Should You (Want to) Attend MIT?
Last week, I shared my perspective that MIT probably teaches engineering less well than RPI, WPI, Georgia Tech, etc. Whenever I give this rant, my students ask me: “So… if I get into MIT, should I go?”
Yes, if you’re MIT-smart. Certainly, the MIT brand does a lot for you, and it is a tragedy that one has to slog through 4 years of university to prove one is smart, when the university admissions officers can already decide whether you’re smart before you show up. But in our current reality, graduating from a top university confers the brand, and it will help you.
The MIT network is also powerful. If you spend 4 years learning and having fun with the smartest people in the world, you’ll graduate with friends who are going to go on to do great things. I’ve had some wonderful collaborations with MIT grads (and current undergrads!). I would not have gotten that caliber of network from WPI.
But if you’re not MIT-smart, “sneaking into” MIT is a bad idea, for two reasons:
You’ll get clobbered – it is actually a very difficult curriculum
You won’t build a network
The first point is obvious: you’ll struggle tremendously. 6% of MIT students drop out, and 30% take ages to graduate. Being one of those students will not serve you.
The second point is more subtle, and very important. Many MIT grads will say that they learned the most from their peers. They learned the most between classes, building roller coasters, developing makeshift explosives, engineering robots, getting involved with the Entrepreneurship Club, having late-night arguments about string theory, all that. If your brain works the way other undergrads’ brains do, you’ll be able to handle your classes and do all this. And when you’re with those peers, you’ll be able to keep up.
If you’re not MIT-smart (or, frankly, MIT-weird), you won’t synchronize with the MIT students. You won’t be their peer, and they’ll know it. You won’t have much to add to the Motorsports Club or the slightly-drunk Saturday night “let’s use some Arduinos to build sensors on the bathroom stalls to tell you remotely if one is free.” You will therefore not really build a relationship with those groups. Even though you’re on campus, you won’t get the network. Furthermore, you’ll be struggling so much with your classes, that the thought of joining MIT Motorsports will only enter your mind as a self-pitying story of what you can’t have. Imagine, you could have been at GA Tech, crushing your classes and building race cars!
The worst place to be in your college career is the bottom 5% of the class: you’re academically struggling, emotionally miserable, and not able to keep up with peers. I saw these folks at MIT and, indeed, they suffered. Don’t do it.
Instead, go to a school where you’re an intellectual peer of the student body. Got a 1200 SAT? Go to a school with a median 1200 SAT, not a median 1550. You’ll graduate, you’ll learn, you’ll enjoy it, and you’ll develop a network by doing cool stuff and learning with them.
University prestige unfortunately matters, but it does not translate into better teaching or a better home for you personally. The prestige matters at the very top, and everywhere else, it’s mostly irrelevant as soon as you have your first job: after that, what you do matters. The tech company I founded was cofounded and led by a materials science grad from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. MIT grads were a minority of our early hires, in part because many of those I knew lacked emotional intelligence. We recruited people who had demonstrated they can do great work on teams, take initiative, be nimble, embrace some chaos and failure. School doesn’t teach that.
If you have a 1580 SAT, great grades, and a little bit of weirdness, go apply to MIT, and consider asking me for a reference. If not: find the school that’s right for you. I know this is hard to believe from your side, but I know from experience: the top graduates of GA Tech are happier and doing better than the bottom grads from MIT who slogged through in 6 years.
