The MIT Guide to Avoiding Burnout

http://www.zianet.com/wpickens/jokes/mit.html

by byrneseyeview • 16 years ago

158 28 16 years ago

zianet.com

aaronblohowiak• 16 years ago

The real secret sauce: sleep, variety.

inmygarage2• 16 years ago

Campus wisdom states: At MIT, you can have enough sleep, good grades, or a social life. Pick two.

The monthly three-day weekends are nice though.

storborg• 16 years ago

Worth noting to outsiders that the monthly three-day weekends are colloquially referred to as "suicide-prevention days".

alexgartrell• 16 years ago

We used to have a joke like that at CMU as well http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/djj/architectsLeap.html

Stopped being funny when someone committed suicide there

chrischen• 16 years ago

Hey that's what this harvard alum told me too.

SandB0x• 16 years ago

In a similar vein, there's a Facebook group "Oxford University: Where Your Best Isn't Good Enough, Since 1117".

yosho• 16 years ago

That's also Cornell's Facebook group

"Cornell University, where your best hasn't been good enough since 1868"

roundsquare• 16 years ago

And Also: "Cornell: Where If Your Best Hasn't Been Good Enough Since 1868 Then You Should Probably Leave"

dkasper• 16 years ago

Hypothesis: if you find that you have a balanced life you'll eventually get burned out on that too and shift the balance.

shrikant• 16 years ago

Especially if you have a 'balanced life' and nobody in your family or social circle does. (I speak from personal experience)

DenisM• 16 years ago

We need to blackhole every single one of the 55 users who upvoted this submissions. This is precisely the kind of stuff that will turn HN into digg. What's next - lolcats? Seriously?

txt• 16 years ago

KEEP YOUR SENSE OF HUMOR. Begin to bring job and happy moments into your life. Very few people suffer burnout when they're having fun.

dfield• 16 years ago

There is truth in comedy. Reading this convinced me to take a nap after working for 36 hours straight. I think it has merit.

rywang• 16 years ago

Who all on HN is at MIT right now?

Despite MIT's reputation for entrepreneurship, it's been difficult to find collaborators actually willing to take the start-up plunge--perhaps especially in grad school.

inmygarage2• 16 years ago

how long of a response do you want on this? i've got lots of theories.

i suppose you can make this argument for any top engineering school, but anyway:

1. the economy is starting to pick up - the activity on the eecs jobs list is crazy. hundreds of emails a week for any possible hott tech job you could imagine.

2. there's a pretty palpable division between the business school and the rest of campus. another topic entirely, and one that's likely been debated ad nauseam on HN.

3. people at mit are not short on opinions, and some would-be entrepreneurs have trouble handling it when someone (especially a professor they respect, for example) tells them their idea won't work. see #1, rinse, repeat.

4. there's also the whole east coast/west coast theories on startups + entrepreneurship that's relevant here as well. i wouldn't say acceptance of failure is "alive and well" on the east coast.

5. the e-center at MIT has undergone almost a complete makeover (both ideologically and physically) in the past 6 months with the new managing director, and hopefully there's more to come in the next few years.

jgavris• 16 years ago

inmygarage and i know a couple of entrepreneurial types... :P

epi0Bauqu• 16 years ago

You have to know where to hang out. Try 2w on EC.

varenc• 16 years ago

zacka, RJ...are there others? I'm an '09 5w alum now bootstrapping a startup and living in the area! Maybe I should visit 2w a bit...

cyen• 16 years ago

I've got a couple of my own theories about this -

While MIT prides itself in admitting students with passion and interests over those with 1600 (I suppose 2400, now) SAT scores, I think that the truth is that the overwhelming majority of the students who admitted are still the type to overachieve, overcommit, and - most importantly - follow the rules. To get good grades in high school, you turn in all the assignments, complete tasks (as inane as they may seem), and take the tests.

What this turns into, from my experience, is a large set of students who are not natural risk takers. What's more, I'd argue that MIT makes it or made it difficult to take risks and explore on your own. They load you down with work, pressure you into taking on a UROP (undergrad research for the uninitiated), and it's a rare student who has a significant project on the side as well.

In contrast, places like Stanford seem to encourage thinking outside of the box / trying different things. Their culture definitely doesn't seem like it slants toward loading yourself up with classes as a badge of honor, and I think that's a hugely positive effect on the ability of students to find time to dream. It feels like a cop-out answer, but I've finally admitted to myself recently that this east coast - west coast cultural divide (see inmygarage, above) does exist, and is incredibly influential.

So while the students who have left MIT and become successful are well-known and, frankly, represent, their reputation is disproportionate to their number. You don't see* MIT sophomores walking around handing out business cards for their "startup" - and I don't think it'd be such a bad thing if that changed.

* in comparison to other schools

nostrademons• 16 years ago

I'm not sure that lack of time to daydream is an east-coast/west-coast thing. Amherst is also on the east coast, and it (and I've heard many of the other "little Ivy" liberal arts colleges) encourages you to take a reasonable, balanced courseload and have time for things outside of school. I would say (based on who my friends are at Google) that Amherst and Brown are culturally much closer to Stanford than to MIT, despite being geographically clumped in New England.

The lack of a supportive environment for startups, and consequent lack of risk-taking, is an east-coast/west-coast thing. There aren't very many Amherst entrepreneurs. Most of my classmates did the minimum-wage "life experience" thing before finally going to law school when they wanted to settle down. It's like MIT encourages you to work really hard, Stanford encourages you to find your passion and then work really hard, and Amherst just encourages you to find your passion.

snikolov• 16 years ago

While there's somewhat of a culture of being "hardcore" and taking lots of classes at MIT, I find that many people abandon that mentality after their freshman year. In reality, most people are just trying to get by with the minimum 4 classes, which can already be a lot of work. The question is whether the others that have the intelligence/work ethic/time management skills/etc to take on more work are inclined to load up on more classes or take on side projects.

The answer depends a good deal on the kind of MIT subculture you live in. I live in a place where people like to build awesome things, and frankly, I feel a lot more guilty about not making enough time to hack on side projects than I do about not taking more classes.

On the other hand, in certain other dorms there are strong communities of math/cs/physics olympians, some of whom regularly take 8+ classes a semester.

jackowayed• 16 years ago

Yes, I definitely got this vibe when I visited, and that's why I applied to Stanford (and got in!) and not MIT.

I got there and I asked my host and many of his floormates how they liked MIT and the response from everyone was pretty much "I love it, but there's so much work." And my host (a freshman, which meant he should have been taking fairly easy classes and that he was taking them all pass/no record) talking about spending 8-10 hours on the average PSET for one of his classes didn't help.

I really got the impression that it would be hard for me to find significant time to hack/start a startup, which isn't ok with me.

The MIT Guide to Avoiding Burnout

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