<p>Oh, absolutely – that’s why people come to MIT from such a wide range of academic backgrounds!</p>
<p>Each applicant is considered in the context of his or her high school and the opportunities available.</p>
<p>Breakfast</p>
<p>Most current MIT students I talk to say they either have a light breakfast or do not eat breakfast at all. I’ve been told all my life that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. also in this article here : [Breakfast</a> is the Most Important Meal of the Day - Don’t Skip Breakfast](<a href=“http://nutrition.about.com/od/nutrition101/a/breakfast.htm]Breakfast”>How to Make a Healthy Breakfast for Weight Loss)</p>
<p>Could anyone weigh in on this?</p>
<p>My financial aid package will likely have work study in it. What kind of hours would you work in school… after classes? on weekends?
Also are there good jobs besides UROPs, I imagine UROPs would be hard to get into.</p>
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<p>UROPs are pretty easy to get, actually. Additionally, there are a bunch of on-campus work-study jobs (that are specifically reserved for work study) that you could apply for. You would work whatever hours you’d want to work, provided that your selected job was okay with it 
Most professors / supervisors have the attitude that you’re a student first, and so they are pretty flexible regarding hours.</p>
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I usually keep some fast things around my room - I prefer sleeping in to making an elaborate breakfast each morning. However, I definitely know people who prefer breakfast to sleep. It’s up to you.</p>
<p>S accepted his MIT offer last night. Thank you all–students, parents, and admissions staff–for helpful comments over the last few weeks. We are very very happy! :)</p>
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What do you eat for breakfast now? Whatever that is, you can continue eating it at MIT. </p>
<p>I usually ate cereal or oatmeal for breakfast in my room when I was in college, or maybe a muffin if I had time to stop at LaVerde’s. There are several places around campus that sell breakfast sandwiches or burritos (Cosi, Anna’s, LaVerde’s, Dunkin Donuts), so if you want something more substantial, those options are available.</p>
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It’s typical (though not universal) to work about 5-10 hours a week for a non-research job, such as being a desk worker at a library, MIT office, or dorm. This is one or two hours a day, and is totally manageable – remember that you won’t be in class nearly as much in college as you were in high school.</p>
<p>UROPs aren’t difficult to get, but often they logistically require a bigger time commitment than non-research jobs. I went from working 6 hours a week at the foreign language library freshman year to 12 hours a week at my UROP sophomore year, which was a big bump, but which was necessary if I wanted to get anything done research-wise.</p>
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Congratulations! :)</p>
<p>Re: breakfast. I lived in a dorm with kitchens, but my breakfast routine would have been possible with even a mini fridge and a toaster. I usually had a bowl of cereal and some orange juice, or maybe frozen waffles or toast with fruit jam if I had a little more time in the morning. I never understood people who don’t eat breakfast. I’m always starving by 10 unless I’ve eaten something. That said, people who don’t want to eat breakfast, don’t, and people who do, do. I don’t believe the dining halls are open for breakfast, so you won’t be able to eat an omelette with sausages and homemade pancakes with fruit or something elaborate unless of course, you’re enough of a morning person to be able to get up and make it for yourself. Welcome to the real world. =)</p>
<p>Re: work-study. In addition to UROPs, there are other jobs available to students which I will break into two categories: thinking and non-thinking. By this I mean there are lots of jobs that are available which don’t require you to do much or use your brain, but are good for making some extra cash or spending time doing homework. You can be a deskworker in your dorm or at a library, for example. But there are also somewhat academic opportunities that aren’t UROPs. For example, I worked as a math and science tutor at a local Cambridge high school (good money to be had there, if you’re eligible for work-study, otherwise it’s volunteer) and as a computing consultant at IS&T. (You can read about it here: [MIT</a> Admissions | Blog Entry: “Making money: my campus job”](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/finaid/student_employment/making_money_my_campus_job.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/finaid/student_employment/making_money_my_campus_job.shtml)) There are a handful of other “thinking” jobs available as well. You might have to look a little harder, but if you’re not really into research, you can usually find a job writing code for someone or doing organizational stuff and event planning for some department or something like that.</p>
<p>What happens if you end up not doing work-study, or if your parents may be able to pay the amount of work study. Is it compulsory?</p>
<p>No, you don’t have to have a job on campus if there’s work-study in your financial aid package. And the amount that’s listed in your financial aid package is just an estimate – you get paid for the amount you actually work.</p>
<p>But it’s pretty normal to have a job of some sort at MIT. Even if you don’t help your parents pay for your education, you can cover your own expenses like food, clothes, and entertainment. I graduated from college with a nice nest egg in my savings account that I’d earned myself.</p>
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<p>What kinds of high schoolers do they make in the factories these days…</p>
<p>High school timings sucked. Breakfast is so much easier to come by in college, just stalking up on a few things like bread, butter, oatmeal, etc. Can’t imagine it being impossible to eat something simple daily.</p>
<p>Whoever ate aforementioned elaborate meals in high school…shush you.</p>
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<p>Dining seemed to be a big complaint of students. Can anyone comment on this?</p>
<p>I’m not really concerned about breakfast as I never really had it during HS, but as for the other two meals, what do students do? I understand that there’s the student center, but I don’t want to be going there every single day to eat. Students cook, but isn’t that time consuming?</p>
<p>It seems like the lack of centralized dining halls takes a lot of the social and “college” experience out of it, not to mention the fact that it’s one fewer option for students to have.</p>
<p>^ Meh, I survive. I don’t find my combination of cooking/going to my ILG for dinner/buying food to be overwhelming. </p>
<p>Why would it take the social or “college” feel out of it? I still eat with my friends - and my main way of socializing is, er, doing fun things with extracurriculars or with my living group or whatnot.</p>
<p>If you want to eat in dining halls for dinner every weeknight, you can absolutely do that at MIT – you can choose to live in a dorm with a dining hall, for one, or you can just go eat there each night even if you live in a different dorm. I don’t think not having a single centralized dining hall reflects a narrowing of choices.</p>
<p>Any food option can be time-consuming or not, depending on how you go about it. Cooking for myself when I was in college took much less time than going to one of the dining halls for dinner, since I would start something cooking and be able to do stuff in my room while it was going, or else make something big on the weekend and eat it for dinner all week. In contrast, going to a dining hall for me inevitably meant taking about an hour away from work. </p>
<p>Like Piper, I ate with my friends every night – many nights, a few of us would cook together, and we would always eat dinner in the floor lounge while watching TV/socializing/psetting. </p>
<p>Ultimately, you get to choose how you want to go about eating at MIT. I think that’s a huge advantage over most other schools – students at most schools do not have fond words for their dining halls, where they must eat every day, even if they don’t want to, or essentially kiss $15+ per day goodbye. I would not have wanted mandatory centralized dining at MIT, and I am fascinated by the terrible stories my graduate school classmates tell about dining at their undergraduate schools.</p>
<p>I’m down to two colleges - Harvard and MIT.</p>
<p>What scares me about MIT is the lack of meal plan and the feeling I got at CPW that students pretty much hold to small groups of friends in their dorms. </p>
<p>Any input on Harvard vs MIT in general, or on those specific things? (Sorry this is such a general question).</p>
<p>re: the meal plan, yeah, it’s kind of scary. I ate a lot of ramen the first few months before I learned to cook, but now I impress my friends and family when I go home with my awesome culinary skills. Alternatively, some weeks, I eat a lot of student center food. It’s kind of nice to not be constrained to either losing my money or eating in the same place each night - my fridge / kitchen don’t close at eight for the night. And, of course, there’s always Foodler.</p>
<p>Where did you stay over CPW? I think that it definitely varies from person to person and from dorm to dorm. People do tend to live in places where they feel comfortable and end up being pretty close to their hallmates, so it makes sense that your host would be close friends with the people around him or her. I live with my closest friends (probably also a product of seeing each other every day), but I have friends all over campus that I see on a regular basis. MIT students probably aren’t as antisocial as you think :)</p>
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<p>There are actually now dining halls open every night of the week, including weekends. I think this is a new thing for this year though.</p>
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<p>For lunch you can pack a lunch, or there are all the places in the Student Center to eat (5, plus LaVerde’s, the convenience store), but there’s also the Steam Cafe, Bio Cafe, Cafe 4, and something in Stata that all have food, and there’s food trucks and a few places in Kendall Square. For dinner, again, there are dining halls every day, plus the Student Center and Kendall Square.</p>
<p>And honestly, I don’t see what the big deal is with cooking. There are a lot of people that cook, I’m sure you can too.</p>
<p>Baker dining is open 7 days a week, and it is not new this year. I believe the other dining halls take 1-2 days off.</p>
<p>As for your feeling that most students only have a few friends in their dorm, I just have to flat out disagree. Sure, some people are more antisocial than others and will be in that situation, but they don’t make up the majority. That is not to say that you won’t have friends in your dorm, actually MIT hopes your have friends in your dorm and thats why the housing system is the way it is. But generally I have found that you just spontaneously meet many people from your classes, clubs, sports, fraternity/sorority, etc.</p>
<p>That said, the more important question is if you felt comfortable with the environment at MIT, which includes feeling comfortable with the people here.</p>
<p>Re: dining. I’m honestly not sure that you can rely on the impression that “a lot” of students are unhappy with dining. Yes there have been a lot of protests and anger about it, but you also have to put that in the context of a school with a strong…I’ll call it a counterculture movement. This is very hard to understand unless you’ve lived there, and nearly impossible to explain. At the risk of getting “political” and possibly annoying some current or former MIT students on this forum, you might say that those making all this racket about dining are a very vocal minority, and in fact, The Tech ran an article recently about how the vast majority of the students complaining about proposed dining plans don’t actually live in dorms with dining halls. At the risk of really annoying people, I might even venture to say that a lot of those people just like having something to complain about. I’m not saying the dining system is perfect or even great, or that there’s not discontent in the student body about it, but the public impression you got about it may not be exactly representative.</p>
<p>As for the dining system itself, I believe it is pretty much accepted as fact that you will lose money with the “Preferred Dining Plan.” With this plan, you pay a flat fee up front per semester, and then receive half off your meals in the dining halls for that whole semester. In some dorms the plan is optional, in some it is not, but in all cases you need to pretty much literally eat every meal in the dining hall in order to just break even. But the only thing that effectively means is that the price you pay per meal is higher than advertised. Does that mean it’s unreasonable, or more expensive than what you would pay for a dining plan at another school? I personally have absolutely no idea, but you just need to figure that out and then decide what you think about it for yourself.</p>
<p>I never set foot in a dorm dining hall during my 4 years at MIT, and I survived. For lunch I normally ate what I would have eaten in high school- a sandwich. That doesn’t exactly take much time to prepare. Like Mollie, I would also often make a large plate of something and then have leftovers for several days in a row. I probably only cooked every other night or so. And of course, sometimes if I was busy I would grab food at the Student Center or eat some kind of microwavable meal or something.</p>
<p>Re: socializing within your dorm. First off, I don’t see how having groups of friends in your dorm is anti-social. Staying locked in your room without any human contact is anti-social. Because of the way the housing system is set up, yes, students form close relationships with people who live near them. I see this as a benefit more than anything- after all, these are the people you’re going to be seeing the most, spending the most time with, and sharing your living space with. If I could only get along well with one group of people at MIT, that’s the group I would pick. But of course there’s no such rule. Students often socialize with members of their athletic team, clubs and activities, or study groups. Yes, there are people who only hang out in their dorm, but there are also people who almost NEVER hang out in the dorm. Most, of course, fall somewhere in the middle. Just because social groups that revolve around living groups are probably the most prominent sort of social group at MIT, doesn’t mean they’re the ONLY one.</p>
<p>book_worm, Harvard is one of the schools I’m talking about when I say that I am fascinated by the horror stories I hear about dining elsewhere.</p>
<p>So, sure, Harvard has a meal plan and dining halls. But the dining halls are only open certain hours, and while MIT specifically forbids scheduling classes between 5pm-7pm so students can eat/participate in sports/etc., Harvard doesn’t. So the undergrad who works with me in the lab sometimes has class while the dining hall is open and doesn’t make it back to his dorm for dinner. This means that he’s wasted the ~$10 each dinner costs him upfront, plus that he has to buy food from somewhere in Harvard Square, because his dorm doesn’t have kitchens. </p>
<p>I guess I don’t see how a system like that is a step up from MIT’s system, which is more like the real world. If my undergrad lived at MIT, he a) wouldn’t have class the whole time the dining hall is open, b) could grab dinner at the student center without losing money he already paid upfront, and c) could cook for himself if he so desired.</p>