<p>is it possible that when i go to mit, if i don’t do wellenough on my first year, they will reject me from the major i want? I want to go to mechanical as of right now, but is it possible if i’m “too stupid” that i have to switch to a different major? Also how do i know if i’m on par with the mit students? is it possible to just make it through with hard work? </p>
<p>I never did well on math competitions, does that mean my problem solving skills are not as good as mit students skills?</p>
<p>also has anyone ever failed out of mit engineering?</p>
<p>sorry for the nervousness, i’m just not sure if i really am “smart enough for mit”</p>
<p>Well, if you already made it in (which I’m assuming you have) then you’re probably already really intelligent and are just suffering from some pre-college anxiety.</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard, it’s just time management. Don’t procrastinate, work hard, and you’ll be fine. </p>
<p>Although I have heard of people flunking out of MIT.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>If you’re accepted to MIT, then the Admissions Office thinks you can do the work, and you can if you apply yourself.</p></li>
<li><p>You don’t “apply” to any majors at MIT. Once you’re in, you can do whatever you want.</p></li>
<li><p>If you can’t handle a major or it’s getting too difficult, switching to another major (even as late as junior year) requires simply a few signatures on a form.</p></li>
<li><p>“Failing out” of MIT require more than one semester of poor performance on your grades (not passing (C or lower) more than 36 credits per term). You will get put on Academic Probation first and then required to take a Leave of Absence if you continue doing poorly. You can petition to join MIT again after a Leave, but a board will have to approve your petition. Many students who “failed out” of MIT (in the sense that people usually think about “failing out”) simply never returned to school after getting a Leave.</p></li>
</ol>
Of course not. There are a lot of MIT students who don’t do well in high school contests, and a lot more who never even participated.</p>
<p>Much of the point of freshman year courses at MIT, other than to provide students with a good scientific foundation for any major, is to teach problem-solving skills. Students don’t just come to MIT magically knowing how to think and how to solve problems – that’s the point of an education at MIT, to teach you how to think. Freshman year GIRs are great equalizers for students of different backgrounds, and students from relatively weak high school backgrounds (myself included) tend to find themselves well-prepared for courses in their majors after getting through freshman year.</p>
<p>There are also folks who just don’t like math competitions - I know some, including one who has PhD in math.
Problem solving skills play into lots of things. My child displays those doing things like fixing his Rock Band drum set using ‘materials at hand’.
MIT , like all selective schools, will not admit students who are unlikely to do well. That being said, kids do flunk out/drop out. I’ve known one drop out myself who made a huge shift in interests around junior year.</p>
<p>Been a long time since I was a student at MIT, but you were never “rejected” from any major when I was there. There are general grade standards that apply across the board for all majors. So, as long as you were in school you can take any class that you meet the prerequisites for. To get a degree in any major, you have to meet the requirements of that major. </p>
<p>We had to designate a major and we would get an advisor in that major. He(she) would make sure you were making progress in that major.</p>
<p>Again, in my day, department (ie. majors) would get an allocation of funds from the school based on the number of students in that department. So, it was never in their interest to "reject’ any students from designating them as their major. </p>
<p>Could have changed, but probably not by much.</p>
<p>^ No, not by much. There are some classes you have to lottery into (like Sloan classes). When Course 20 was newer, they reserved the right to reject people because of limited resources, but to my knowledge no one ever was (and this system was removed when they knew how many students to expect).</p>
<p>*There are also folks who just don’t like math competitions - I know some, including one who has PhD in math. *</p>
<p>Enjoying research math does correlate a little poorer with math competitions than one would expect. Now, people who win the Putnam, win an IMO medal, etc are very well represented in math academia, but those are some of the highest achievers in math competitions. High achievers in math competitions very frequently will enjoy technical majors with problem solving emphasized, but actual mathematics is reasonably different, and fewer and fewer people stick with it as its nature is more completely revealed.</p>
<p>On CC, it’s frequently brought up that the MIT Admissions officers face making difficult decisions, picking a class out of literally thousands of amazing, qualified applicants. They’re most definitely not going to let someone in who can’t do it given all the others they could’ve had.</p>
<p>That’s not to say that MIT won’t be difficult, that you won’t have to push yourself, that you won’t be banging your head against psets at 3am at times. But it will certainly be possible.</p>
<p>MIT will let you change your major anytime in the first year. So you dont have to be too worried and the flunk rate of MIT isn’t significantly high. But you will definitely be under pressure because you would be studying with some of the best minds of your generation</p>
<p>Personally, I don’t think anybody with a decent set of study skills and a flexible, creative mind should do too poorly. MIT is not as hard as a lot of people make it out to be. It requires just as much discipline and hard work as high school, maybe a little more (maybe it is just me, but I didn’t feel like there was a huge jump between high school and MIT–I just applied the same study skills in high school). Also, the curves are HUMUNGOUS, so don’t fret.</p>
A lot of people, myself included, have zero discipline until the last year of high school, and many have zero discipline all throughout but start to develop habits IN MIT (where you certainly can’t go on without any study habits). As far as colleges go, MIT is probably one of the hardest. It also depends where you’re from as to how you perceive the difficulty - I believe there’s a spike for US students, but possibly not for Asians and some other countries with extremely rigorous high school programs.</p>
<p>I suppose it’s true that not everybody’s high school prepares them very well for MIT. That’s where the make-or-break comes in, and where some students decide that MIT is not for them, etc., etc. Honestly, though, MIT classes are somewhat similar to APs. If you can take 4 or 5 APs in one year (and take them seriously), then you pretty much have an idea of the rigor of MIT. </p>
<p>However, I would think that if you were admitted, you should have SOME discipline, or do admissions officers only see your talent but not your hard work?</p>