It’s important to recognize that there are various bubbles out there in the world, and almost everyone is in one or another of them. You have to be thoughtful about when to generalize from your bubble, and when you are talking about your bubble, and when you should listen carefully to other people about their bubbles.
This thread started out asking the question why more kids interested in humanities and social sciences don’t go to MIT. That’s a very inside-a-certain-bubble question. It’s not really very useful in addressing that question to talk about how lots of the sociology majors at South Northeastern State wanted to be doctors or accountants but couldn’t hack it, or to say that you don’t really need multivariable calculus to do this or that.
Most people don’t even know what Pantone is, ha. And they live their lives unaware of how it permeates the world around us.
And many people can be math savvy (analytically, quite competent and flexible, quick to pick up and apply concepts,) without having majored in stem, taken much math in college, or even knowing what MVC is.
Any way to swing this thread back to the original topic? I’d bet MIT non-stem majors do have a quant skill set that serves them well in the niches they pursue. Great. But that’s just one path.
Long ago when my kids were applying to college, we had one professor friend at MIT in a non math/science field and his advice was that it wasn’t a great place for non math/science undergraduates. He may have been wrong. He left as soon as he could, for a university with an excellent graduate program in his field.
Similar here, alh. Professor friend moved to MIT for his personal opportunities and found it supportive, from an administrative and research perspective, but not a community of like-minded scholars. That sense of collaboration is as important in the humanities as in some of the stem fields. And similar to why many scholars prefer working in a college with a graduate dept, not just with undergrads. One’s mileage may vary.
That sounds very similar in reverse to the experiences of a couple of hardcore engineering friends.
One was a HS classmate who ended up regretting turning down MIT for Harvard DEAS as she found DEAS was treated in her words “like the neglected stepchild of FAS” during our undergrad years in the mid-late ‘90s and found our HS classmates’ puzzlement about why any aspiring hardcore engineering major with the stats to get into MIT would go to Harvard was confirmed from her undergrad experience and moreso when she went to Stanford for her engineering Masters.
Another was an older friend who attended Princeton which has one of the best engineering departments in the Ivy league and can hang with top 10 engineering schools though not quite at the tippy-top engineering/CS schools like MIT/Caltech/CMU/Stanford/Berkeley.
His experience was while he received a good education, he felt socially isolated in a campus culture centered on humanities/social science majors and was treated as a bit of an odd duck for being an engineering major. It was only when he went to MIT to do his MS and PhD in engineering that he found a critical mass of “his own people” and his enthusiastic pride about his MIT alum status was such even his closest friends assumed he went to MIT for all his degrees from undergrad to PhD.
In short, many students may not opt to attend MIT because they prefer a campus culture with a larger critical mass of students with similar academic interests than what’s available at MIT. Even with those who desire to do a double major with a STEM field such as a classmate who turned down MIT to double major in American Politics and Engineering at Stanford.
When my son applied to MIT people were falling down to advise me it was better for grad school, but undergrads were miserable. My nephew is in grad school there now and is overworked and stressed out. His professor had started out at UCSF, but moved. He liked being in SF a lot better!
I don’t know why anyone is surprised that high school students don’t realized that MIT has some good non-STEM departments. Or that even knowing there are good departments there, they worry about what the overall atmosphere will be like.
Look, let’s not put too fine a point on it. MIT has a reputation as a school that is for nerds who are brilliant but kind of “off.” Whether that is deserved or not isn’t the point; that’s what it is. Students have a lot of choices for top schools that don’t have such a stereotype surrounding it. They can go a lot of other places and experience the typical trappings of college life.
And yes, I KNOW MIT has Greek life and isn’t that Smoot bridge thing funny and yada yada.
Yes, the emphatic skills are primary in those types of jobs. But the ability to evaluate the latest research in the field (which presumably requires a reasonable understanding of statistics) and apply it to one’s work is still helpful, right?
Isn’t that what I just said? But we are still talking about basic research methods here. What it means to say something is significant at the 80% or 95% confidence level. Not necessarily being personally able to derive the proof of that.
My MIT grad kid is neither “off” nor brilliant. He just loved math and wanted to be in a place where that wouldn’t put him at the far end of some sort of bell curve.
He ended up NOT majoring in math- shows you how funny life is. And as a major in a small but highly regarded humanities department, had all the “goodies”- faculty attention, research opportunities, a summer fellowship, opportunities to publish, etc. that everyone claims you can’t get at MIT since the place is so focused on grad students.
To pivot slightly- most large corporations spend millions of dollars on training. It’s a huge amount and encompasses both hard skills (mini MBA for new grads who have never taken a finance course, things like that) and soft skills (listening, managing conflict, driving consensus).
There are three things that most folks in the training industry will tell you cannot be taught at the corporate level:
1- Basic Math. I cannot take a 25 year old who is innumerate and teach him or her the core skills of computation and basic analysis (like looking at a bar chart and telling me what is happening along the X axis).
2- Reading comprehension.
3- Empathy.
There is a module out there for pretty much everything else. We develop our own courses; we buy from universities and other adult learning organizations; we hire terrific faculty who adapt other people’s curricula- whatever it takes. And we are pretty good at training (and many other companies are even better). And we look admiringly at experts in remedial ed who can teach kids with LD’s the first two. But number 3? Even the experts in working with kids with severe spectrum disorders can teach someone to mimic empathy (like if you tell me your grandmother died, I can learn that the correct response is “I am so sorry for your loss”) but I’ve never read anything or heard anyone claim that they can teach number 3 to an adult who doesn’t have it.
@Canuckguy originally suggested that students who were capable of handling the MIT core would not want to major in the humanities or social sciences, because people choose their majors by what they can do, not what they want to do. I am sure it’s true that people who can’t do math choose majors where they don’t have to do much math. But that hardly means that no one who chooses to major in the humanities or social sciences could survive the MIT core. @Canuckguy thought differently, and at one point suggested that the reputation of elite colleges was a kind of scam by non-STEM types to convince people they were smart even if they didn’t do a lot of math.
And he didn’t seem to understand the elite colleges pretty much only take students with the sort of math ability (based on HS coursework and standardized test scores) he believes demonstrate intelligence.
It took me a while to think about that one because my experience of mathy kids at the elites is that they are some of the best mathematicians in the country, if not the world, of their age group. I had to remember that we were talking about Calculus and SAT math scores, not Putnam and such.
“. @Canuckguy thought differently, and at one point suggested that the reputation of elite colleges was a kind of scam by non-STEM types to convince people they were smart even if they didn’t do a lot of math.”
Whatever one thinks of WStreet, they ain’t stupid, and if they consistently found that their elite school hires did not have the quant skills they require for success, they’d either hire only from a subset of majors or they’d go elsewhere. They aren’t repeatedly fooled year after year.
While that is true of a critical majority of applicants…especially non-hooked ones, I’m not really sure it applies to all applicants.
Even ones within the last few years if what I’ve observed of several dozen recent Ivy graduates/current undergrads are any indication.
It still boggles the mind that there were HYP undergrad alum colleagues in past workplaces…including younger ones who needed a calculator for everything…even simple arithmetic involving multiples of 5 and 10.
And it was certainly the case with Ivy/elite u alums around my age and older considering one older undergrad classmate who is one of the most quantitatively challenged individuals I’ve encountered in my life so far was admitted to two Ivies*…and only one of them was as a legacy/developmental admit. He was admitted having only completed pre-calc by the end of his boarding school career. .
He hasn’t taken calculus and he’s very unlikely to do so considering he struggled heavily in pre-calc and with his social science grad stats course which was essentially the same type of stats course I took and had no problems with at H’s summer program despite numerous complaints from most of that class which was made up of a critical mass of H Econ majors.
From my observations, students who are admitted and attend MIT or similar schools like Caltech, CMU, Harvey Mudd, etc tend to have quant skills above and beyond those of most elite U quant-heavy STEM majors with the exceptions of folks like a few HS classmates who are genuine math geniuses, continued excelling at Harvard as hardcore math majors, and one is currently a full Prof in Math(PhD in Applied Math from NYU) at an respectable/elite U currently.
Cobrat, Brown has a very strong applied math department. Not sure what point you are trying to make. Cornell has a very strong engineering school- with some outstanding sub-disciplines. Are you really suggesting that folks studying quant heavy subjects at these schools are coasting?
No idea what sorts you work with, cobrat, or how you collect these observations, but right now, scoring above a bar in CR and M is pretty important. If your acquaintances can’t add, it’s an unusual anecdote.
I think we all agree the sorts of kids who get into Caltech and MIT can be exceptional in their skills. It simply doesn’t mean kids in other tippy tops are subpar.
This notion of some stem kids looking down on others originally came from some of your comments, I believe, cobrat.
I’m suggesting that unless the given applicant is applying specifically to engineering which is usually a separate school/division or declared a major in STEM…especially math or quant heavy ones like Physics, I think Ivy/peer elite adcoms even today are flexible enough to give allowances to aspiring humanities/social science majors whose math level hadn’t reached the level of calculus by the end of high school if they have other talents/experiences to add to a given incoming class.
As for the quant-heavy majors…my point in the prior post was that the quant level of quant-heavy STEM students on average at MIT and schools like it tend to be a cut above the already high quant level present in many Ivy*/peer elite colleges…partially because of their admission requirements (recalled reading they did require completion of calc I before admission somewhere) and partially because they target and attract students who are operating on that high level.
And in the eyes of many engineering firms and folks who have experience hiring engineers for decades such as some older relatives, they have found that while engineers at schools like Cornell, Princeton, and Columbia SEAS are great…the engineers from MIT and its engineering peers…Caltech/CMU/Stanford/Berkeley are considered on average to be a cut above. One older relative who has observed this from his decades of experience hiring engineering graduates and stated as much is himself a graduate of Columbia SEAS.
With the possible exception of engineering as with the exception of Princeton, Cornell, and Columbia, the Ivies aren't regarded as having engineering programs above and beyond many respectable public institutions and are regarded as coming up quite short in comparison to some strong public institutions...such as Georgia Tech, UMich, UIUC, etc.