<p>Essentially, why should you choose MIT over Harvard, Stanford, or Caltech? What's special about the MIT environment and programs there? Please be specific :)</p>
<p>Are you looking for personal experiences? MIT is a big and diverse place – your question is too general to have an answer that both applies to everyone and is specific.</p>
<p>@PiperXP Yes, if you go to MIT, how is your experience there? </p>
<p>I graduated in 2013.</p>
<p>I had never heard of MIT until the end of my junior year of high school, when I heard it was “the best engineering school in the world”. I was curious, so I visited MIT’s website, and saw… crazy toys that students had apparently manufactured and designed in class.</p>
<p>That was my first inkling that MIT was for me 
As I started to read the blogs, I started learning about hacking culture and the east side. </p>
<p>Harvard and Stanford are, quite frankly, too normal. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not what I wanted. As for Caltech, I didn’t even apply – I want to go much farther than 20 minutes away from home 
I think college is a good time to get away from your family and figure out how to be an adult. It doesn’t mean flinging yourself across a continent like I did, but hey, whatever floats your boat! I also didn’t find Caltech appealing because it was about the size of my high school, which means getting critical mass for a large number of active clubs is very difficult. Fewer clubs, fewer opportunities for me to do the things I like.</p>
<p>My MIT experience was full of ups and downs. I was tried harder than I’d ever been tried. I pushed myself in ways I never thought I’d do or be able to do. The way I relate to people is completely different now compared to before MIT, in a good way.</p>
<p>I actually wrote a post about it here: <a href=“http://eastcamp.us/culture/i-am-dying-my-hair-a-wacky-color-again-though/”>http://eastcamp.us/culture/i-am-dying-my-hair-a-wacky-color-again-though/</a></p>
<p>But my experience is not a universal one. I suspect anyone on west campus will have an MIT experience more similar to Harvard/Stanford than I had. </p>
<p>I went to MIT. One of my closer friends from high school went to Harvard. I spent a reasonable time particularly my freshman year on the Harvard campus visiting her, and she similarly visited me. Whereas MIT always felt like home to me, Harvard never did. One day I turned her her and said something like “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but Harvard has always felt, vaguely…um… pretentious in a way that has never really felt comfortable for me.” She grinned and said “I am SOOO glad that you said that. I have always felt exactly the same way about MIT.” And of course, MIT is not less pretentious, but it is a very, very, very different kind of pretension.</p>
<p>There is no best school. There may be a best school for any individual student. You are picking a home for four years. Pick one where you feel that you are home. For me, that was MIT. Your mileage may vary.</p>
<p>Many years ago, I chose MIT over Stanford. I visited Stanford and the sun was shining, the people looked rich and athletic. By there wasn’t the air of happiness I would have expected, given all that. I visited MIT and people weren’t exactly happy, as in a feeling, but they were highly engaged in what they were doing. Consumingly engaged, with a sense of purpose. That attracted me, and I enjoyed my four years there.
Ironically, a number of years later, I was on the research staff at Stanford. I have wonderful, happy memories of my years there, too – go figure.</p>
<p>I’ll note that when I attended CSULA, I was happy - a different type of happy, but happy nonetheless. And CSULA is very, very different from anything mentioned here.</p>
<p>I think a person who had the option to attend all of these universities would be able to build a happy life and seek a great future at any one of them.</p>
<p>I lived on west campus, and I’ve gone to both MIT and Harvard. From what I could glean as a grad student looking into the undergrad experience at Harvard, it was very, very different from MIT – a great deal more worrying about grades and about not overloading oneself with classes.</p>
<p>I think each person experiences each university differently. I was an undergrad and grad student at MIT, grad student at Harvard, lecturer at CalTech, and have spent time at Stanford and worked with people from there. I can’t do an “apples to apples” comparison, but my observation is that Caltech has a unique undergrad culture due to its very small size, and the fact that undergrads are such a minority. I think it is the most intense of the four places (I don’t think I would have fit in very well there as an undergrad); however, it’s like MIT in that everyone (almost) is a STEM major. MIT used to call itself a “university polarized around science.” Of course the joke was that it was “paralyzed around science.” It shares that characteristic with CalTech - S&T permeate everything. Harvard and Stanford are very different; they are much broader and the “we’re all in the same boat mentality” is not there in quite the same way. I have heard it said that at Harvard College if you’re not a jock, a wonk, or a preppy, you are a nobody. I don’t know whether that is really true, but it seems possible. Socially, MIT is a really egalitarian place. It also has a dynamic atmosphere I’ve never experienced any place else. It’s sort of like NYC - it never stops. I remember being in labs at 3 or 4 a.m. and running into lots of people in the halls. Stanford always seemed more “laid back” to me. On of my friends who went there for grad school from MIT moved back to MIT because he disliked the relative lack of intensity. IMHO, MIT and Harvard have Caltech and Stanford beat locationally. California is warm and sunny relative to Boston, but Pasadena and Palo Alto can’t compare with the richness of the Boston urban landscape, and it’s much easier to get around Boston than around either of the other two places. Like every other tech tool since the beginning of time, I suffered my waterboarding at the fire hose, but I had a good time, made lifelong friends, and received a truly excellent problem solving education that has worked well in post-grad life. As usual, all generalizations are false, and YMMV.</p>