Vivi

Following the footsteps of the Cornell post of the same topic (link), I'm curious to know what are some of the not-so-nice aspects of MIT. I'm a '12 prefrosh, actually, and already absolutely adore MIT... but it's nice to - as the OP of the Cornell thread said - "strip the bias" and hear it like it is =)

So, what do you dislike about MIT?

rainynightstarz

can I make a suggestion?
for everything you dislike about MIT , also mention one you do like about MIT. However big or small the issue is.
Contest for who can make the longest list of likes and dislikes! XP

jessiehl

The many, many things that I like about MIT, and the fact that I am so glad that I went there, are chronicled here and elsewhere. So I'll bite, with the "dislikes" thing:

- Discipline snobbery (i.e. "My major is more hardcore than your major!"). The people who engage in it are a minority (and who they are varies, since for many people it's a defense mechanism when they're taking their major's most brutal classes), but they're a loud minority.

- Too much emphasis on being hardcore. To quote a friend who got his bachelor's, master's, and PhD from MIT, "I was really hardcore as a freshman. Where 'hardcore' means that you were dumb, but survived." It can turn into a masochism contest very quickly, with people depriving themselves of food and sleep, taking more classes than they can reasonably handle (I did this, with near-catastrophic results), or even going into majors that they don't really care about (see my first point) in order to prove to everyone how tough they are.

- It may have more student freedom than most campuses (a plus), but a common perception is that this is dying little by little (a minus), and would be dying faster if there weren't students working hard to preserve it, and a subset of sympathetic admins and faculty. <political digression> In some ways it parallels the US under the Bush administration, and Krueger was our 9/11. </political digression> *I* don't actually believe that traditional MIT student culture/freedom is dying, but it gets more and more difficult to uphold it.

pebbles

the construction?

i can't sleep right now

piccolojunior

Besides rejecting me? Lack of pre-med prowess

If I had gotten in, I would have said "weak financial aid" but other than that, nothing really.

iostream

i'm sitting outside 6-120, and i think that the phrase "fine-grained" next to the picture of george eastman is a horrible play on words.

sakky

I agree with jessiehl that there are many things to like about MIT. But I also agree with jessiehl that MIT's biggest drawback is what he stated above regarding the student culture and the social emphasis on being 'rigorous' and 'hard-core'. It reminds me of my high school (and I suspect most people's high schools) where there was excessive social emphasis on the guys to be star athletes and the girls to be cheerleaders, at MIT, there is probably excessive emphasis on people to be masochistic.

The emphasis on rigor might make some sense if it actually mattered from a real-world point of view. But the fact is, it probably doesn't. Just like being captain of your high school football team may matter a great deal in terms of social status while you're in high school but nobody is going to care afterwards, similarly, being excessively rigorous and masochistic may earn you social status at MIT, but probably not afterwards.

As a case in point, I think there is little dispute amongst MIT insiders that Sloan management is a relatively easy major (compared to many other majors at MIT). Yet the fact is, Sloanies earn one of the highest average starting salaries of any major at MIT: higher than many of the hard-core technical majors. In fact, I think that's the key reason why the Sloan School is such an crucial feature of MIT. Sloan offers students who can't or don't want to put up with the rigor of a hard-core technical major the chance to not only still earn a degree from MIT, but more importantly, to also get a top-paying job. In other words, you work less and get paid more. It's an absolutely fantastic deal. I often times wonder why more students don't become Sloanies. {Again, it's almost certainly due to the dysfunctional social pressures that jessiehl and I decry.}

I'll give you another example from outside the MIT community. Take the technical majors at Stanford. Stanford is quite famous, or perhaps infamous, for offering a relatively relaxed atmosphere (relative to most other top-ranked technical programs). It's practically impossible to actually flunk out of - or heck, to even get truly bad grades at - Stanford. Yet I think we can agree that Stanford graduates are hardly hurting for jobs or for grad school positions. The relative lack of masochism does not seem to hurt them.

The problem is not so much with pain or hard work, but rather with unnecessary pain and hard work. There are some kinds of pain that are useful because they will foster long-term intellectual maturation and development. But then there is pain just for the sake of pain.

differential

@Sakky: I think one reason people go to extreme's of the scale is that they are scared of losing the values that they hold dear. For many people crazily enough, money and a comfortable life is not what they want. They want to invent things, discover things, etc etc. Going the Sloan route and making lots of money for little pain may be what some people want, but for others, it's the equivalent of letting go of their childhood dreams to be a rocket scientist, marine biologist, underwater basket weaver, etc. And I personally feel that following my childhood dreams is far more important to me than anything else.

app2008

All I can say after seeing the whole processes of the college application is that MTI is the next to impossible to get admitted if you are Asian Boys and if you are not International/National Contest Winners no matter how strong you are acedemically and extra activities. The boys just do not have such opportunities in their current school enviroment to attend any sciences contests. I wish those boys will success in any school they go, and fight back in four years to MIT graduate school or be a MIT professor in near future. For those rejected, don't give up.

Crash_Blair

I hate that when I ask someone "How are you?" he'll reply back solely in terms of p-sets/exams/sleep or lack thereof.

Olo

The best is seeing the frosh slowly transition from "sleep is for the weak!" to "screw you I'm going to bed."

Ben Golub

sakky -- you don't seem to understand at all what motivates the good people at MIT. getting a top paying job out of college is such a small goal in the sight of many of them. as differential said, many of these people are hardcore not because of social pressure to be hardcore but because of a deep inner drive to strive and achieve greatly. it's amazing how much small-scale careerism dominates your thinking and impoverishes your understanding of smart kids and good schools.

bay-area

i dont know.. their natural competitiveness could be driving them to be hardcore instead of their actual interest in majors and such

sakky

Uh, I actually think YOU have an impoverished view of the world that prevents you from understanding the true driving force that motivates students, even the smart students. Actually, I think that you actually do understand, you just don't WANT to understand it, which is arguably worse.

Look, let's be perfectly and brutally honest. The vast majority of college students,including the top college students, wouldn't even be going to college at all if college was not seen as a way to enhance one's economic opportunities for the simple reason that their parents wouldn't encourage them to become educated and certainly wouldn't pay for it. Come on. You know it's true. With perhaps only a few exceptions, everybody here is college-educated because our parents taught us, starting at a young age, to value college. Yet the reason why they taught us that in the first place is because they believe that college enhances economic opportunities.

Now, one might argue that perhaps that linkage between education and jobs is overly simplistic or confounded. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that parents believe it to be true. If they did not, then parents would not be encouraging their children to become educated. After all, honestly, how many kids, including smart kids, would really care about college if their parents had never taught them to value it?

Hence, given that backdrop, it is entirely fair to examine a college in light of what economic opportunities it provides. Most kids at MIT - and yes at Caltech - are there only because their parents believed that education leads to greater career success, and, by extension, kids therefore inevitably absorb the linkage - real or imagined - between college and career. Furthermore, college ain't exactly cheap. Parents are willing to financially support their kid's college education only if they believe that doing so will lead to greater economic success, which therefore makes the education/career linkage even more salient. To pretend otherwise is to be willfully ignorant of the true motivations that drive higher education.

For those who still disagree, let me put it to you this way. Imagine a world where college doesn't lead to greater career opportunities, or at least, is not believed to lead to greater career opportunities. How many people would still go to college? Or, perhaps more poignantly, how many parents would teach their kids to value college and would still pay it? Be honest.

sakky

But we're not talking about that. I fear you have misunderstood the points made by me and jessiehl.

Let me explain. You talk about pursuing your childhood dreams. But let me ask you this. Is it anybody's childhood dream to be getting terrible grades? Or to be put on academic probation - or to even be expelled from college - for poor grades? I think it's safe to say that that's nobody's dream. Nobody wants this.

That's why I brought up the topic of Sloan. To be clear, I think Sloan offers numerous benefits. It is clearly one of the world's elite business schools, it offers (obviously) excellent career opportunities, it offers a vast range of educational courses. All of these characteristics are true. But one other feature of Sloan is something I find particularly important - that the Sloan undergrad program is relatively easy (compared to the technical majors at MIT). What I mean by that is that while it is still extremely difficult to get top grades at Sloan, it is relatively easy just to pass.

Now, some would argue that this is a problem with Sloan or with MIT in general. And to that, I would diametrically disagree - not only is it not a problem, it is actually arguably its best feature. Sloan offers to those students who just aren't good enough to complete one of the difficult technical majors an opportunity to still earn an MIT degree. After all, like I said, nobody dreams of getting terrible grades. Nobody dreams of being relegated to academic probation. Nobody dreams of being expelled. These outcomes are everybody's nightmares. What Sloan basically offers you is a way to avoid your nightmares. If you just can't handle the extreme difficulty of the other majors, you can just declare a Sloan management major and hence still successfully graduate.

Look, I'm not asking for anybody to give up their true childhood dreams. For example, if your dream is to design the next great microprocessor, then by all means, declare a major in Course 6 and if you do well, then more power to you. But my question is, what if you don't do well? In fact, what if you do so poorly that you're flirting with expulsion? After all, not everybody in the technical majors does well; some people perform poorly. What if you're one of them? Sloan, if nothing else, at least provides you with a way for you to still graduate. That's a heck of a lot better than the alternative.