<p>As far as social engineering goes it’s hard to beat MIT’s Chocolate City…</p>
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<p>Just the opposite. With the administration’s mandate of recent years that all freshman must live on campus, many of the independent living groups aren’t filling their houses. The MIT’s Fraternity, Sorority, and Independent Living Group (FSILG) community is operating under constraints by seemingly insulated administration members that are orthogonal to the health of student off campus life.</p>
<p>^All that shows is that when given time to get established and make an informed choice, they end up choosing frats less often. In order to prevent this, the administration instituted Rush, literally to rush the students into making a worse choice. In organic chemistry, isn’t there a concept like this? If a reactant has two potential products, when you turn up the temperature and watch a compound transform into a less stable product.</p>
<p>In the past, they had a few days after arriving on campus to decide whether they ever wanted to be in a frat. </p>
<p>Also, I don’t really view frats as collections of free-thinking students; at best, it only represents the upper classmen’s best interests and not the freshmen. At worst, it is an institution which propogates itself through inertia rather than because it has an reason for being.</p>
<p>Isn’t the fact that a much higher percentage of MIT students are in Greek life fairly suggestive that institutional factors at MIT are favorable to FSILGs? Also the fact that the weekend before classes start is dedicated to rush events with virtually nothing else scheduled seems incredibly favorable to FSILGs. I also remember that some of the orientation programming basically said students who weren’t considering FSILGs were closed-minded. The administration also has fairly strong incentives to promote FSILGs as they are necessary to avoid severe housing shortages.</p>
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<p>That’s not how numbers work. Fraternities used to be able to fill up with 4 years’ worth of students. MIT has arbitrarily restricted this to 3 years. Fraternities now have to be more successful than they were previously to stay alive. It’s not that the recruiting is less successful, it’s that they are now required to get more people from 3 class years to fill up. </p>
<p>(Unless you have other stats to back up your data, but it sounded like you were responding to jpm50.)</p>
<p>This is an entirely different question than whether or not fraternities are good or not - but certainly, when about half of males at MIT join fraternities, I don’t think it’s a failing institution,</p>
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<p>Oh, ok, I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of how many beds were being occupied per year; rather, I was referring to the number of people who would sign up for the fraternity eventually.</p>
<p>^ In that case, I <em>think</em> that number has gone up. I’m not sure, though, and I don’t feel like digging around for stats >.></p>
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The work and stress can be overwhelming, and, amidst a group of talented and motivated peers, sometimes the ugly beginnings of imposter syndrome would creep into my head. Not unfrequently, I felt like 1) I wasn’t working hard enough and/or 2) I simply wasn’t smart from the start. Worst of all, I even had doubts about my career path. Was this really what I wanted to do, if I can barely score above average? Can I actually see myself doing this for the next 40-50 years of my life, happily and passionately?</p>
<p>That was the most hideous part for me. But, when taken into context, I realized almost EVERYONE had the same feelings of incompetence and loss of directionality at one point or another.</p>
<p>Some other bad points:
La Verde’s (campus convenience store) consistently overprices snacks, but desperation led me to becoming a regular there.<br>
Stress makes people a little cranky.<br>
Study room on the fifth floor of the student center always smells funky. :S
I know MIT brags about the building-number system (“so mathematically oriented!” but wow it makes no sense to me at all. To this day, I don’t know where building 36 is.</p>
<p>After listing all that bad, I will say that the best part of MIT was emerging as a different person. I am not who I was going in, and, after meeting people who genuinely love what they do, I better understand my own role in life.</p>