#1 ［转自Quora］Is getting into MIT worth it?
发表于 ： 2024年 8月 21日 11:50
Is getting into MIT worth it?
Felix Schmidt (Studied at MIT)
I went to MIT and if I could give myself an advice in doing it over again it would have been: “take it easy”. MIT recruits extremely talented kids, and also some kids that simply are a few years ahead in their educational process. What I mean is that once you get there, some of your colleagues are at a Junior-Senior year level when you might be struggling with your freshmen classes. You need to take it easy, discover who you are and what you can do, and MIT offers all the tools and the time for you to excel. Undergrads at MIT have an arrogant petulant attitude of being “smart” and taking advanced over-complicated courses early on. Two of the most successful people who went to MIT the same time I did were normal students who took the normal classes at their own pace and they are now incredibly successful people. While other students were trying to show off and take miserable over-complicated versions of the institute requirements, these two girls took their time, step by step: one is the founder of a successful company and the other a famous personality at NASA.
Go to MIT, but take it easy. And USE MIT early on. Use MIT’s network to do internships in industry and so on: MIT is awful at helping unemployed alumni, so build your network early on. In other words, build your bridges while at MIT: you will do yourself a huge favor in the future. One advice: don’t UROP in summers, instead get industry internships. UROPs are “Undergraduate Research Oportunities” where you work in the labs of the fancy professors. Do those during the semester or over IAP. If you are in engineering, please use your summer in a real company.
For some more negative considerations.
If you can go to a good technical university in Europe, I have news for you: it’s the same level, you will be as good as MIT engineers and scientists or whatever without paying an unjustifiable fee for it. At the undergraduate level, there is no reason to “go to MIT” besides wanting to do so. If you want to go to MIT: do it - don’t rationalise it.
A few critical observations. MIT has a bad habit of butchering some of its traditional fields because of how professors are recruited. A Professor at MIT is at the very top of his buzzword-dominated niche in research. It so happens that such people are not necessarily equipped or experienced to teach students anything about how an automobile operates, how steel is produced, how a bridge is structured and so on. For example, I was at MIT when they terminated course 13: Naval Engineering. If you want to be a Naval Engineer, the answer is easy - don’t go to MIT. If you want a solid education in mining and metallurgy, you are better off in the Colorado School of Mines, don’t bother with a place like MIT. This seems to not be an issue in Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry, but does affect the engineering departments. Your MechE professor at MIT probably never stepped foot in industry, doesn’t know how a screw is produced but he is churning papers in Nature and Science about the mechanical behaviour of red blood cells. This person will try to teach you Mechanical Engineering…it’s something to think about.
It’s a good school, I spent some of my happiest years there. But don’t fall in the trap of comparing yourself to the Wunderkinder they recruit and stay vigilant of how MIT can help you in the real world rather than focusing on the MIT bubble itself.
Felix Schmidt (Studied at MIT)
I went to MIT and if I could give myself an advice in doing it over again it would have been: “take it easy”. MIT recruits extremely talented kids, and also some kids that simply are a few years ahead in their educational process. What I mean is that once you get there, some of your colleagues are at a Junior-Senior year level when you might be struggling with your freshmen classes. You need to take it easy, discover who you are and what you can do, and MIT offers all the tools and the time for you to excel. Undergrads at MIT have an arrogant petulant attitude of being “smart” and taking advanced over-complicated courses early on. Two of the most successful people who went to MIT the same time I did were normal students who took the normal classes at their own pace and they are now incredibly successful people. While other students were trying to show off and take miserable over-complicated versions of the institute requirements, these two girls took their time, step by step: one is the founder of a successful company and the other a famous personality at NASA.
Go to MIT, but take it easy. And USE MIT early on. Use MIT’s network to do internships in industry and so on: MIT is awful at helping unemployed alumni, so build your network early on. In other words, build your bridges while at MIT: you will do yourself a huge favor in the future. One advice: don’t UROP in summers, instead get industry internships. UROPs are “Undergraduate Research Oportunities” where you work in the labs of the fancy professors. Do those during the semester or over IAP. If you are in engineering, please use your summer in a real company.
For some more negative considerations.
If you can go to a good technical university in Europe, I have news for you: it’s the same level, you will be as good as MIT engineers and scientists or whatever without paying an unjustifiable fee for it. At the undergraduate level, there is no reason to “go to MIT” besides wanting to do so. If you want to go to MIT: do it - don’t rationalise it.
A few critical observations. MIT has a bad habit of butchering some of its traditional fields because of how professors are recruited. A Professor at MIT is at the very top of his buzzword-dominated niche in research. It so happens that such people are not necessarily equipped or experienced to teach students anything about how an automobile operates, how steel is produced, how a bridge is structured and so on. For example, I was at MIT when they terminated course 13: Naval Engineering. If you want to be a Naval Engineer, the answer is easy - don’t go to MIT. If you want a solid education in mining and metallurgy, you are better off in the Colorado School of Mines, don’t bother with a place like MIT. This seems to not be an issue in Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry, but does affect the engineering departments. Your MechE professor at MIT probably never stepped foot in industry, doesn’t know how a screw is produced but he is churning papers in Nature and Science about the mechanical behaviour of red blood cells. This person will try to teach you Mechanical Engineering…it’s something to think about.
It’s a good school, I spent some of my happiest years there. But don’t fall in the trap of comparing yourself to the Wunderkinder they recruit and stay vigilant of how MIT can help you in the real world rather than focusing on the MIT bubble itself.
