<p>Honestly I learn well with good teachers & lectures/hands on types of stuff…I prefer not to self study EVERY thing. Will I survive with this attitude at MIT?</p>
<p>I like groups…if we remain focused and not go off in tangents.</p>
<p>There are lots of different types of learners at MIT, and it’s certainly possible to prefer lecture learning to reading the book and be successful at MIT. I would strongly consider myself a lecture learner, although I did get better at extracting necessary information from books and scientific papers as I progressed through MIT.</p>
<p>Would it be ridiculous to say that all MIT students are expected to be “self-learners”? It IS one of the most prestigious institutes after all.</p>
<p>If you want to see how much “self-learning” is necessary to excell at MIT, look at the MIT open courseware. I’m going through a differential equations class on my own with the MIT lectures and class book. The professor expects that every student do a LOT of required reading before the lecture, and pretty much understand most of it. This may not be TOO much “self-learning”, but it is a fair amount.</p>
<p>I certainly did not find my MIT classwork “self-taught” in any way, however, clearly there was a requirement that you come prepared to class, but the preparation was largely explained to you and clear professor-led expectations were set.</p>
<p>Mikalye-that is probably much better stated that what I said. However, I think that professors at MIT require much more of there students. I am currently taking classes at a small college near my house (west chester university), and the professors require little to none preparation for lecture, even in fairly advanced science courses. It seems that professors at MIT expect that the students do a fair amount of studying before lecture, and the professors don’t want to waste important time during lecture talking over the expected pre-lecture reading.</p>
<p>For nearly all of my science classes, I think the professor clarified what was likely to be on the exams and explained everything in a broad comprehensive manner. Then, you’re expected to go home and fill in the gaps in your knowledge on your own through assimilating hte course materials.</p>
<p>self learning skills will never fail you</p>
<p>I think self-teaching is an incredibly valuable skill. If you can’t teach yourself, you will always be limited in what you can learn (by what people around you are learning). I went to a small high school without many opportunities, but I self-studied 7 AP exams (in addition to the ones I took classes for). I taught myself physics well enough to test out of 8.02. If I hadn’t been able to teach myself, I wouldn’t have been able to go beyond what my high school offered…and I probably wouldn’t have been admitted to MIT. If you attend a very academic high school with tons of opportunities, self-teaching is not so important. Since MIT has an absurd amount of opportunities, self-teaching is definitely not required to be successful, since there will almost always be people you can learn from/with. </p>
<p>However, self-learning is always a useful thing, even at MIT. I took a lot of classes and had pretty bad lecture attendance, but I still did pretty well due to my ability to learn from books. Self-learning has also been very useful in research, since I am not a lab/experimental person and prefer to do design/computational/theory work fairly independently. Needing to have someone explain concepts would slow me down a lot.</p>
<p>In short, although self-teaching is a valuable skill and can often make life easier, it is not essential to succeed at MIT.</p>