<p>Lots of helpful information! My son will be at CPW next weekend. A few questions about food and cooking in the dorms:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Our finaid sheet lists $4402 for board for next year. If food is a-la-carte and there are no traditional meal plans, how is that number calculated? What assumptions are built in about buying food versus cooking in the dorm?</p></li>
<li><p>What is a realistic expectation for savings for a student who prepares, say, half of his meals himself? </p></li>
<li><p>Is sufficient refrigerator/freezer capacity provided, or do many students maintain their own refrigerator?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Yearly board in Burton-Connor (which has kitchens, by the way): $2552
Note: She’s in a single, most expensive option.
Yearly amount for food: 5000
Note: Months in residence at MIT
Total for room and board = $7,552
Savings difference = $3,808</p>
<p>This is what we budgeted for food, but she spends less. Our figure is based on spending around $20 per day per food. Breakfast is usually cereal and fruit or toast and fruit. Lunch is usually soup and half sandwich at a cafe on campus or nearby. Dinner is whatever she and friends want to cook.
If your family can cover the health care costs through your private insurance, you
can also save $1,656 annually.</p>
<p>Our finaid sheet gives $6,170 for room and $4,402 for meals for one year. The total of $10,572 is less than the $11,360 given on the online course bulletin. I guess that gives dh something to ask the finaid office during CPW. :)</p>
<p>Thank you for the numbers you provided. I’m trying to see if a student can save as much by cooking as through a work-study job. It would be nice to spare ds work-study at least for the first term or two. If he could choose between contributing, say, $2000 through work-study and $2000 through learning how to cook… you get my drift. ;)</p>
<p>Let me see if I can change your mind about “work study” at MIT. When my daughter was a senior, another friend who’d been accepted to MIT the year before sent her a long, 2-3 page single-spaced letter outlining all the advantages of MIT over Yale, Harvard, or Stanford. One thing that struck everyone in our family was that she recommended getting a desk job. This was a girl whose parents are executives in a well-known tech company here in Silicon Valley. She didn’t need to work. But she had worked about 9 hours per week in one of the libraries, and the work was so slow that she could finish an entire math p-set while on the job. In fact, she thought it provided her some really focused time to do that work.</p>
<p>So, thinking along the same lines as you, we suggested to our daughter that she look for a part time position in the spring, something simple that might contribute to her tuition. But midway through fall of her freshman year, she believed she had time to take a 9-hour job at DRAPER (athletics), and she basically sat at the counter checking out hockey gear. Like her friend, she found she was usually able to complete a math or physics p-set on her shift. Now, that kind of work is nothing like a paid research position, but of course, in a paid research position, you usually can’t also devote time to your academic work. But it was my daughter’s first paid employment, and so it was a great first experience.</p>
<p>Working at MIT will not incur any of the social hierarchy ******** (excuse my language) you may find at other campuses. In other words, no one will “look down” on a student who wants to work. Our family pays full freight and could do without a child working – however, we believe that young adults learn as much through work as through academics. At this point, having worked through successive research positions, our daughter will graduate with a strong resume. </p>
<p>I went back over the numbers as a result of the earlier post, and it looks as if our daughter so far has contributed around $12,000 per year to her education at MIT. But that includes a yearly renewable outside merit scholarship of $2,500. She has pursued summer research opportunities at MIT that pay only 12 dollars per hour; some of her friends have taken summer jobs at technology companies that pay quite a bit more.</p>
<p>@CalAlum, do you suppose your dd’s friend would send us a copy of that letter? Just kidding–all the same, I wish someone would send ds a letter like that.</p>
<p>If you thought the dorm system offered choice, then the fraternity, sorority, and independent living group system (FSILG) offers far more. All a FSILG house is, at its core, is an exercise in self government. The house is owned by its members (actually at most houses a corporation of alumni exist to hold title to the house) and decide on such topics as “How much should we pay to live here?” Most houses are broadly similar to the dorms in housebill, but they do tend to spend the money differently. For example, if something spills in a common area of many dorms, a union cleaner will clean it up. In almost any house, a house resident will be rostered in some form to clean it up. The money saved there, tends to go towards a larger social budget than exists in the dorms, but again there are exceptions.</p>
<p>The cheapest living accommodation at MIT is ALWAYS Student House, an ILG in the back bay ([mit</a> student house](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/studs/www/home.html]mit”>http://web.mit.edu/studs/www/home.html)). This house has very few frills and does their own cooking. At many houses, the decision is taken to hire a professional cook to do lunches and dinners usually 6 days per week. Some houses eat very well indeed, and choose to spend a higher percentage of the housebill on the food service. There was one house on campus when I was there that ate gourmet food better than found anywhere else on campus. But again it is all self-governing. The members of the house usually decide what their housebill will be and how to spend it. It is almost always house officers (students) who administer all of these functions. This can be a time sink, but the house tends to be a very supportive environment (again every house is different). There is a reason why the average FSILG grade-point average has been higher than the dorm grade-point average, and why that has been true for at least the past thirty years.</p>
<p>This post is not meant to denigrate the dorm system in any way. The dorms are great, and I have many friends who really enjoyed their time in the dorm system. However, I see a lot of misunderstanding about what a fraternity actually is at MIT, where people base their understanding on Animal House, and similarly accurate portrayals of the FSILG system.</p>
<p>^ Granted, you can find Animal House fraternities. But they’re definitely not representative of the entire system.</p>
<p>But yeah, don’t let your preconceptions keep you from exploring both systems. They offer different things, and you’ll find out what’s best for you by giving everything a chance. Dorm rush and FSILG rush even happen at separate times, so you won’t have to choose to explore one over the other.</p>
<p>If anyone is interested in how working at MIT while being a student is, you should PM me. The list of my jobs and average hours per week:</p>
<p>Frosh spring: UROP, Desk, SAT Prep (20)
Frosh summer: UROP, Desk (30)
Soph fall: Desk, SAT Prep (15)
Soph spring: Desk, 6.01 LA, SAT Prep (20)</p>
<p>I’ve also found that working doesn’t actually affect my GPA, it just affects what I do with my free time. I have never had to go to work when I really needed to do a problem set and was unable to do homework.</p>
<p>UROPs pay you too, starting at $10 per hour (depending on lab and department, I think UROP min wage is 9.25 or something like that, and I have heard of UROPs getting paid at $16 per hour). I regularly spent 20 hours at the lab last semester and if I opted for pay, that would easily translate to 13 weeks x 20 x 11 = 2,860 -> a hefty sum, not to mention pretty much guaranteed letters of rec too.</p>
<p>I would just like to give further credence to this comment by saying that this concept of working students being looked down on never even occurred to me as something that might happen on a college campus until I just read what CalAlum wrote.</p>
<p>I held several jobs on campus over the years, and they were all interesting in their own way. To tie this into the discussion about food, I made about $40 per week as a blogger, which just about covered my weekly grocery bill. That was pretty convenient. Starting my sophomore year I worked at the Computing Help Desk (a fantastic job I highly recommend), which paid $12.50 an hour for a 6-10 hour weekly schedule. Senior year I also picked up a job as a tutor. I actually started out as a volunteer- I went to a “volunteer opportunities fair” held by the Public Service Center and started volunteering to tutor kids at a local Cambridge high school in math and science. After a couple of weeks the coordinator told me that they were registered with the federal work study program, which I was eligible for. So I started making $25-30 per hour (depending on how many students I tutored at a time), which I thought was a pretty sweet deal.</p>
<p>In total I suppose I’d work about 10-12 hours per week between all of these jobs combined. I would have made far more money if I had just put in that total number of hours at my Help Desk job, but money was only part of the point. =)</p>
<p>If a student also has a team practice daily—can he/she reasonably
get back to a dorm, shower,
make dinner
and then do p-sets and laundrey etc…</p>
<p>Our student is burning like 4-5k in calories daily so ramen noodles or canned soup won’t make ends meet…</p>
<p>How are the kitchens/refirg/freezer space to be able to buy/store/cook real foods
poultry/meats
produce etc
not pre-packaged stuff.</p>
<p>I have no idea how kids cook now–or how guys handle it…</p>
<p>When I was in college–I shared a condo with 3 other women jr and sr yr–we split the cooking by M-Th night - each cooked for the group and we had dinner as a “family”…
breakfast/lunch was on our own…It was relazing to sit down to a real meal for those nights each week–and we did the shopping together/split the bill.</p>
<p>Every single one of my athlete friends - every single one - has said that having that sort of activity brought a lot of structure into their lives, and started performing better academically once in a sport.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Varies from dorm to dorm, but most floors seem to have large fridges for them to store things. Many people also buy small fridges for their rooms.</p>
<p>
Believe it or not, men do have some amount of intelligence, and are fully capable of learning to cook ;)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Situations like these are not unheard of at MIT :)</p>
<p>Oh man, your son will definitely not have class at 8am, the earliest classes start at 9am. And chances are, he probably won’t have class at 9am either. Also, it won’t be a block of class straight through the day, he will most likely have breaks. I think freshman year, I had about 4 hours of class a day.</p>
<p>Aside from the start times, this isn’t unique to MIT, as far as I can tell - people generally spend less time explicitly in class in college than they do in high school.</p>