivation of varying my study location and thus going to coffee shops is because I hate studying staring at a wall or in a location where everyone seems to be stressed out and doing work - thus, I try to find my own spaces and so far it’s been great =D</p>

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<p>How Flexible is course selection at MIT? (like is there a lot of bureaucratic red tape, or is registering for courses pretty liberal)</p>

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<p>Course selection is pretty easy - you preregister (which doesn’t really mean a whole lot), meet with your adviser on Reg Day, and they sign your course selection form and you turn it in. They’re pretty flexible about prerequisites and things, and it’s <em>really</em> easy to drop courses. But I’ve only gone through two terms of registration, so if anyone wants to weigh in…</p>

64

<p>^Right, and there are very few classes with limited enrollment. Those that are limited enrollment are often labs or other courses that need to stay small for materials/space reasons.</p>

<p>Registration Day is the day before classes start, but you don’t have to pick your final slate of classes until Add Date, which is about three weeks into term, so if you’re stuck between a couple of interesting classes, you can go to a few of them and pick after term starts. Drop Date, the last day you can drop a class, is usually about three weeks before the end of term. To add or drop classes, you just have to get your advisor’s signature and sometimes the signature of the class professor.</p>

<p>Nobody is going to stop you if you want to take a class without prereqs or want to take a grad class or something.</p>

65

<p>just curious why are most of the people answering prefrosh questions bloggers? Where are the other MIT students? now don’t get me wrong, I think its wonderful and very generous that you guys are giving up so much of your time to do this and I am grateful.</p>

66

<p>Almost all of the current bloggers were on CC before they were bloggers. Many of us were selected to be bloggers because of our posts on CC.</p>

<p>There are also a number of non-blogger current students here.</p>

67

<p>molliebatmit, I have a question for you. Thanks for your helpful comments on my previous “MIT or Princeton” thread. I have done CPW and Princeton Preview weekend and although I liked both schools a lot, I have to admit that MIT and Boston/Cambridge just seem more energizing to me. The weird thing was that the CPW sign said “Welcome Home” and that is exactly how I felt during CPW - that I had found my home. The one thing I was more impressed with at Princeton was the accessibility of professors and their focus on undergraduates. The physics and astrophysics departments at Princeton have very small classes with almost a 1:1 ratio professors: concentrators, and everyone does research with almost 50% physics majors getting published. At MIT are professors as willing to mentor the undergraduates or only a select few that really stand out? Are the freshman learning communities a good way to seek a smaller, possibly more nurturing community within MIT as well as close relationships with professors? I am really close to deciding in favor of MIT but this seems to be my biggest concern right now. Otherwise MIT seems like a perfect fit for me.</p>

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<p>Hey about study areas – how many places in MIT have CHALKBOARDS to study with!!! </p>

<p>That’s the primary requirement for me to get productive thought going. A whiteboard can work too. But it has to be basically all for me (+ whoever else is studying with me).</p>

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<p>I know the student center has a bunch of small rooms with whiteboard where students can study together. There is also a flat screen. It’s really high tech and nice.</p>

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<p>

Pebbles can speak for the physics department specifically, but in the biology department, every professor takes UROPs, and every professor teaches classes. There isn’t really a selection for the best and brightest undergrads, because that would be kind of pointless – everybody’s smart enough to contribute meaningfully to research, so professors are happy to take on undergraduate researchers.</p>

<p>I had great relationships with professors while I was at MIT, and professors were happy to meet with and talk with me when I sought them out. My interactions with faculty started during orientation, when a friend and I decided to walk around one of the main academic buildings (I think building 4) and knock on professors’ office doors and see if they would talk to us. The first guy whose door we knocked on invited us in, and we had a nice long chat with him.</p>

<p>Less randomly, I had a great relationship with my UROP professor, as well as relationships with other professors in my department who were invaluable in helping me get into graduate school. My husband used to go fly airplanes with his academic advisor.</p>

<p>Overall, I think MIT professors are very easily accessible if you’re willing to go chat with them.</p>

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<p>Dining plans can also get expensive.</p>

<p>If people can cook but don’t want to bother doing so every day, they can always organize a rotating cooking group with friends (e.g. six people, cooking in pairs, and each pair cooks dinner for the whole group of six twice a week, with one day that’s not covered by the cooking group). This is not an uncommon setup. Some living groups (French House and pika come to mind, though I’m sure there are others) have institutional versions of this that cover the whole living group and require any individual to cook even less often.</p>

<p>Really, there are so many options that dining should be a non-issue. You can get a dining plan (regardless of where you live) and eat in dining halls all the time. You can buy your food food-court-style at the various places that are all over campus. You can buy groceries and cook hot meals. You can buy groceries and fix meals that don’t require cooking (e.g. a big delicious juicy sandwich and some fresh fruit). You can set up an informal cooking group. You can live in a living group where there are formal cooking groups (or you can live somewhere else and get on the meal plan for such a living group - I know that pika, at least, will let you do this). You can live in a living group with a meal plan and house chef. You can order from CampusFood or go out to eat. You can mix and match these options as you see fit (I mostly combined fixing my own meals and food-court-style eating). It does not need to be inconvenient, expensive, or scary, and you’re not going to starve.</p>

<p>Also, if you become a student member of an Institute Committee (e.g. the Committee on Discipline), they will feed you really well, which I know from personal experience. :wink: Obviously, this is not a sustainable option, since you only get to take advantage of it infrequently, but I figured I’d mention it as a plug for representing the student body on Institute Committees.</p>

72

<p>Re: dining
You can get all kinds of free meals if you know where to look. Freshman year I got three free dinners a week, consistently. =)</p>

<p>Re: professors
What Mollie said. I haven’t had too much interaction with professors (only because it didn’t really interest me, I have no desire to go into academia and spent a lot of valuable time on extra-curriculars rather than research- to each his own) but I do have one awesome anecdote of my own to share. At the beginning of this semester I was looking for a thesis project, and I had no idea whatsoever about what I should do. I was totally lost. So I literally scanned through the research interests of every single professor in the MechE department and sent off an email to a few who listed some interesting things. One of them (a professor I had zero previous interaction with) wrote back to me and set up a meeting with him, basically just to chat. He told me straight away that he didn’t think that anyone in his group was doing anything that would be a good fit for what I wanted, but fully knowing that he still just took an hour out of his day to chat with me about what I was interested in, what my goals and background were, and suggested a handful of other professors I should contact.</p>

<p>I am still amazed at how unbelievably nice of him that was. I’m not sure <em>I</em> would go that far out of my way to help a lowly undergrad if I were a professor. =)</p>

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<p>You can just hijack one of the classrooms (especially the more cozy seminar type rooms that accomodate ~10 to 15 people) and study there. That’s what I do pretty often, actually, cuz I like the lighting in most of these seminar rooms =p</p>

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<p>One of my friends who competed in IPhO is absolutely brilliant and he actually bypassed most undergraduate physics classes (tested out over 1/2 of the regular undergrad curriculum) and is now taking mostly grad classes in Physics. He’s working in a lab for his UROP - except he’s listed on his lab’s website with the grad students, rather than the undergrads. He’s also getting published this semester (after 4 semesters here). </p>

<p>If you stand out, there’s no doubt that professors would be absolutely thrilled to work with you.</p>

<p>(even if you’re not, they still are too! i had no bio research experience AT ALL prior to coming to MIT and my first UROP adviser was so patient that he allowed me to work in his lab - starting from the ground up like how to set up a PCR, how to run a gel…etc. he was never too impatient to answer my questions even though (in retrospect, after having taken more bio classes) most of my questions were really elementary and pretty stupid…haha. true - i think most major core classes are huge, but once you get to a certain extent the classes start tapering down and you can always find your own mentoring relationship if you go out and look for it)</p>

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<p>Yes, per meal, the food courts are rather expensive. However, the total cost never reaches what the “suggested amount” people should spend on food or the semesterly cost of a meal plan at another university.</p>

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<p>“Yes, per meal, the food courts are rather expensive. However, the total cost never reaches what the “suggested amount” people should spend on food or the semesterly cost of a meal plan at another university.”</p>

<p>…Unless you are me :D</p>

76

<p>Any other last-minute questions? May 1 is creeping up on us.</p>

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<p>I committed already :)</p>

78

<p>Thanks for sharing your wisdom over the past few months. Son ultimately decided to go to Harvard, loved MIT and CPW but what it ultimately came down to was that MIT was going to cost us 25,000 more a year and we just didn’t want to incur the debt for undergrad when he had a good option. He still hope to apply to MIT for Grad school! Good luck to all in the coming year.</p>

79

<p>Hello all,</p>

<p>I recently visited both MIT and Princeton for their CPWs. I did not have the most engaging experience at MIT, but after going to Princeton, began to feel that MIT was more energetic and open, being located in a large city with easy access to almost everything. Princeton, however, did appeal to me; it seemed more balanced, had a good engineering department after all, and would have given me more opportunities had I realized that I did not want to be a pure science major. I would like to major in computer science, but I’m also interested in the arts and humanities (philosophy, literature, painting, whatnot), and I’m quite torn between the two schools. So a few questions:</p>

<ol>
<li>What humanities departments does MIT take pride in (or, are there any)?</li>
<li>How hefty should I expect the engineering courseload to be if I want to major in Course VI CS at MIT? Will I be able to pursue extracurricular activities/unrelated humanities classes?</li>
<li>Princeton likes to state that its professors are highly approachable; are MIT’s CS professors the same way?</li>
<li>How safe, really, is Cambridge/Boston? o_o</li>
</ol>

<p>Thank you very much,
-Kai</p>

80

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<p>No offense to you, since you meant it in good faith, but it hurts me to see comments like this about MIT. </p>

<p>OF COURSE MIT has good humanities departments! We have a top-caliber polisci department, the best* econ undergrad department in the nation (* this is according to the econ department), a very good linguistics department, and of course a rigorous foreign language and literature/writing program…this among many others like our strong music department as well, for example. </p>

<p>I have consistently taken more humanities classes than science classes here (this is my only semester taking more science than humanities) and I don’t think I’m getting a worse instruction in the humanities than my peers at Harvard or Wellesley. For example, I took Intro to Art History last semester and absolutely loved it. A good friend of mine at Wellesley was also taking their version of Art History during the same semester, and we were able to discuss overlapping topics fine without any significant gaps of knowledge or anything. </p>

<p>I think, if anything, the MIT humanities department might even have more to boast about since because the department sizes are small, you get to know professors well since you’ll probably have multiple classes with them. For example, I keep running into the same professors in my Spanish and Japanese classes, and it’s been great in that sense cuz you really get to know them better. Also, since there’s not as many humanities majors here, it’s easy to get recognition for your abilities in the humanities if you stand out and would like to be recognized.</p>

<p>I probably can write a paragraph about each humanities class I’ve taken here, since I’m quite satisfied with nearly every single one of them. Who says a Tech school is doomed to be deficient in the arts?</p>

<ol>
<li><p>I think a Course VI major can speak better to this than I can, but I think a large amount of this is how well you take MIT classes at the face value. For example, some students here breeze through the undergraduate curriculum, while others (like myself) have to spend a substantial effort in learning the material and preparing for classes. Pursuing extracurricular activities and taking other unrelated classes I think is all a matter of discipline and how you choose to balance your time. I think most majors at MIT are designed to finish in ~6-7 semesters if you take 4 classes per term (some more than others, depending on how many requirements you have for the major), so you have plenty of wiggle room to explore more fields. Of course, if you’re brilliant and can handle 6 or 7 classes for term, then that just opens you up to take a lot more other classes. (but even if you want to save some more time for extracurriculars, you can also choose to cut down on your classes and still be okay. I’m a bio major (the major is known to be not particularly requirements-heavy), but I still take 5-6 classes per term (half of them are not in the bio department). even this semester, when I’m taking only 4 classes, I just do more extracurriculars. it all balances out.)</p></li>
<li><p>MIT professors are definitely highly approachable if you just take the time to get to know them. I think a big mistake that many frosh make when they come here is that they sometimes get intimidated by the intro classes with 100+ students and never approach the professor or go to their office hours, but actually if you want to establish a relationship with a certain professor, chances are that professor would like the same with you too. For example, even this term, I emailed one of my professors in this big intro class I’m taking about something we’re learning about in class which came up in the news, and the professor actually responded with a lengthy email about what he thought of the news article and even invited me to come in and chat some more if I want. =D</p></li>
</ol>

<p>If you are into research, I think the MIT UROP program is an unparalleled research program that provides an opportunity to work closely under the supervision of an outstanding scientist in the field and most UROPers find the relationship they establish with their lab or the professor they work under to be very rewarding. For me, this has definitely been a big plus.</p>

<ol>
<li>Cambridge (especially around MIT), is very safe just due to the fact that it’s pretty well-lit and the Campus Police is quite diligent. I mean, occasionally there are incidents but it’s definitely not like UPenn where it’s like a constant fear or anything. I regularly walk back to the dorm from main campus at 3 or 4 in the morning and never felt threatened, so I think it’s fine. =D</li>
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