<p>
Aerospace engineering is a particularly interesting one to pick for the purposes of this discussion, because it’s pretty universally agreed to be difficult even by MIT standards.</p>
<p>Aero/astro has a class, Unified Engineering*, that all aero/astro sophomores take, and which crams most of a normal sophomore and junior aero/astro courseload into two jam-packed semesters. This class is officially 24 units, which means that it’s supposed to require 24 hours of class, lab, and homework each week. Realistically, most students spend 40-50 hours a week on Unified, and sometimes more. There’s a lot of work, and it’s difficult work, and although everybody is doing problem sets together in the aero/astro lounge until the wee hours of the morning, everybody is still doing problem sets. </p>
<p>My husband was aero/astro, and he was the valedictorian of his high school class, blah blah blah, very smart and madly in love with airplanes. He is still madly in love with airplanes, and is an absolutely outstanding aerospace engineer, but there were times during undergrad when we went a full week without having substantive conversations or going to bed at the same time because we were both so busy.** He is very, very smart, and got fairly good grades at MIT, but he had to work to do it.</p>
<p>Importantly, though, there is very little work at MIT that’s busy work, or easy work in large volumes. The point of most MIT problem sets is to teach you how to solve problems, and the problems are neither easy nor pointless. The work is hard, but you will become educated whether you like it or not. If you’re the kind of person who will thrive at MIT, you will like it, even if you pretend not to sometimes.</p>
<p><em>Classes that are referred to by name rather than by number are generally Bad News.
*</em>Spoiler alert: This also happens post-MIT. Unfortunately, smart person careers like engineering and science tend to be life-consuming, and tend to be more like callings than careers.</p>