MIT actually has a very active social scene – it’s said that MIT students “work hard and play hard.” About 50% of MIT guys are in fraternities, and students from the other schools in Boston come to MIT to party.</p>
<p>As a female, I don’t know about eye candy, although my husband certainly didn’t seem to have a problem finding someone at MIT who fit his “eye candy” criteria.</p>
<p>It’s definitely true that not everyone is a fit for MIT, but MIT students are also happy with the school and with their social lives.</p>
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MIT is about 55% male, 45% female. That’s not a different enough ratio that you notice it from day to day.</p>
<p>Caltech students certainly also “Work hard and play hard,” but there’s still very little eye candy out here. Even in the wonderful California sun.</p>
<p>Thanks for clearing that up for me…though I would argue that ‘play hard’ and ‘eye candy’ are drastically different from the consensus of playing hard and eye candy.</p>
<p>As I said, I’m a female, and I don’t know much about eye candy.</p>
<p>I do know something about playing hard, and I assure you that MIT students play exactly as hard as the consensus college definition of playing hard, if they choose to do so.</p>
<p>I agree molliebatmit, MIT does party hard.
People from Harvard,BC,BU,NEU…etc all go to MIT to party.</p>
<p>I think MIT realizes if their students weren’t drunk or high, they might commit suicide.</p>
<p>Also, I think MIT thinks of most undergrads as baggage, They would much rather take 10,000 grad students IMO since they can enslave them for a cheap price.</p>
<p>And the issue is that the system *encourages * abuse, to the point that numerous observers (including me) now think that the nation might actually be better off if we were to actually eliminate all patents. Granted, the patent lawyers and patent ■■■■■■ would clearly be worse off. But society as a whole may be better off, for as Bessen & Meurer demonstrate, society spends more on the legal framework of patents (including not just litigation but on the defensive patent searches that firms have to undertake to ensure that they didn’t accidentally infringe on a patent that they didn’t even know existed) than the value that the patents create in the first place. </p>
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<p>Unfortunately, that’s actually part of the problem: you don’t have to be advancing the technology or otherwise pursuing the market in question in order to maintain your patents*. You can just be sitting around and doing nothing at all. In fact, doing nothing is actually strategically rational for the patent ■■■■■■ because if you are actively pursuing a technology, other firms will probably find out - either because your employees are presenting technical papers in conferences or your representatives are speaking to the press, or obviously if you actually launch a prototype product in the market - and then will realize that you probably hold a patent. On the other hand, by keeping quiet, you maximize your chances of ‘stealth’ which then allows you to spring your patent on an unsuspecting firm for maximum surprise and damage. For example, if that firm is just about to launch a new product, then you wait until the very last moment to spring a patent infringement lawsuit on them, knowing that they will most likely choose to settle because they can’t afford to stop their launch. </p>
<p>Which points to one of the biggest problems of the patent system, which is that the patent databases are extremely difficult to search such that you’re never really sure whether you’re infringing on someone’s patent or not. Granted, you can hire a patent lawyer to give you a clearance opinion, which is a legal opinion about whether you are probably safe from an infringement lawsuit, but even so, it’s just an opinion. There may still be a patent out in left field somewhere that you never even heard of that somebody surprisingly springs on you. </p>
<p>That begs the question of why can’t the patent system be made simpler to search and understand, and the (sad) answer is elementary: because the patent lawyers obviously don’t want that. They clearly want the system to be as complicated as possible, because that means more fees and more cases for them. It’s a brilliant make-work strategy of the patent lawyers.</p>
<p>*But even if you did have a requirement that a patent-holder would need to be ‘actively pursuing’ the technology in order to maintain the patent, the problem then becomes how do you define ‘actively pursuing’? That would just be yet another phrase for the lawyers to argue over, and hence yet more fees for them.</p>
<p>Sakky, so instead of finding a way to fix the system from a very small group of abusers, we should completely eliminate the system to spite those abusers?</p>
<p>I’m involved in a group now that does a lot of alloy and process development. Our ideas and developments would be rather simple to reverse engineer, so what would protect the investment of our time and effort if we were to try and go commercial with our idea? Who would fund our developments if a competitor could buy a chunk of our stuff and reverse engineer it in a matter of weeks when it took us five years to develop it?</p>
<p>It’s not a small number of abusers. It’s nearly the entire lot of them. That’s why studies have shown that most technology executives would actually prefer to move to a system where we had no patents at all. </p>
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<p>But the reverse-engineering happens anyway. The entire idea of a patent system is that you have to disclose your entire idea in exchange for a monopoly. In other words, you have to tell everybody exactly what your idea is in exchange for a patent, which means that competitors are given the chance to carefully study your patent and learn from it. Yet the fact is, after studying your patent, it’s generally not that hard to find workarounds, and that is precisely what competitors do - produce enough of a workaround such that they are no longer violating your patent. Heck, some of them don’t even bother to make large changes, but just make small changes and then just dare you to sue them, betting that their lawyers are better than yours.</p>
<p>Furthermore, you also have to consider the possibility that you, right now, are violating somebody else’s patents that you had never even heard of before. This is where the whole idea of patent ■■■■■■■■ comes in: somebody will spring an infringement lawsuit on you out of nowhere, using a patent that you had never even heard of, and/or that doesn’t seem to contain any relevant stipulations (but that the patent holder asserts to be relevant). This risk multiplies if you are thinking of selling overseas, and hence have to consider the patents of any nation to which you might be exporting, especially in less developed nations such as China or India where the patents are often times extremely poorly defined and often times quite different from developed nations (for example, some concepts can be patented in some countries but not in others, etc.) </p>
<p>What that means is that your firm, for defensive purposes, is almost certainly expending large legal fees to engage in patent searches to see whether you are inadvertently violating somebody else’s patent. Yet even so, you might still be in violation anyway. That is precisely what happened to Kodak when it developed its own instant photography technology in competition with Polaroid: Kodak hired a crack legal staff to carefully examine Polaroid’s entire patent portfolio and to then advise the Kodak engineering team as to how to develop its technology to avoid infringement. Nevertheless Polaroid sued anyway, and Kodak was found to be in violation on some of the counts. Think about what that means: it means that you can carefully develop your technology in conjunction with legal advice, and still be found in violation anyway. Heck, even if Kodak hadn’t been found to be in violation, they still would have ended up paying out millions in legal fees simply in defending itself.</p>
<p>Which leads to a central point that B&M have made and that I will repeat: if you can’t tell the boundaries, then it ain’t property. Intellectual property laws like patents are supposed to be akin to regular property laws, but the difference is that property has well defined boundaries. If I buy a piece of land, then it’s easy to determine whether somebody is trespassing on my land or not, because my property had well-defined boundaries. Not so with patents, for they usually have poorly defined boundaries such that you don’t ever really know whether you are violating it or not: it is all a matter of interpretation by an individual judge and jury. To quote B&M:</p>
<p>“…innovators find it increasingly difficult to determine
whether a technology will infringe anyone’s patents, giving rise to inadvertent
infringement. Similarly, they find it increasingly costly to find and negotiate the
necessary patent licenses in advance of their technology development and adoption
decisions” </p>
<p>So that of course begs the question of why can’t the boundaries be made clearer, and the answer to that is obvious: because the patent lawyers don’t want that. They want patent boundaries to be fuzzy. They want them to be unpredictable. Why? Because it means more work for them. It means more opportunities for infringement lawsuits and legal defense fees. This is a gravy train for them. </p>
<p>The poet Robert Frost once famously said that the definition of a jury is 12 people who get together to decide who has the best lawyer. Frankly, this is what the patent system has devolved to: nothing more than a football that is fought over by the lawyers, and a contest to see whose lawyers are better. </p>
<p>Besides, just think of it this way. Think about how much more funding you would be able to get for actual technical innovation if your firm didn’t have to spend so much money in hiring lawyers to defend yourself from potential lawsuits regarding patents that you had never even heard of before? Or, put another way, let’s say that one of your competitors did in fact willfully violate one of your patents on one of your alloys. Are your lawyers good enough to prove that? In other words, right now, you are facing the problem of investors being hesitant to fund your developments because they’re rightfully afraid that you may not be able to properly press your patent claims in court (because your competitor’s lawyers are better than yours). That’s a risk that all technology firms have to take.</p>
<p>Hi, I am in 8th grade and I am doing terrible in school my teachers hate me, my grades are failing, and i get in trouble to much. I have been suspended 3 times also but I’m trying to change… My goal is to go to MIT i sound a little young to be saying this but… I really want to go there… What does everyone suggest to do in high school for my start on trying to get in to MIT??</p>
<p>I took partial differential equations by my senior year, yet I was rejected. I’m at gatech now. I feel somewhat out of place. I don’t see that motivation for success, knowledge in all but a few of the students. They say Tech’s a hard school. It isn’t that hard. We just take too many students.
Lately I’ve been watching lectures from OCW; the great passion with which the professors teach, the enthusiasm that’s put in the topics is incomparable. Then again, maybe they film the best lectures.</p>
<p>I have the same dream of getting into MIT, but I also understand that there are other engineering schools other than MIT. As to the 8th grader above, just focus on school. Focus on changing and trying to do better. Do EC’s that you enjoy and have a genuine interest in, and do something you have passion for, that is the key to being competitive for MIT.</p>
<p>to the eight grader failing classes, hated by teachers, and getting suspended: give up hope.</p>
<p>to everyone else:</p>
<p>Don’t try to get in with good grades. Grades are SECONDARY. Have something–ANYTHING unique on your resume. Just find a hobby, no matter how stupid it is, and keep doing it. Get good at it. Enter competitions with it. Show you have passion for what you do, and you WILL get into MIT.</p>
<p>That’s a little harsh. Eighth grader, if you seriously turn it around and give up the attitude, you’ve got a shot.</p>
<p>To add, you <em>have</em> to have good grades to get into a selective school. You also <em>must</em> have something else to show for it, the passion that c00kie was talking about, because automatons with 4.0s and perfect SAT scores are a dime a dozen in the MIT admissions pile. You need to stand out even more. But grades aren’t secondary in that you don’t need to have good grades… You’re not that lucky!</p>
<p>how are you in algebra I as a 9th grader?? i took that in 7th grade with about 40 other 7th graders and the rest took it as 8th graders, i knew only 3 or 4 kids who took algebra as a 9th grader</p>
<p>I failed plenty of classes in middle school, and got suspended or expelled a number of times too. But I cleaned up my act in high school. I earned a 4.0 and scored a 2300 on the SAT. But MIT still rejected me. Sorry, you’re out of luck.</p>