Accepted to MIT: should I attend?

Mikalye
Sat, 12 Nov 2011 15:28:33 +0000

When I visited MIT as a high-school student, I did not attend any of the science, math or engineering classes. I presumed that they would be excellent. I wanted to convince myself, as someone very interested in the humanities, that I could enjoy my time at MIT, so I sat in on a writing class, a film studies class, and a literature class, and I was thrilled by them. They were filled with MIT students, who are very, very bright as a rule, and I had a great time.

I got to MIT, and I took a lot of theatre classes. I spent IAP’s touring with the MIT Shakespeare ensemble. I got to spend a lot of time with some of the arts faculty and staff, and I had more time with them than I had with most of my STEM class professors. I got out of MIT and worked as an actor. I got my equity card, and I got surprisingly good theatre training at MIT. Now sure, Yale has hugely better theatre facilities than has MIT, heck Northwestern has much better theatre facilities and training than that found at MIT, but at schools like those, the arts faculty and resources are only really available to the Drama majors. Unless you go into Yale knowing that you want to devote your life to the performing arts, then you won’t get to spend much time with their stellar faculty.

MIT has the combination of superb humanities instruction, and very few majors. If you want to learn novel writing, then the introductory course is taught by Junot Diaz (Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”), Science Fiction Writing is taught by Steve Haldeman (5 Hugo awards, 5 Nebulas, a Cambell award, and the Damon Knight Grand Master award for lifetime achievement in 2010). There are similar stars across a wide variety of humanities disciplines. This allows MIT students to have choices.One of my roommates at MIT went there expecting to major in Physics. He graduated with a degree in English Literature. One of the EC’s in my region is a Fashion Designer.

Look, nobody succeeds at MIT unless they have at least a solid tolerance, if not an actual enjoyment, of the sciences. If you are going to MIT and loathe mathematics, then MIT is not a good place for you. But if you are say, an Architecture major, then you will be living in the studio and thinking a lot more about the arts than the sciences. Of the roughly 3200 undergraduates with a declared major, there are 74 Architecture majors and another 214 in the school of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

So I think that most of the MIT posters on this thread are right. Yes, you can succeed and prosper as a non-STEM major at MIT. That being said, you are picking a home for four years. Some schools will simply FEEL like a better fit than others. Wait until you get in, then go to CPW, and see how comfortable you are on campus.