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Originally Posted by CalAlum To some extent, a student who enters MIT committed to the idea of becoming an engineer, physicist, or mathematician and who then finds that he or she does not quite have the skills to attain that goal will probably find it psychologically difficult at MIT. It's easier to leave U.C. Berkeley's School of Engineering and major in business in the context of a campus of more than 30,000 students. It's easier to switch from a math major to literature at Harvard or Yale. In those schools, one can join a fairly large group of colleagues highly committed to the liberal arts. At MIT on the other hand, a student may trudge on through the math or engineering major simply to avoid the stigma of having "died." I do know of at least one MIT alum who did this, although this was several decades ago. |
I offer my son as a related example.
He declared 18C and was doing fabulously well... and his heart wasn't in it. But I think he felt the pressure of the hardcore to stay there and slug it out. Instead he took a term off and took classes near home more closely allied to where his heart was. And returned to MIT this term as a Course IV (architecture) major. There was never any question in his mind of his leaving MIT and he wasn't anywhere near failing out. But he did have to go through Erdos's trauma of having "died" and it wasn't a trivial psychological exercise for him (even though he did have the skills to attain the mathematician goal: he just learned his goal was something else, and that voluntary switch was no less difficult). I do know that his heart is now in what he does, and that's what I need to know.