MIT is Hard

This is another great post from the student bloggers on the MIT admissions site. It describes how the intensity is cranked up during sophomore year. An excerpt:

I say magic, but we actually had to go through the proof for this and I promise you, it was definitely the scariest and most overwhelming thing anybody in that class had ever seen. Ever. There was some weird partial differential equation separation of variables thing, variable substitutions in integrals, Fourier transforms, and algebra (read, witchcraft) that somehow produced this long, hellish equation containing a bazillion variables. Oh, wait, reviewing my notes, there was also something called a "Similarity transformation," an "Error Function," and an "Error Function Complement."

My favorite part was the variables. We actually ran out of variables and started to have to reuse variables we'd already used, but assign them different values. Yeah. I looked around and saw some students just sitting with their mouths open, others laughing, and still others were trying to learn but failing miserably. At the end of lecture we all just kind of sat there, dumbfounded, before standing up to leave. There's a lot of academic rigor at MIT. The classes are hard. They're totally doable, but hard.

Here's another post from the MIT Admissions blog "Work Hard, Play Hard, Work Hard Some More" that gives a freshman perspective.

If you're interested in attending MIT I highly recommend following their admissions blog. It's the best one I've found for painting a detailed picture of the student experience there.