What if interests change? Liberal arts at MIT?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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<p>I am the parent of an admitted student who loves MIT and like our daughter we fell in love with the school when we visited. </p>

<p>But we would greatly appreciate input from students and alums at MIT on the following question: What if our daughter decides that she doesn't want to be an engineer? What if she decides that she wants to study religion, or psychology, or literature, et cetera. She's 17. The typical undergraduate changes their major several times in college. Her brother was going to major in physics; he's majoring in international relations and studying Arabic.</p>

<p>I know that MIT has excellent programs outside of science and math. But what about the opportunity costs? If you are a poli sci or psych major at MIT, don't you have a lot fewer opportunities to take courses in your field because of all the required courses in STEM?</p>

<p>Also, if you aren't a STEM major, do you feel like a fish out of water? Is there a sufficient community of students in these other majors to feel like you have a critical mass of people who share your passion? I was looking at the INVALUABLE December 7, 2012 issue of the MIT newspaper, The Tech, on pressure and stress at MIT (every admittee and parent should at least look at this: <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V132/PDF/N59.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://tech.mit.edu/V132/PDF/N59.pdf&lt;/a> ). I was astonished to see that the number of engineering students who responded to The Tech survey was 678; the number of respondents for all of Humanities, Arts and Social Scients was 30. Where can we get data on how many people graduate with majors in each HASS subject area? Is the ratio of engineering majors to humanities majors really 20 to 1? </p>

<p>Like all the other admittees, our daughter has been accepted at other excellent schools. If she goes to Michigan or Berkeley we know that she can decide to be a theater major or study Hindi or just about any topic and have a substantial group of people who share her passions. What about at MIT?</p>

<p>PS -- A BIG "Thank You!" to Molliebatmit, MITChris and the other members of the MIT CC community. Your posts have been an invaluable resource throughout this process.</p>

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<p>I was accepted to MIT’s class of 2017. I received a call from a current senior asking me if I had any questions. One of my questions was about the strength of humanities at MIT and whether or not it was as limited as most people thought. Ironically, he was very interested in the humanities and said that professors in these disciplines are very friendly and you get to know them on a more personal level, especially if you do UROP. He also was a Burchard Scholar in which sophomores and juniors at MIT are chosen to attend a series of eight dinner seminars throughout the year that present leading edge research from MIT’s humanities, arts, and social science disciplines. Past seminars include one on Roman history, Chinese culture, and another on the history and value of magic. His input definitely changed my view about humanities at MIT. They may be known for science and technology, but they definitely understand that undergraduates have multiple interests across many disciplines. And even though MIT has a more limited selection of classes, such as languages, undergraduate students can take courses at nearby Harvard.</p>

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<p>Current enrollment statistics are here [Enrollment</a> Statistics: MIT Office of the Registrar](<a href=“Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar”>Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar). Degrees and double majors can be found here [Enrollment</a> Statistics: MIT Office of the Registrar](<a href=“Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar”>Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar) and here [Enrollment</a> Statistics: MIT Office of the Registrar](<a href=“Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar”>Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar). The ratio of engineering to HASS depends considerably on how you count. If you include all students then you get a ratio of close to 20 to 1 while if you look at where people end up and include double majors it might be like 8 to 1. </p>

<p>Another thing to consider is that MIT’s strength among HASS fields varies widely. MIT is one of the best places to study economics as an undergraduate (close to 1/2 of HASS majors are econ). Political science isn’t as good as econ but is a full department with an excellent graduate program. Although I disagree with the claim that MIT is better than Harvard for undergrad political science, it is still a pretty good choice. Linguistics, philosophy, architecture, and urban studies are other excellent departments. The Media Lab and comparative media studies (CMS) do great work in humanitiesish areas (CMS claims to be “applied humanities”). The above fields have the vast majority of HASS majors as well (technically architecture and urban studies aren’t HASS but they are close enough for our purposes). However in many other fields the situation is far less rosy. A number of fields including sociology, religious studies, and classics are simply not taught. Psychology is part of the Brain and Cognitive Science department. Offerings in other fields vary from minimal to pretty good. There are also typically very majors in these fields so there may not be as much of a sense of community.</p>

<p>As to the required STEM courses most of those are taken in freshmen year so if someone comes to MIT and decides after freshmen year they don’t have to take lots more STEM classes which is similar to other situations where students in STEM decide they want to do something else after freshmen year.</p>

<p>I think another important thing to consider is that students who may have switched to non-STEM fields at other schools may stay in STEM at MIT. Partially this is because MIT doesn’t weed people out of STEM for obvious reasons and another reason is that the path of least resistance at MIT is through STEM. If most of your friends are in STEM you’re much more likely to stick with it as well.</p>

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<p>To answer your question, there are humanities majors at MIT, but most of those are people who double-majored in science and engineering.</p>

<p>The required classes are almost all the first year, so if your daughter intends on majoring in science initially, she will probably take them the first year anyway. There may be another lab class requirement or something, but pretty much that’s it for the required STEM classes.</p>

<p>I was very into humanities, and it doesn’t feel like a liberal arts atmosphere. You might feel like a fish out of water. I took a lot of lit classes. While they were good classes, the breadth of classes is not as much as at a place with more people who have a humanities field as a primary major. Some of my professors had taught at places like Oxford before. There are a couple of Pullitzer Prize winners, I believe–one in writing, another in music. </p>

<p>It’s true you can supplement them with Harvard classes. I knew someone who was adamant about taking all their language classes at Harvard because they were more rigorous (although I think our language classes are still good too.) One advantage of taking humanities at MIT is that they are generally more based on your own analysis and less on research–that is, finding a bunch of sources and citing them. Trying to find your own insights is what I think is at the heart of humanities rather than cobbling together other people’s points of view. More “serious” humanities programs may emphasize research more.</p>

<p>Music is absolutely top notch as a major at MIT–nothing to worry about there. Also, I know people who were poli sci majors and went on to become professors in that field at major research universities–it is a respected department.</p>

<p>Sometimes people think of economics as a humanities; I do not, but I’ll just note that we have arguably the #1 department in the world in economics. We don’t have psychology, but our cognitive science major is quite strong. It is more science-based than psychology at other places, but you have flexibility in your emphasis. I don’t know the extent of offerings in more traditional psych subjects like humanism or Jungian psychology. </p>

<p>While you can’t major in theater, I have heard that it is easier for people to participate in plays and other artistic things at MIT than at places which recruit for such people. There is less competition, less rigidity. Though not a major, if you want to write for the paper (The Tech), it’s not that hard to do so. Also, there’s an MIT alum who writes for Forbes who started his own independent paper at MIT while a student. In comparison, at Harvard it’s cutthroat to make the staff at the Crimson.</p>

<p>Obviously our linguistics department is strong with Noam Chomsky on its faculty, but I don’t remember linguistics classes. </p>

<p>I think if you enjoy the quantitative feel/slant of the campus atmosphere, then life as an MIT humanities major could be rewarding, depending on the major.</p>

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<p>I forgot to mention that architecture is excellent to–a top 5 department.</p>

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<p>I fully agree with the points UMTMYP and collegealum have made here. There are options, good options, outside of science and engineering at MIT, and those departments, while generally small, are not devoid of majors. And there are a lot of people at MIT who have a strong interest in, say, music, or history, they just aren’t majoring in it, so the number of majors in a given department doesn’t necessarily reflect the number of people on campus who are passionate about that subject.</p>

<p>Overall, my opinion is that MIT is not the best choice for someone who is really unsure about what majors he or she might want to pursue. I don’t mean that you have to be 110% committed to a single field in order for MIT to be a good choice for you, but, on the other end of the spectrum, people who come in with no idea whatsoever what they might want to major in often find MIT a challenging place to be.</p>

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<p>Thanks for these comrehensive and thoughtful replies – very helpful!</p>

<p>To be clear, our daughter wants to be an engineer. She is deeply involved in FIRST Robotics, has done research and internships with the Engineering departments of two local universities, is participating in the Nat’l Youth Science Camp this summer, etc. So this is more a parent’s “what if?” question than a product of any uncertainty on our daughter’s part.</p>

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<p>As MIT admissions always says to admitted students, MIT doesn’t make mistakes. Your daughter will almost certainly thrive at MIT, and part of that is choosing a major (STEM or otherwise) that she loves.</p>

<p>That said, MIT doesn’t really to turn anyone off to engineering ;)</p>

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<p>

A bold claim. And not really relevant to this discussion either.</p>

<p>

I don’t think this is quite true. Looking at the enrollment stats there seems to be a mild trend of students switching from engineering to science or humanities across their time at true. It is certainly true that attrition in engineering at MIT is far less than at most engineering schools or at schools like Harvard.</p>

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<p>“A bold claim. And not really relevant to this discussion either.”</p>

<p>It’s not my claim – it’s on the admissions blogs “Admitted” open discussion, which seems to be closed or hidden now. But I only felt it was relevant because MIT admissions selected Washdc’s daughter because she is likely to be happy and fulfilled at MIT, regardless of her major.</p>

<p>Edit: For instance, a student who was clearly going to be unhappy without a major in, say, ancient Greek would not be happy at MIT. But it’s likely that the admitted students have a strong interest in math/science/STEM that will not disappear, and their other interests will be satisfied by MIT as well.</p>

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<p>To be clear I think the vast majority of MIT students will end up happily majoring in STEM. However, that doesn’t preclude the existence of a small minority who would have been happier going to another college with more diverse offerings.</p>

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<p>Another possibility for your D is that she may stay in a STEM major but really want some good humanities classes. </p>

<p>Although it been a long time since I graduated, I enjoyed and got a lot out of the the humnaities classes I took. I took classes in architechture, photography, economics (including a class on the socialist movement in the US), politics, etc. </p>

<p>You really can have the best of both worlds at MIT.</p>