<p>Zenkoan sounds right. I would think it’s very foolish to choose MIT if there isn’t a clear bias towards maths, science, or tech, simply because of what students have said about the culture. </p>
<p>And semesters can be long. This one feels short to me, but others have seemed very long. It’s certainly better by far to have three times to switch gears if one is figuring things out. Further, my experience is that topics taught in a semester usually go into special optional things. The streamlined courses usually are an entire year’s worth of stuff, and can be blocked out by sequences as zenkoan says. I think it’s a matter of whether people like switching it up more often (for instance, switching professors). The semester system started working for me very well precisely once I decided I knew exactly what I wanted, and wanted to spend long amounts of time learning from certain professors.</p>