<p>I KNOW that MIT gives students super hard work....but I was wondering what the work is like. For example, I hear everyone talking/complaining about problem sets, are these like paper homework you have to turn in, or are they online homework sets (my school uses a program called LON-CAPA, an online homework program and we hate it...)? Also, I heard that you can't use calculators in math classes, is this true? If so why? What is the hardest major and why? Can anyone give me like an example of a typical load of homework that a freshman at MIT has? I'm just trying to gauge if MIT is even a place I'd like to be.</p>
<p>I think that the difficult part is to get in, then it’s a joke. If you get in you are qualified for that kind of school.</p>
<p>The problem sets are a mixture of paper homework and online stuff. I’m a freshman, and had a pretty typical courseload first semester (18.02, 8.01, 7.012, Humanities). The most time consuming were math psets, taking 8-10 hours per week. Physics took maybe 2-3 hours per week, and bio was maybe 4-5 hours. That workload is pretty managable if it’s only that, but usually there is something else, like a test or a humanities paper or something. As a freshman you can average maybe 7 hours of sleep a night, but I hear it goes down from there.</p>
<p>basically, if you get in, you are qualified, but by no means is it a joke.</p>
<p>It’s materially possible to do double major at MIT. Physics and CS ?</p>
<p>I hear you can also get a double minor too…I also heard that physics is one of the hardest majors. Physics is what I am most interested in, so I was just wondering what makes it so difficult. I haven’t heard anything about computer sci though…</p>
<p>The problem sets are time consuming - and it’s not that you have a lot of busywork to do, it’s that you really have to think and integrate theory. You can use calculators for your math homework, but you won’t find it useful. It’s not like high school homework where calculators can do most of the work. The problems aren’t set up this way. You are <em>pushed</em> to think.</p>
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<p>This is far from true for most students at MIT. The work here is <em>hard</em>.</p>
<p>IsaacM, MIT has open course ware, so you can take a look at the problem sets in various courses, and see for yourself. I agree completely with PiperXP.</p>
<p>just a quick question, how about the humanities classes? are they time consuming? or do the humanities professors know that the students will least prioritize the humanities classes and give less work?</p>
<p>^ Depends on the HASS class. Coming from a very humanities-based high school, I was quite pleased with the classes here. Take that as you will.</p>
<p>Granted, the workload can get hard, both because of the quality and quantity. However, I think it is highly dependent on how much you know about the material in the 1st place. If you are beast at ODE, you won’t find 6.002/6.003 too different (signals&circuits). If you did physics olympiad, 8.012/8.022 would be fairly trivial.</p>
<p>However, I think a lot of the pain here is self-inflicted. I know lots of people who take too many classes (6+), or who take classes they didn’t have the prereq’s for. Sometimes, it works out well, sometimes, they just get hosed all the time. People here tend to like challenges. What makes MIT hard is both the institute, but also personal choices.</p>
<p>BTW, I find the psets on OCW way, shorter than the ones I get… Not sure why for the discrepancy. Also, it seems the material gets harder over time, like exams from 2000 seem easier than 2008</p>
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<p>With due respect Piper…I think it’s perfectly reasonable to see utterly terrifying madness and start laughing and not stop through the four years.</p>
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<p>Well, I can tell you knowing lots of people doing engineering, maths and such at my school and similar ones, some common but different issues that come up are:</p>
<p>a) There’s just way too much to absorb in a short amount of time. One must internalize things before really working out the details. If you naturally think like the person who made up the problems, that’s not so bad. If not, good luck…</p>
<p>b) Material is unmotivated. I.e. it’s not all neat drills using the formulas, sometimes the biggest problem is why in heaven’s name would I ever care about this object, how does it relate to anything……and sometimes the problem there is just said object is something your buddy the professor loves thinking about and warps around in his/her head all day, so it’s the nicest example they could think of. And it so happens, lucky you, that they came up with the nightmare of your nightmares.</p>
<p>c) Too many details to check, and the work is tedious and not necessarily well synchronized with the class theme. Obviously it’s MIT, so it probably won’t be “busywork” in the sense of high school, but there are different definitions of “busywork,” some particular of which may be reasonable to insert here.</p>
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<p>Because in harmonic analysis, they teach you to integrate e^x sin(x) without a calculator. Terence Tao does that stuff. Look him up, he’s pretty good at maths…</p>
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<p>The hardest major is one you don’t like, so you avoid the work, and then end up doing it at the last minute, and then feel bad when you don’t do as well as you could.</p>
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<p>Like Piper, this depends on the exact humanities class, but you really should not get this idea ingrained in your mind. I know people who actually got Cs in their HASSes because of this kind of disregard.</p>
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<p>These are extremely good advice.</p>
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<p>I can tell you that I feel like in many biology classes the assignments and exams change notably in its composition from year to year, probably because as more discoveries are made they change the course to reflect the advances in science.</p>
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<p>I can’t attest for classes past 18.03 but the test questions are designed to be doable with basic arithmetic. Physics is designed so that you solve for everything in terms of variables rather than numbers, so there’s no number-crunching. The psets will sometimes require Matlab or a scientific calculator, though.</p>
<p>I think the thing that makes MIT hard is that it’s relentless. There is always work to do, it is always difficult, and you won’t always do well.</p>
<p>You don’t just need intelligence to get the work done, you also need mental toughness. I think that’s the part that most people struggle with. A lot of freshmen come to MIT having completely aced everything since preschool. If you fail a test, are you going to have a total breakdown, begin to doubt yourself, shrug off your other work, etc? Or are you the sort of person who will be able to put that behind them and move on to the next pset?</p>
<p>I don’t remember particularly being forbidden to use a calculator, but I don’t remember it being a problem either way. Like oasis said, often enough the problem asks you to solve for a particular variable, derive a certain equation, etc. It’s actually somewhat rare that an answer to a question will be an actual number, nevermind one that requires difficult calculation. </p>
<p>I remember one particularly long differential equations question that required you to take some function, do several complicated steps with it, convert to a complex number, do more complicated stuff, convert from one form to another and back, etc etc…and the answer was 4. To this day I am in awe of the TA who sat there and worked out the problem so that the answer was a single digit positive integer.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure what the OP meant by the statement that people couldn’t use calculators, but most advanced math is not computational. In number theory, you just do proofs. Same with group theory.</p>
<p>Math majors probably wouldn’t have much use for calculators.</p>
<p>^ It sort of depends what one means by “number theory” – in classical number theory, there could certainly be some computation. Using Minkowski bounds, for instance, when dealing with explicit examples. What people call modern number theory is of course mind-meltingly theoretical. A good professor would hopefully create examples that do not require heavy computation, even if they might show up when describing most examples in practice. The real computations are so hard they require their own programs anyway, a calculator would do nothing :D</p>