Sugarcoating Rejection? Stop it. Be realistic.

luisarose
Sun, 17 Mar 2013 23:44:33 +0000

Quick repost of my posts from http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/massachusetts-institute-technology/1474084-rejected-mit-am-i-deprived-something-rest-my-life.html :

"I think that the “MIT experience” is really just a hard, intense, involved college life that you could get for yourself many places, but at MIT, it’s forced upon you because you HAVE to meet those high standards. And some things are more easy to do at MIT (research, internships, etc) because everyone does them. That’s one thing, but if you’re at a “lesser” school and still doing research, internships, and hard classes, it shows you took the initiative to do those things whereas all MIT students HAVE to do them.

I don’t believe that they really manufacture leaders and change makers…they just select a high-achieving, leadership-oriented group of kids and give them high expectations and LOTS of opportunities. You can find those same opportunities elsewhere, it just takes more effort.

I think that the “we teach you how to think” thing is mostly about the hard curriculum, as well as the engineering focus (problem solving, etc.) and they give problem sets (psets) as homework rather than exercises. The psets are often really difficult and require lots of thinking/collaboration – they’re not something you could copy from the back of the book. That part could definitely teach you how to think, but I do think you can learn all that elsewhere by challenging yourself."