<p>
[quote]
Students with big egos and little resilence will get utterly destroyed here very fast.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Another group that will get utterly destroyed are the people who have nothing to fall back on in order to preserve their self-esteem and sanity when they start to struggle - no friends to turn to, no hobbies/interests outside their chosen academic subject in which they can take pride, nothing that they can cling to so that they can see their struggles from a distance, or that will take them outside of the intensity of their experience for at least a couple of hours so that they can refuel. You NEED some foundation from which you can develop coping mechanisms.</p>
<p>Actually, rereading through this thread reminds me anew about the utter pointlessness of most "chance me" threads. </p>
<p>People list scores, and extracurricular triumphs without usually identifying anything that might give a picture of the match. The question that is answerable is "Is this person good enough to be considered"? The question which there isn't enough information to answer is "Is this person likely to get in?" Sigh....</p>
<p>Multiple posts with some questions, all related to this thread, follow.</p>
<p>There seem to be three principal reasons being advanced for MIT to consider a persons group interactions in admissions:</p>
<p>1) Work at MIT (and later on) requires people to solve problems together
2) A student needs to rely on friends when academics go badly, as they probably will from time to time
3) (implicit) MIT wants students who will be there for other students, when their friendship is needed.</p>
<p>Reasons 1) and 3) seem valid to me. Joint problem-solving is part of functioning well in science/engineering. Being thoughtful and attentive to others is a matter of character, and even more important than reason 1), in my opinion. Im not sure that either of these correlates so strongly with being gregarious in a typical high-school environment, though.</p>
<p>Reason 2) does not seem valid to me, as long as a person meets criterion 3). I dont doubt that academics will go badly at some time for almost everyone at MIT, with personalized definitions of badly; and I dont doubt that for many or most, relying on friends is the best solution. But I think that people are entitled to seek their consolation wherever they find it. I wouldnt rule out solitary activities, including composing music, playing music, writing or reading poetry, photography, art, spiritual outlets, or even just gazing at the Charles.</p>
<p>Some people do respond successfully to work-related problems with more work. I recall a math prof remarking once that he had great difficulty with a math course in grad schoola more advanced version of the one he was teaching. In fact, he was failing the grad course at first. I started laughing, since it was clear how it had turned out; but he stopped me, saying, This was serious. This was my life. He reacted by working more; and for inexplicable reasons, understanding dawned. Im not denying that one needs to go off topic from time to time to re-awaken creative insight; but it makes a difference whether one truly loves the subject, or just loves the sensation of being good at it.</p>
<p>Bertrand Russell once wroteconcerning his student days, I thinkthat he had never experienced a day that couldnt be made appreciably better by the unexpected offer of a chocolate cream. I note that he must have had at least one friendleft implicitdoing the offering. </p>
<p>^^ ashyLOL: If I were an MIT applicant circa 2007, Id stress the friend, and not the chocolate cream, metaphorically speaking.</p>
<p>It has never bothered me to be an average member of a good group (or even below-average). As a person progresses in a career in science, he/she tends to enter increasingly rarefied atmospheres, until becoming average for that environment. Since pebbles brought up Nobel Prizes, and its Nobel season, Ill remark that well above me, there are below-average Nobel laureates. I doubt that it bothers them.</p>
<p>Do you think that its particularly stressful for a person to encounter an environment where he/she is below average, as an undergraduate, as opposed to later on?</p>
<p>Several posters have remarked on the stress level of MIT courses. If you plot net learning in a course vs. stress level, Id guess that the graph for each individual starts at some non-zero value when there is zero stress, and falls to near zero as stress goes to infinity. Where do your courses fall on that graph, and in particular, is the derivative of your net learning with respect to stress, at your point at MIT, positive, negative or zero?</p>
<p>I ask because the stress-level should be adjustable by the instructor, to some extent.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Do you think that it’s particularly stressful for a person to encounter an environment where he/she is below average, as an undergraduate, as opposed to later on?
[/quote]
I absolutely think the reverse is true, at least in the scientific environments with which I'm familiar. The earlier that a scientist or engineer learns not to be the best at everything, the better for his or her future career development, I think.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I’d guess that the graph for each individual starts at some non-zero value when there is zero stress, and falls to near zero as stress goes to infinity.
[/quote]
I learn best when I'm pretty screamingly stressed -- my best terms at MIT (both grade-wise and learning-wise) were terms when I was taking too many classes and doing too many extracurriculars and spending too much time in the lab. YMMV, but I think the people who secretly enjoy being hosed are the most common type at MIT. (I mean, why would anybody want school to be easy? That wouldn't be any fun.)</p>
<p>
[quote]
The earlier that a scientist or engineer learns not to be the best at everything, the better for his or her future career development, I think.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I had a reply to this typed out, but now I think I should check exactly what you mean by this.</p>
<p>Regarding match, even if 12 different people made the match decision, they could all be influencing each other in subtle fashion and hence there could be a cascade of consensus which would be further affirmed by the congitive dissonance of both the accepted kids and the rejects. Since match is determined so subjectively there is no way to confirm or disconfirm whether true matches exist.</p>
<p>The fact that students do go on often to different institutions for graduate work and find yet another match seems to suggest that most of us will find enough things to confirm in our minds that a match exists and adcoms will proclaim no match as though arguing from first principles.</p>
<p>Throughout history outstanding scientists have been loners. In recent years, America has been emphasizing team work, cooperative learning, democratising everything, proclaiming all books have equal value, all ideas are equal, all races are equal in all things ,etc etc that adcoms, colleges and every institution has been pushing the dominance of the group over individual differences. We can no longer mention gender differences in learning, etc. No wonder MIT wants those who will fit into the group.</p>
<p>My prediction is that nothing worthwhile is going to come out of the top 50 US colleges in the future because only those who fit a social consensus would have been selected into these schools. The geniuses will come out of Oregon Agricultural College like Linus Pauling.</p>
<p>I mean that it's important for future scientists and engineers to learn their weaknesses, and to learn a little bit of humility in the process. MIT-caliber kids who come from typical public high schools have never experienced failure, and I think it's good to learn how to deal with not being amazing at everything before you get into a situation where it might really matter -- better, for example, to fail your first 8.01 test as an undergrad than to hit a roadblock in your project as a graduate student and completely melt down.</p>
<p>I guess where this is coming from is my first year of graduate school -- some of the students in my program came from colleges where they'd been 4.0 standouts with no blemishes on their records, and some of us came from schools where we got Cs in intro physics (ahem). I felt that those of us who came from schools where we weren't #1 all of the time were better able to roll with the punches first year -- we didn't panic about the workload, and we knew when to not finish the problem set in order to spend an extra day in lab.</p>
<p>In a nutshell, I think the earlier that a scientist or engineer learns not to be a perfectionist, the better it is for his or her development. As a scientist or engineer, your number one asset is your ability to brush yourself off and get back on the horse -- failure is inevitable, so you have to learn to cope with it and not to let it grind you down.</p>
<p>Is that clear enough? Just out of curiosity, tokenadult, what did you think I was saying?</p>
<p>EDIT:
[quote]
Throughout history outstanding scientists have been loners.
[/quote]
Whether or not this is true, it is certainly true that outstanding scientists today are not loners, regardless of nationality. Actually, being a really great scientist today tends to be more about selling ideas than anything else -- the top professors aren't really doing the outstanding research coming out of their labs, they're managing the group of postdocs and graduate students who are, then presenting the research and trying to get more money for it.</p>
<p>QUOTE from Mikayle:
"Actually, rereading through this thread reminds me anew about the utter pointlessness of most "chance me" threads.
People list scores, and extracurricular triumphs without usually identifying anything that might give a picture of the match. The question that is answerable is "Is this person good enough to be considered"? The question which there isn't enough information to answer is "Is this person likely to get in?" Sigh...."</p>
<p>Thats not entirely true. I don't think people do chance threads just to ask whether or not they will be a match to MIT. I think people post chance threads to get a feel of where they are standing in applications. You know the typical "Where am I compared to . . . " such and such.
People just do chances to see where they are among people. They probably want comments from experienced people. They want to know whether, for example, their scores are below the norm, or whether the ECs are not substantial enough.
I understand the match is very important. It can be found in interviews and essays. But the "stats" are important too.
The chancers just want to be campared with the usual applicants MIT recieves. There is nothing "pointless" in that.</p>
<p>molliebattmitt, Millikan, Pauling, Newton, Ramanujam, Galois, Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Francis Crick, all loners. As was Feynman. His ex wife remarked he was the most talented misanthrope she had ever met.</p>
<p>You need solitude for creative work. Read Anthony Storr on solitude and creative genius as also Arthur Koestler's Act of Creation.</p>
<p>I respectfully suggest you are all part of the zeitgeist that values groupthink and therefore you will interpret the past in science in terms of the group, a process called conceptual anachronism.</p>
<p>Yes, I know that today Nobel winners for example manage large labs. I am not talking of Nobel prize winners although that has to be a measure, I am talking of true genius whether that wins a prize or not. Most Nobelists are mediocre scientists in their group. I am talking of the one in a century genius.</p>
<p>I think it's a little futile to talk about "once in a century" genius in this context -- after all, the vast majority of people applying to MIT do not represent that genius, whether accepted or not.</p>
<p>(I'll note also that the more modern scientists on your list were capable of working with others, even if they preferred solitude somewhat. Crick, for example, may have been somewhat disagreeable to most, but it's clear that he found his collaboration with a select group of others quite productive.)</p>
<p>Well, I don't think anyone at MIT worries about producing the "geniuses of the century." They care about getting things done. MIT Engineers -> Mind and Hand.</p>
<p>I'll admit to being a bit of recluse, but anyone who can't function in normal society, let alone with classmates or colleagues, is pretty much stuck going nowhere. It's not so much "groupthink" as it is finding people who aren't flat-out afraid to collaborate with others to achieve higher goals than any person on their own. If you have something you want to try on your own, feel free, but you just can't reject all others at the bat of an eyelash. Maybe all ideas and books do not have equal value, but making assumptions before evaluating the value of someone or their input is just asking to be ostracized; it's more about giving things a chance than automatically assuming everyone is on an equal plane. To me, what you're suggesting isn't as much resisting a trend towards forced equality as it is preaching assumed greatness and borderline elitism.</p>
<hr>
<p>To NewLeader:</p>
<p>I'm with you on "chance me" threads. I was wondering where I stood among the rest of the field; I knew there was no way I was getting a "yes/no" answer on if I get in or not. I know that it really comes down to things that can't really be accurately shared or seen in just words on a forum post, but still I want to know what people who have been directly involved in the application process think about how appealing I might be at first glance.</p>
<p>To Molliebatmit: loner does not mean disagreeable, misanthropic or incapable of working with others.</p>
<p>To Gasparlewis: great science is elitist. Harold Sirkin ,of the Boston Consulting Group and author of "Payback", a book on innovation strategies argues that companies have too many ideas; in fact, the more ideas firms come up with the more important it is for bosses to kill off a lot of them early. This is to avoid going down countless dead ends. In a society that values all ideas with respect (Americans are so much into "respect" as in respect all cultures, value all contributions etc etc,) the solitary genius who can see through the mediocrity of most ideas will be ostracised. Niklas Savander of Nokia argues that Nokia excels in the harsh discipline needed to weed out ideas, as in fast failing.</p>
<p>I submit that in a culture that is so dominated by respect for various herds, women, minorities etc plus a self-esteem based society innovation won't happen. Clayton Christenson of Harvard Business School , author of The Innovator's Dilemma believes he has cracked the code of how to kill poor ideas. He says managers must unlearn some golden rules, chief among them the rule that one must listen and respond to your customers, especially the best customers.</p>
<p>I have wandered off the subject a bit, but at a time when Dubai and Tokyo are beginning to replace New York in finance, Bangalore and Shanghai in business innovation, there is a clear danger that MIT may become irrelevant because of their belief in the magic of the match when the match involves a good chunk of team work and ECs.</p>
<p>I do not have answers but am trying to foster a debate in a culture in which fitting in has become very important.</p>
<p>Ramaswami: I started this in response to your earlier posts on this thread. I’ll follow up on your latest post (#58) separately . Geniuses come up with extraordinary, brilliant ideas and inventions. What they develop is mostly proof of concept products. They lay the foundation for a whole new array of products. That’s all, no more. Who develops those ideas and inventions into useful products? Invariably it is a group of ‘diverse minds’. A successful group is not one that’s made up of all geniuses. It is an intelligent group in which the individuals have the capability to work with others and are able to assimilate points of view other than their own. A genius who cannot work with others has no place within such a group. To be a successful team player one has to recognize and acknowledge that every individual is different from everyone around him/her. An individual’s merit is what he/she brings to the team and has nothing to do with that individual’s race/gender. That’s the reason why it is wrong to type someone based on race or gender. </p>
<p>A ‘true genius’ is hard to come by. There may be one in a million. If MIT were to admit only true geniuses, how many students do you think they will admit every year?</p>
<p>I think fitting in has always been very mainstream and important in American culture. Could science be becoming too mainstream in America? Of course, it would have to be to meet national research initiatives..... Let's not get started with that brilliant idea.</p>
<p>I may be misunderstanding you Ramaswami, but it seems you are saying MIT is very focused on admitting students that 'fit in' with each other. Not having been to MIT, mind you, I would say the exact opposite. MIT seems to value rapport and exposure between future aerospace engineers, mathematicians and bio-engineers. The idea of course being that if no one in the group can solve the problem it may be someone seemingly unrelated with the answer. </p>
<p>By this idea the ostrocised solitary genius becomes more acceptable to the group. The question is, must the solitary genius be in control of the group to benefit from it or vice versa? Debate is great but action is necessary. To the reclusive genius debate is inane, the path is obvious. On that note does the group have to understand the path to benefit from the 'genius of the century' or vice versa?</p>