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<p>When the people who write for and publish USNWR are no longer ivy leaguers.</p>
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<p>Who cares? I’m starting to feel MIT is a two-way street, and especially MIT. The school chooses you, but you’ll also have to choose the school - otherwise, I don’t think 4 years here is worth it, honestly (especially all those IHTFP nights).</p>
<p>Let those who come truly seek to obtain enlightenment at the feet of Athena.</p>
<p>^ haha true lol</p>
<p>now a serious question : When I was at CPW, one of the brothers where I was hosted said that you can put in your resume that you joined a fraternity. How does it work?</p>
<p>How does what work?</p>
<p>The only thing that joining a fraternity might be good for is medical school, because they are paranoid about choosing people that like people. Maybe if you had leadership positions in it, then it might help you win the Rhodes Scholarship–assuming you had everything else.</p>
<p>Otherwise, putting a frat on your resume’ is worthless. </p>
<p>But don’t think you need to join a frat for you resume’, even for medical school. You are going to freaking MIT–if you do well, you’ll get any job you want. Being in a frat (and being, say, the president) may be a tip factor for medical school, but there are alternatives. You could just do student govt. in a dorm.</p>
<p>…don’t join a fraternity just because you think it might help you get into med school.</p>
<p>The frat brother you talked to was probably referring to leadership opportunities with the frat. After all, getting into the frat isn’t an impressive accomplishment at all, because it’s not really an accomplishment. It’s just where you chose to live. Since the frats are self-governed, there are a LOT of leadership opportunities. As mentioned, you could potentially be president, but there are also lots of other positions, like organizing your frat’s annual charity event, being in charge of coordinating chores, etc etc.</p>
<p>As I understand it, this is a benefit of frats at other schools. At MIT, however, the dorms are also very much self-governed. You can also be the president of your dorm, or in charge of some annual event it has, or in charge of coordinating the desk workers, or whatever. So in that sense, there isn’t much of a difference between the two, and it’s not a reason to pick one over the other.</p>
<p>I’ll also extend this to say that MIT as a WHOLE is very self-governed. There is no shortage of leadership opportunities. If you’re the kind of person who likes to take charge and get things done, you’ll have no problem finding the opportunities to do so.</p>
<p>I see…Thanks!</p>
<p>on average, how many Extracurricular activities such as organizations and associations do most people participate? Does joining a frat suck up a lot of time?</p>
<p>I’m not exactly an admitted person to MIT (a junior looking for next year), but I think my question could be answered in this thread.</p>
<p>I plan on doing chemical engineering, but I also have a passion for politics. Is there any way I could combine the two into some sort of potential major/minor and eventual job opportunity?</p>
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<p>the short answer would be YES. but I’m still a prefroshie so I’ll let the mods do the explanation if you need any.</p>
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<p>Well, the time commitments for EC’s vary widely, so the average number of EC’s is not really a useful statistics.</p>
<p>Frats suck up a lot of time during pledging, which lasts a semester. </p>
<p>Varsity sports are very time consuming. Generally, it’s a couple of hours a day, at least. And it’s really frowned upon to miss practice. Lots of people do intramurals, and you basically can go whenever you want. </p>
<p>Other EC’s, like writing for the newspaper, can be done at your leisure. Whenever you feel like writing for the Tech, you can just submit an article. </p>
<p>Most EC’s are more relaxed than varsity sports.</p>
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<p>Sure, we have a top 10 Political Science program and you could minor in it. As you might imagine, MIT’s strength in poli. sci. is quantitative analysis. </p>
<p>I’m not sure what job opportunity you are looking for, but certainly a chem E major from MIT would be in excellent position to get a Washington DC internship in science policy at the NIH or NSF.</p>
<p>To add to the discussion of which ECs take up how much time:</p>
<p>There are also performing arts groups which either take up a lot of time, all the time (notably a capella groups) or lots of time, some of the time (theater groups, where if you find yourself with a heavy courseload one semester you can choose not to participate in that semester’s production, for example.)</p>
<p>There’s also variability within the groups. For example, you can write an article for The Tech every couple of weeks, or you can become the news editor and spend 2 nights every week working in the office from 5 PM - 1 AM getting the next issue ready before the deadline. You can play varsity sports for a min of 2 hrs/day, or you can show up for intramurals when you feel like it, or you can be the captain of your intramural team and be the one harassing everyone else to show up, or you can be on the IM board and coordinate the entire league’s schedule (in addition to playing and refereeing some games). If you love journalism but are just into sports to get some exercise every once in awhile, you can be news editor at The Tech and show up for IM soccer when your dorm’s team is short a few players.</p>
<p>Also, while it’s not useful to give any averages of “number of ECs MIT students participate in” or “amount of time dedicated to ECs per week” or “amount of time dedicated to any particular EC,” I will say that we do tend towards the maximum. =) It’s true that MIT students don’t get much leisure time, but we plan it that way. We fill up our otherwise free time with either more classes, sports, jobs (including those just to earn a few bucks, like desk worker, or those to improve your resume, like a UROP), clubs, student government, etc. People just mix and match from those categories in a way that suits them. For better or worse, MIT-type people are not really into sitting around relaxing.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
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<p>does this mean that ppl don’t show up? lol</p>
<p>are IM’s scheduled 5-7 as well?</p>
<p>Haha, usually what happens is that people like the IDEA of intramurals more than the thing itself. So when you’re trying to put together a team, half of your floor says, “Yeah, I love softball/basketball/soccer, I’ll play!” But then when the games actually roll around, everyone has a pset that night or a test the next day or a club meeting in 20 minutes…or “wait, today’s THURSDAY?”</p>
<p>IMs are usually later in the evening or Saturday mornings. They are definitely not scheduled from 5-7 during the week, because two important things are unavailable during those times: athletes and athletic facilities. I don’t think there’s any particular rule against it, but no one would plan it that way.</p>
<p>What is the average amount of sleep an MIT student gets?</p>
<p>How competitive is MIT (among students)? I’ve heard stories of people tearing out pages in books and other nasty things this to hurt their peers and help themselves. Is this still apparent? If not, why not? What has changed? What used to be the reason MIT was so cut-throat?</p>
<p>What don’t you like about MIT? (Please don’t be a politician here)</p>
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I can’t tell you the average amount of sleep all students get, but I can tell you the average amount I got: 6.7 hours on weekdays, 9.4 on the weekends. (Many more detailed stats [here](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/mollieb/Public/Sleep%20Statistics.pdf]here[/url]”>http://web.mit.edu/mollieb/Public/Sleep%20Statistics.pdf)</a>.) That was as a double major with a UROP, one major extracurricular activity, and a boyfriend. </p>
<p>People can choose to get more sleep than that, or less sleep. It’s all about the number of classes you choose to take and the number of activities to which you choose to commit yourself.</p>
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I’ve never heard stories like that about MIT (and I graduated four years ago). I don’t know if any of the older alums around here have stories like that – I have never heard them.</p>
<p>MIT is, and as far as I know, always has been, a very collaborative place. My hypothesis is that this is fostered by large numbers of freshmen taking the same classes – everybody quickly figures out that the best way to get through problem sets is to gather in somebody’s room or hallway or lounge and order food and puzzle through the work together.</p>
<p>It’s also fostered, I think, by the difficulty of the curriculum. It’s only reasonable to try to screw up other people’s performance if homework and tests are easy, because then you’re trying to keep everybody from getting a perfect score and blowing the curve. At MIT, the work is difficult enough that basically nobody is getting perfect scores, so it’s much more reasonable to help people with the assumption that they’ll help you back. </p>
<p>“Cut-throat” is not a word I would ever use to describe MIT, either now or in the past.</p>
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I don’t like the auto-stereotyping that people often do when they find out I’m an alum. I am not amused by the assumption that all MIT students are [insert stereotype here], because it’s both false and impossible to combat on a large scale. There is nothing that all MIT students are, other than MIT students.</p>
<p>Thanks for the quick response (and I’m amazed at how specifically you answered my first question). You missed my 3rd question though.</p>
<p>In regards to your answer to my second question, I definitely feel my conversations at CPW with current students were consistent with your response. However, the two teachers that I have talked to at my school both know MIT to be super competitive (although their impressions are probably >20 years old). Any input on the validity of their dated ideas would be helpful.</p>
<p>I can’t speak to the validity of your two teachers’ “dated ideas.” Were they once students at MIT? Or are they just spouting old rumors? All I can say is that I’ve known about 7 individuals who attended MIT during the late sixties and early seventies, and each of them has described MIT as collaborative, not competitive.</p>
<p>My daughter and her friends, who are now students at MIT, describe the school as very collaborative, not competitive. Students frequently study together; I’ve never heard anything like what you’ve described.</p>
<p>My brother-in-law attended MIT from 1969 to 1973, and he saved every issue of The Tech, the student newspaper. When my daughter was admitted, he presented her with the entire set, and we read through some of these. As a historian, I was especially interested, and I probably read far more issues than she did. Since she went to MIT in the fall of 2007, I have read every issue of the Tech from then to now, so I now have some basis for comparison: MIT now, and MIT then. I think MIT is surprisingly similar in culture, but some things have changed. There are more females, and there’s now a greater emphasis on the life sciences. But students talked about study groups working together on p-sets back in the 1970s (which I assume is well before you were born). </p>
<p>I mean really, the key thing is not what happened at MIT back in the day; the key thing is whether you can see yourself there today.</p>
<p>At those dorms that allow smoking in rooms only (like Random), are there a lot of smokers? Does the smell drift into the halls? Do people break the rules and smoke in lounges?</p>
<p>I don’t really care if people smoke, I just don’t want them to smoke in my face.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>I’m an even more recent alum than Mollie, so I can’t really speak to what MIT “used to be like,” but I have also never heard anything about it being competitive. And there are enough older alums around to hear stories from- my freshman roommate’s dad was an alum, and when he came to visit during Family Weekend in October of frosh year he told us stories about his days. In fact, his sleep schedule was thrown off by reverse jet lag (coming from CA and thinking it was 3 hours earlier than it really was) so he stayed up past midnight helping us with our calc pset, and commented on how it reminded him of his own time at MIT. (He graduated in the 70s.)</p>
<p>Not to criticize your teachers too much, but I have a feeling they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s easy to imagine how people who aren’t actually familiar with MIT might hypothesize that it’s a competitive place just because it’s such a prestigious school full of really smart people. Maybe they think that students must have been really competitive in high school in order to get in, and remain that way after they enroll. Neither of these things is true, but I can easily see how people might believe them. But nothing I’ve ever heard about MIT, good or bad, has ever suggested that it was a competitive place.</p>
<p>“What don’t you like about MIT?” is a difficult question to answer, because it often has the same answer as “what do you like about MIT?” MIT is like a very sharp double-edged sword. Sometimes you might like the intensity of it, and sometimes the intensity of it really wears you down/drives you crazy/makes you angry/makes you miserable/whatever. But I wouldn’t ever say that I disliked the intensity, because on the whole I think it has a net positive contribution to the experience. Even the times when it makes you miserable, in retrospect, are important learning experiences, I think. I hope you don’t think this is a “politician’s” answer, because I’m really being very honest. This is a well-documented phenomenon among MIT students. However much you might love MIT, you do have to be sort of willing to be miserable sometimes. =)</p>