|
|
|
|
|
|
by JustLurking2022
1553 days ago
|
|
|
I toured MIT and didn't apply because I got the distinct sense my tour guide was miserable there. I didn't really know the importance attached to elite schools at the time, and ended up going to a top 25 school that I considered my top choice. However, one of my siblings ended up going to MIT, and I can safely say had access to a variety of career opportunities that just weren't on the table at the school I attended - not because the students were smarter (I know several of my classmates and I had better test scores than my sibling), but MIT has a tremendous brand. Part of that is likely due to the rigor - I will admit, my sibling got challenged more and had to work a lot harder in college than I did. At my school, it was very possible to excel academically and still have a very active social life. I knew several people who completed the author's plan, going to an elite school for grad studies. In liberal arts, I've seen it work reasonably well to be top of the class at a good but not Ivy League school, rather than middle of the pack at an Ivy. For engineering, it seems like it's more about working with well connected professors to get into competitive grad programs, and that is more likely to happen at MIT than other schools. As a reference, my top 25 CS program had 1 professor whose resume matches anyone in the business, but that was it, whereas at MIT you would have many more potential recommenders with a ton of pull. It's hard for me to say what I would have done in retrospect, but those 4 years of undergrad can certainly alter the trajectory of the next 40 years of a career. |
|
|
MIT's policy for granting tenure which is enforced in part by the relevant Visiting Committee, is that you don't get it unless you're #1 or #2 in your subfield, and sometimes #3.
Which brings up that part of MIT governance, a variety of areas beyond departments and special institutions like the Media Lab have a Visiting Committee that regularly physically visits and talks to the stakeholders, including students for what was once one office for them. It's a critical part of maintaining the overall quality of the Institute, is by no means unique to the Institute although I don't know if it's used as widely in a lot of other universities.
Per https://corporation.mit.edu/committees/visiting-committees they were established 10 years after the real start of MIT (the Civil War broke out two days after it got chartered), there are 30 including for "the Libraries, the offices of the Dean for Student Life and the Dean for Undergraduate Education, and Sponsored Research."
OK, MIT's general library is small and thus subpar, and in the 1980s MIT paid Harvard a million dollars a year to give the humanities professors access to its stacks, but I'll comment the one for "Management & Social Sciences" was excellent back then for the latter topic.
BUT, the OP is an enterprising fellow, he could make a point of befriending one or more Harvard students, plenty are good people and interested in STEM, and you can help him do some research in their huge libraries and get some of this in return, or as I did do this on topics we were both interested in. I can attest that Harvard's general, law, and medical libraries are every bit as good as advertised. Which brings up the general advantage of the Boston area, it's "the Athens of America," there's real advantages to that.