<p>I’m just curious if more students major in certain areas because they know (or have heard) that those are the strongest and most highly regarded at MIT. Are there majors that are considered “weaker” or not as highly regarded?</p>
<p>Even though it seems MIT is most known for engineering and engineering/CS, I would assume a student majoring in math or physics is still going to get an amazing education, though math and physics are less popular than the myriad of engineering majors.</p>
<p>Could there be a benefit to a student who’s majoring in one of the less popular majors in terms of smaller class size, more interactions with professors, more opportunity for research, etc?</p>
<p>Everyone I know chose their major based on interest. The only “exceptions” I can think of is someone majoring in course 18 rather than 18C to get out of a specific requirement.</p>
<p>Even though most MIT students major in engineering, the math and physics majors are still some of the most popular and MIT’s math and physics departments are extremely well regarded. Math and physics are the third and fourth most popular majors respectively after EECS and MechE. I would suspect that smaller majors would have lower class sizes and probably more interaction with professors as well.</p>
By MIT students, yes. By people outside MIT, not really. All of the science and engineering departments are highly-ranked and world-class, and most of the non-STEM departments are also really outstanding (management, economics, political science, philosophy, for example). </p>
<p>The math and physics departments in particular are among the best in the world.</p>
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The first two, definitely. The third, not as much, just because there isn’t really a shortage of UROP opportunities in any department, highly-populated or not. There are plenty of research positions to go around everywhere.</p>