What can we tell you that will help you make your decision?

mathboy98
Thu, 13 May 2010 23:02:31 +0000

I’ve heard some negative things about MIT’s class sizes and freshman experience - for example, some profs that are brilliant but are not very good teachers and are more focused on their own research. Do you have any negative experiences with this? Anything to contradict this?



Not an MIT student, but I do have a comment on this very line of thinking -

a) I don’t think there is a direct tradeoff between teaching and research, given professors are used to having to do some teaching anyway, and big classes take a substantial degree of energy to teach. Some professors care, and others don’t that much, to do it well, but it’s going to take them some time anyway, and to think every ounce of extra effort in the classroom takes away from research is a little simplistic an assessment. Plenty of exceptional researchers who care find the energy to give a good course. You just have to look out for who these are. This goes for any great research school.

Now, professors needn’t have been chosen for their teaching abilities, but you will find that well-spoken researchers can often teach quite well. Importantly, they know what’s crucial to master for the future professional/researcher.

b) A friend who graduated from Dartmouth definitely didn’t make it seem that everything was super undergraduate-focused, not to the point where I’d make this a huge point in favor of the school, even if MIT is less so by some definition of “less so”. I’m sure MIT is the type of school where you have to seek out opportunities on your own, and the profs hopefully will assume you’re to some degree competent and worth spending time on.

c) If a big-name researcher doesn’t find you that interesting to mentor, you may just want to consider that you don’t know anything at all, and might want to ask them what to learn for the future, train yourself, and then expect more attention, if you want things like independent projects with them.

All this said, the regular posters like Mollie seem to have gotten involved in projects very early as lowerclass(wo)men. My main point apart from any info they’ll give you on how availabe professors can be to help you is that when you’re dealing with star professionals, you should expect there to be unfriendly ones and friendly ones, and know that it’s boring to mentor someone who hasn’t taken significant initiative to figure basic things out. I.e. I doubt many will want to spoon-feed. On the other hand, if you want to bring yourself up to speed and ask profs about your future learning, fully acknowledging you don’t know much, they probably will help.

Why do I bring this last point up? A significant number of posts which deal with the issue of undergraduate attention somehow seem to suggest undue focus on graduate students. A lot of graduate students have slogged through the very process I mentioned of bringing themselves up to speed, and have years of experience, plus they’ve made a commitment to research a topic for a long time. Their goals are often quite simply different, and I find the very idea that one batch can draw attention away from another batch a little strange, since the commitments are fundamentally different. Sometimes I want to ask people who make this point and/or raise this sort of question - do you really, actually know what you’re asking?? What, so you asked a professor that you wanted to work with them on something, and they said they didn’t have any good openings for you, but they had some senior grad student working on the same stuff. Perhaps they weren’t convinced you’d find the position meaningful. Similarly, say a professor was unenthusiastic when you visited him/her in office hours. Does one conclude that this was because there are graduate students sucking away his/her life and energy, and draining their enthusiasm for talking to you?

Note - I am not saying you’re making these assumptions, but I think all these points should be disposed of, since they keep rearing their heads.