<p>Wow. So…the reason MIT isn’t winning some little-known CS programming contest is because MIT is now admitting women and minorities? I’m going to just assume this wasn’t REALLY the intent of these posts.</p>
<p>Speaking as the parent of an MIT female who just graduated with institute awards and is going on to Harvard – in other words, presumably an “authentic nerd” – I agree with posters who pointed out, much earlier in this thread, that the CS contest here is little-known in the U.S. and not prioritized for that reason. No U.S. tenure-track faculty member, unless at at Tier-3 school, would consider coaching a competitions team to be anything apart from “service,” and service rarely counts toward tenure. </p>
<p>Posters have already noted that MIT doesn’t really teach programming – the assumption is that students will pick it up on their own. My daughter’s comment was, “I don’t want to become a code monkey.” She still knows about 7 or 8 programming languages now, but apart from the Battlecode Competition, which was rather like an online video game, I don’t think she and her friends would have thought to enter a programming competition.</p>
<p>CalAlum, Schrock says re the increasing number of women and minorities, “that’s great.” If you read his quotation closely, you’ll see that he’s complaining that the students are busy with EC’s, much as if in high school. Translated from “Professor” his remark means: “The undergraduate student researchers who work in my lab seem to be drawn away for other activities all the time. I don’t recall doing that when I was at UC Riverside.”</p>
<p>More in a minute, but I wanted to correct this misimpression right away.</p>
<p>I can’t believe this wanktastic thread is still going.</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of this competition - all of the other course 6ers I’ve talked to haven’t, either. Fact is, we have more interesting things to do (like intern at Google, or program satellite-robots in the International Space Station, or the like) than defending our honor at every little CS competition in existence*. If you guys can explain why this competition should be so important to me, please do, because right now I’m just sort of laughing and shaking my head at the pointlessness of this thread :P</p>
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<li>I’ve actually heard of course 16 people at other schools make similar “Hah we beat you in $random_competition!!!” and such too. This stuff doesn’t seem limited to course 6.</li>
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<p>I don’t think that’s what the quote intended to say. I think it’s trying to suggest that perhaps there may have been a diversification of interest strongly in part due to the changed demographics. The definition of nerd in the context they described is rather narrow and reflects the times in which they was describing (a white male being totally STEM oriented and solely focused on academics and academic related ECs). However, I wonder if that thin definition is even fair.</p>
<p>If you read my “opus” on CC, you’ll see that I am a consistent supporter of affirmative action for URM’s. I don’t think that MIT is decreasing its quality in any way by admitting URM’s. I don’t think MIT is decreasing its quality by admitting women, either.</p>
<p>It is my impression that most of the issues that women face in science and engineering hit much harder at the grad-post doc-young faculty level than in the transition from high school to college. For example, Schrock mentions in his autobiography that he had 10 students in his lab by his 3rd year at MIT. Haven’t looked at Sylvia Ceyer’s record in detail, but I doubt she experienced that favorable situation.</p>
<p>What I did say was this: I believe that it is actually difficult to discern who the “top of the top” will be, in a field like CS. High school experiences are so varied that the record to that point is a rather rough guide.</p>
<p>I named a set of posters on CC (at least some legit) who were waitlisted/rejected at MIT, on whom I’d place a bet for long-term career success.</p>
<p>I’m not in CS, but I’d heard of this competition. My non-top university occasionally does well in it.</p>
<p>Finally, I think that disrespect for “code monkeys” will hurt us in the long run. No problem with a woman aiming for something different. In fact, I think that’s wise–a woman in CS could do without the double whammy of gender and anti-code-monkey sentiment.</p>
<p>It’s getting to be a fairly long thread, but I’d also like to point out that I suggested earlier that MIT students might be busier with classes and undergraduate research, and that a “win” in this competition nets them less than it gets for students at other places.</p>
<p>I think that’s a useless distinction to make. For all the brilliant students that you point out were rejected, there were several students who were equally or even more brilliant admitted. So when I said “attracted,” I meant that was a shortening of “attracted to apply and attend.” Your anecdotal evidence actually strengthens my case, because if these so-called brilliant CS students are getting rejected, then even more brilliant ones are being admitted. I know that’s not always the case, but I think that when you average it out, that’s what happens.</p>
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<p>I’ve always thought - and found to be true - that MIT focuses more on creativity than people think. There are a three not-so-distinct abilities: having lots of knowledge (easy) and having the capacity to understand (harder), but the most important one, often overlooked, is creativity (hardest): having the capacity to understand on a higher level, to see and make disparate connections. People often try to say that IIT is more selective, but I think its students are better at the first two, and MIT definitely wins on the third.</p>
<p>I think that may be what’s happening here as well. To win these CS competitions, you need more of the first two - knowledge and ability to understand - and not so much creativity. Of course, there is creativity to an extent, but that’s a different kind of creativity, since these are just toy problems of little to no consequence (whereas the creativity I mention above is the sort of thing that defines a good researcher).</p>
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<p>I agree with this post, but do MIT students normally use course numbers even when talking about students at other schools? I have no idea what course 16 is (and, come to think of it, am also morally opposed to memorizing the numbers in such a pointless system ;)).</p>
<p>phantasmagoric, your statement that equally or more brilliant students were accepted would be true if the MIT admissions office were functioning optimally. I am not sure that is the case, actually.</p>
<p>The MIT admissions team believes that no one “deserves” admission to MIT (please correct me if I am wrong). I believe that, given the number of students who are admitted, there are actually people who do deserve admission to MIT, and some of them are not admitted. </p>
<p>Selecting for creativity is good. Creativity takes lots of forms, though, and creativity in science may not be so easy to spot, especially in a 17-year-old. Feynman wrote once about the constraints on the creative process in physics. (I think he may have scored poorly on a test of “creativity,” based on my reading between the lines in what he wrote.)</p>
<p>In a parallel conversation, another CC member points out to me that of the senior finalists in the USACO from 2008-2010, 9 are going to MIT and 3 to Harvard. So clearly MIT does attract and admit this group (who then presumably find more interesting undertakings than the ICPC once they are at MIT).</p>
<p>I hope this post does not close down USACO as a route to MIT admissions! The odds look pretty good to me.</p>
<p>You’re definitely not course 21 with grammar like that. ;)</p>
<p>(And yes, I had to look that up.)</p>
<p>(BTW, I’m not course 21, or 15, or even 6, but CS. I am not a number. :p)</p>
<p>QuantMech, I agree that creativity of the kind that I’m talking about is not so easy to spot, but I think MIT has gotten pretty good at it. That, to me, is optimal.</p>
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<p>I’ll clarify that MIT is likely admitting this group because they tend to be the most qualified: they likely have many other accomplishments, get great recs, write awesome essays, etc. not because of USACO itself. Same deal with lots of other big-deal accomplishments like RSI, science fairs, olympiads, etc.: the top placers tend to be qualified regardless and would likely have gotten in without that additional recognition.</p>
<p>There are some overlap between USACO participants and USAMO participants admitted to MIT. This number is still a lot lower than the number of AIME/USAMO participants admitted to MIT. Total number of USACO participants per year is around 1000. Total number AIME/USAMO per year is around 10,000 or more.</p>
<p>Are you sure it’s that many? It used to be about 800 per year. I know it has expanded somewhat, but I don’t think it would have expanded by more than a factor of 10.</p>
<p>@collegealum314, #75
Sorry, I relied too much on coolweather’s numbers. The total number of AIME participants in North America was 4574 in 2011, from the MAA website info.
(Someone else may have corrected this in the interim.)</p>
<p>I am interested in Programming…but indeed i think i have to Start teaching myself as a Chemical engineer because I wonder if MIT will offer me what i need to be fully prepared for any competition.</p>