Lessons of an MIT Education

The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I&#x27;m going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered.<p>Let&#x27;s take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country&#x27;s politics.<p>I suggest that a society only interested in the workings of machines rather than the workings of people will soon treat people as mere machines. Let the nightmare begin.

&gt; Lesson Six: You must measure up to a very high level of performance. I can imagine a propective student or parent asking, &quot;Why should I (or my child) take calculus at MIT rather than at Oshkosh College? Isn&#x27;t the material practically identical, no matter where it is taught, while the cost varies a great deal?&quot;<p>Is there any truth to this? Because it seem like classical university jingoism to me. &quot;My institution is better than yours.&quot; Anecdotes like &quot;All MIT graduates I&#x27;ve met were dumb&quot; or &quot;All MIT graduates I&#x27;ve met were smart&quot; does not count.<p>Because I looked at the DE course he taught (18.03) and I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education. I&#x27;m sure many other HN readers have too. I wonder if there is some test you can take to see if you are just as good as an MIT graduate?<p>The EU has done great work in this area by trying to standardize the university curriculum across the union. What that means is that a master&#x27;s degree in computer science from the university of München is mostly comparable to one from Madrid, so name-dropping your university &quot;does not work.&quot; It also means that it is trivial for a Spanish student to study one year in Germany and then come home to Spain (see Erasmus). The US system, where some colleges are rated higher than others for irrational reasons, is strictly worse.

An insightful list, but one part bugs me: the approval of working so hard you can&#x27;t stay awake. This is bad for learning, and apparently there are even experiments showing that it&#x27;s bad -- which casts an ironic light on the part of this list about demonstrably knowing things vs. bullshitting.<p>Maybe there&#x27;s a deeper reason it&#x27;s good, but I&#x27;m skeptical.

MIT is a very good school, but shouldn&#x27;t be fetishised. After several years of hiring people in the Boston area, I&#x27;ve seen just as many mediocre MIT grads as mediocre BU grads. In fact, the only person at my company to be fired for incompetence was an MIT graduate

&gt; Lesson Ten: Mathematics is still the queen of the sciences. &gt; When an undergraduate asks me whether he or she should major in mathematics rather than in another field that I will simply call X, my answer is the following: &quot;If you major in mathematics, you can switch to X anytime you want to, but not the other way around.&quot;<p>You can argue that with Physics as well. However, I have learned in my life, that there is a value in not having the option to &quot;go back&quot;. Flexibility comes at a price.

&gt; The world and your career are unpredictable, so you are better off learning subjects of permanent value.<p>I&#x27;ve been looking for a way to express this idea for years. Doing a core subject at University like Mathematics or Physics can be used in a million different careers.<p>In a similar way I&#x27;d recommend learning say Functional Programming over React or Scala.<p>Plus I guess learning Category Theory over functional programming too, although I&#x27;m not quite sure how true that is.

This was written in 1997. &quot;From the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT April 1997&quot;

&gt; Those who do not become computer scientists to the second degree risk turning into programmers who will only implement the ideas of others.<p>The horror! Maybe this was truly a terrible fate in 1997.

(Off topic)<p>&gt; Scientific biographies often fail to give a realistic description of personality, and thereby create a false idea of scientific work.<p>Any recommendations for biographies which give a realistic look into famous scientists&#x27; lives? I am reading the Einstein biography by Walter Isaacson and it&#x27;s pretty good so far.<p>Completely off topic : how do you configure a LAN to have &lt;domain&gt;&#x2F;~username urls (such as the linked post&#x27;s url) exposed to the internet? I remember having such a directory in my school&#x27;s linux network where I could place files in public or public_html (can&#x27;t remember)and other users could access it by going to &lt;internal school ip&gt;&#x2F;~myname, but it wasn&#x27;t exposed to the internet.

I liked the part about the hidden curriculums. Any idea how one would balance it with the actual one when you have plans to go to grad school?<p>For me, the hidden curriculum is in machine learning and AI. I was recently given a chance (as an undergrad) to join such company. I think this is my best chance to learn about the field in a qualitative way and possibly get my name on a research paper before I graduate with a BSc. I&#x27;d work under the supervision of Ph.D.&#x27;s in the field.<p>That being said, for my grad school efforts, I would need to keep my GPA in check, which is currently 3.2, but which would suffer a blow. My question is that does anyone have an idea whether admission boards (in private US colleges) tend to tolerate lower GPAs for whatever hidden curriculum I&#x27;ve found, given it&#x27;s still academic and aligned with the actual degree I&#x27;m applying to? I&#x27;d be applying as an international student.

&gt; It is demoralizing to give a young person role models of Beethoven, Einstein, and Feynman, presented as saintly figures who moved from insight to insight without a misstep.<p>There isn&#x27;t a single Beethoven scholar I can think of who seriously entertains the idea of Beethoven being a &quot;self-generating&quot; genius who never made mistakes.<p>Also, the Beethoven pieces that today&#x27;s composers most admire-- the late string quartets-- were almost universally shunned by actual Romantic period commentators.<p>Perhaps the Romantic Age stereotype is demoralizing to students because professors with a narrow domain expertise don&#x27;t actively seek out music history experts to revise their outdated views about the Romantic Age.

If you find these lesson interesting, there were another 10 lessons from the Rotafest: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alumni.media.mit.edu&#x2F;~cahn&#x2F;life&#x2F;gian-carlo-rota-10-lessons.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alumni.media.mit.edu&#x2F;~cahn&#x2F;life&#x2F;gian-carlo-rota-10-le...</a><p>[Prof Rota was a bit of an institution already in the 80s, when I took his probability course 18.313. The course utterly kicked my butt, and I believe him when he writes that the homework would occasionally lead to publications.]

I thought that the point of a liberal arts education was &#x27;knowing how&#x27; to live a good life, and then possibly knowing how to communicate effectively through speech and the written word.<p>One of the most cutting arguments I&#x27;ve heard from liberal arts education advocates is that STEM extremists want to turn college into a high-level trade school.

Has the course number changed? It’s not on the Open Courseware list.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocw.mit.edu&#x2F;courses&#x2F;mathematics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocw.mit.edu&#x2F;courses&#x2F;mathematics&#x2F;</a>

I quickly scanned for &quot;You will be hired at places that others are not even considered for because you are largely paying out the nose for a brand name.&quot; Didn&#x27;t find it. Lame.

I just realized that was written in 1997.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to wonder if, 20 years later, the author would change some of what he originally wrote.

Lesson zero: You don&#x27;t need an education.

Man I think I hate Ivy leagues.

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