MIT students open up about stress

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/16/mit-students-open-about-stress/dS61oA5tiKqjvVsJ5VZRAL/story.html

by danso • 11 years ago

149 94 11 years ago

nugget2• 11 years ago

MIT alum from the early 00s here. MIT was a stressful place. Much of that stress was self-imposed, and in an environment full of ambitious, intensively competitive over achievers, it can start to create a negative vibe. Turns out, this was good preparation for real life in the competitive fields that many of us chose.

The MIT administration at that time, to their credit, let students do pretty much whatever they wanted - take time off, re-take failed classes, reschedule exams, get special accommodations when needed, whatever. If you asked for help, they helped you. Lots of career admin and support staff who would bend over backwards to make miracles happen. I have never before or since encountered a more supportive administrative environment and it's that experience that will endear me to the Institute forever.

leoh• 11 years ago

I went to Columbia. We had nothing like this. Unsupportive admins. You couldn't retake classes necessarily. It was an awful environment. Props to MIT.

tricolon2• 11 years ago

While the campus plays host to protests, anti-protests, and anti-anti-protests on what seems like a weekly basis, the entire student body manages to agree on one thing: the administration is terrible. At their best, they are unhelpful. At their worst, negligent.

_sword• 11 years ago

But we did have the prestige of being consistently ranked the most stressful school!

kelukelugames• 11 years ago

I remember the school gave us random days off. They were called Stress Days or something like that. We also had free psychiatric care. I took advantage of it because I was very curious. So for an hour every week, I bitched to poor Edward about people who always told shitty jokes. I was definitely not in a happy place. Became depressed and just stopped caring. It got to the point where my adviser told me to stop fucking around.

Then I quit after my masters and got a job. Having money is so much better than living off of a stupid stipend. Fuck grad school! Wooo!!!

madcaptenor2• 11 years ago

Class of '05. When I was there I heard the random days off called "suicide prevention days".

peter_l_downs• 11 years ago

The administration has been a lot more fucked up recently. Current student wisdom blames it on Columbo, who came from Columbia, and seems to have brought a lot of his shitty policies with him. Nightline has been shut down, medical isn't 24/7 anymore, dorm culture is under attack, etc.

nugget2• 11 years ago

Sorry to hear that. I don't know Columbo but I just looked up his bio and he seems to be a more conventional type of administrator who spent almost two decades at Columbia. Why MIT would recruit someone like that from outside the community, and for such an influential position, I don't know - unless he really believed in and embraced MIT's values. Ultimately it's up to you and other current students to keep the open minded hacker culture alive, and on I hope the more the admins try to interfere the more determined and creative you become (another important lesson for the real world).

hkmurakami• 11 years ago

Do you know what the treatment of students with mental disorders was like?

I'm appalled at how schools like Harvard and Princeton [1] (my alma mater) treat students with psychological challenges (effectively kicking them out) and am wondering what MIT is like in that regard.

[1] I understand their logic that the student is a thread to their own health and other students' well being, but their heavy handedness is revolting to me.

DanBC3• 11 years ago

Aren't they protected under disability protection laws?

Thriptic• 11 years ago

I'm appalled at how schools like Harvard and Princeton [1] (my alma mater) treat students with psychological challenges (effectively kicking them out)

I'm currently at MIT now as a grad student. The notion that MIT is kicking out students who have mental health problems is a common refrain I hear from undergrads; the thought process being that MIT is trying to limit the on campus suicide rate by driving people out. I have even heard people say they suspect that medical shares psych records with the administration without their permission, which is completely untrue and illegal. I can't speak to whether MIT actually kicks people out for mental health issues (I doubt it) but the fact that this is even a commonly held belief is deeply troubling and counter productive.

I love MIT, but they need to get their shit together and be more transparent about their process in dealing with people who have mental health issues.

kchoudhu• 11 years ago

Princeton at least is one good HIPAA lawsuit away from a scandal. When I had issues, I went off campus -- to New Brunswick -- to get help and avoid the additional stress of dealing with the administration.

neltnerb3• 11 years ago

I have personally known people effectively kicked out of MIT for years because they admitted to being depressed.

astazangasta2• 11 years ago

MIT alum from the early 00s here. The administration did very little to make mental health services available to students, did its best to cover up rather than face issues, and generally seemed not to give a shit about students' stress, which is why it had the highest suicide rate in the country. People would joke about how the school colors were "blood and concrete" because of people killing themselves jumping off tall buildings on campus, which happened frequently. My personal experience, when I had a rough early semester, included no offer of mental health services although I was severely depressed, although an administrator did advise me my academic career was over thanks to my poor performance and I would never get into grad school. I suppose this is good prep for a world full of bitter, uncaring, unfeeling people. MIT was a great place in many ways, but this was not one of them.

xxxyy• 11 years ago

Did you consider seeing a psychiatrist outside the school? Depression is absolutely not specific to MIT students.

gumby• 11 years ago

MIT alum from 1980s here (and former nightline staffer). I am disappointed to hear that NL shut down. We did get non-MIT callers, but the fact that we had dormline (probably doesn't exist any more either -- student-run internal phone system) and no mobile phones limited its reach. There were some horrible suicides back then too, and pretty much everyone had at least one all nighter per week. If I remember the Institute had pretty good mental health services for its time, though I doubt it had free, indefinite length psychotherapy or everyone would have been on it.

But despite the grind I had a really really good time. Perhaps it was because I was (AFAICT) in the bottom half of my (tiny) high school so showed up never worrying about how I was doing compared to other students.

The Institute, at least back then, was impersonal and basically uninterested in undergraduates (not anti-, just didn't care). For me that was liberating: I could take classes in pretty much any department, and if my transcript was a mix of 5.0 and 3.0 that was OK since I was learning a shitload every day. As an undergrad I got to take a lot of graduate seminars and I got to spend a LOT of time in the lab (a majority of my last two years).

stdbrouw• 11 years ago

Turns out, this was good preparation for real life in the competitive fields that many of us chose.

I wonder if this is self-reinforcing. When you're used to huge amounts of stress from school, it seems natural that companies will try to take advantage of that and simply start expecting more. Or when graduates from such schools get into positions of management, they might not even see that what they're asking of people is not healthy, because it's become perfectly normal for them. But it's a zero-sum game. How long before it spirals out of control, if it hasn't already?

tomp• 11 years ago

I'm not so sure about that. Some careers are simply known to be very stressful - for example most transactional work (investment banking, corporate lawyers, accounting consulting). It is self-reinforcing in the sense that each company has to keep up with the competition, but I believe that would happen regardless of the level of stress students experience in school. Personally, I have managed to avoid such environments, but for some people, that's the easiest, fastest and least risky way to success.

Fuxy• 11 years ago

Is it weird that I don't get this at all.

I've never been competitive and no exam has ever driven me to tears.

Everything I've learned was self thought and I took it at my own pace which is way slower than academia requires but that gave me the opportunity to delve deeper and answer my own questions.

I don't care about competing with my peers I just want to see cool things and have fun building cool things with other people.

That's probably why stress never gets to me and I never push my self into psychological hell hole.

I've done it once when I was a student and I never want to go back to that and I'm certainly not going to accept an employer pushing me to that.

I would rather quit.

pdonis3• 11 years ago

Much of that stress was self-imposed

This was true when I was at MIT in the mid-80s as well. I agree it can help you to develop skill in dealing with pressure that will be useful in later life, but there's a fine line between that and beating yourself up for no good reason, and it's not always easy to see where the line is.

The administration when I was there was supportive once you asked for help, but you had to ask. I did not see much proactive effort to try to spot people who were having trouble but hadn't asked for help. There's a fine line there, too, of course.

wahsd• 11 years ago

Do you realize the self-fulfilling nature of the system you describe? It seems somewhat recursive to rationalize that the nature and environment you experienced at MIT was a good preparation for "real life", when the "real life" was also populated by equally damaged and self-harmed individuals. It's kind of an obsessive-compulsive abusive cycle that really isn't necessary, but no one knows how to break out of because, as you state, there is a belief that it is a "good preparation for real life".

It's really a bit of a hugely larger social and cultural issue, our willingness to work ourselves do the bone, with utter disregard for well being; all driven by anxiety and obsessive thinking.

neltnerb3• 11 years ago

MIT alum from '05 here.

1) I disagree entirely that this is good preparation for most people. Maybe if you go into academia, but not for the vast majority of graduates. In what I see as the real world, the ability to self-regulate your work load (which is a learned skill) and not fall into the trap of fetishizing working ridiculously hard is critical for long term stability. And I say this as someone who finished my PhD at 26. I didn't do it by working in unhealthy ways, and I sure didn't do it by doing every assignment I was given regardless of cost to my mental health. I did it by working healthy and asking for help when I needed it.

2) Surely you're aware of what happens to any undergraduate in our era who admitted to the administration that they were depressed. I have seen a dozen people shuffled off to McLean or just kicked out for years until they could convince MIT to let them back in. In all but one case I think MIT overreacted and significantly damaged those individual's lives by isolating instead of supporting them.

3) I think the biggest issue wrt stress is that undergraduates compete for who has the worst workload. I see it again and again, and it is insane to me. I honestly think a good portion of undergrads, either intentionally or subconsciously, practice horrible work habits just so that later on they can boast about how they finished a 40 hour lab in a three day no-sleep stretch. You know you've seen it too.

4) Depression != Stress. Admitting you're depressed is already hard. Admitting you're depressed when everyone around you is stressed out is a whole other level.

Taek• 11 years ago

My school (RPI) did something similar with me. I went to health services and asked for help with regards to my mental health. They told me that I needed to drop out and take a full semester off, then attend a community college and consider coming back in a year.

I refused to do this, and they refused to treat me. (I graduated a year later with high honors and a job offer from Google.)

kimbo305• 11 years ago

I have seen a dozen people shuffled off to McLean or just kicked out for years until they could convince MIT to let them back in. In all but one case I think MIT overreacted and significantly damaged those individual's lives by isolating instead of supporting them

can you list some examples? I had to see a Medical Center counselor (who I didn't like that much) for therapy for a couple semesters, but in general I thought the support offered was well-intentioned and appropriate.

You know you've seen it too.

I saw some of that ('06), but always thought those people were idiots.

Anechoic2• 11 years ago

This article perfectly summed up my experience at MIT.

As the article hints, the competitive nature of the student body is a double-edged sword - it helps push you further than you think you're capable of, but it can also push you beyond your breaking point. In a lot of cases, it's a fine line.

To any MIT students reading this:

1) You deserve to be there. Really.

2) You are not alone (read Pepper White's "The Idea Factory" if you don't believe me).

3) Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength.

4) Failing is not the end of the world.

5) Unless you are going to war or face a diagnosis of a terminal disease, everything else after MIT is easy. It gets better.

Please take care of yourselves. Take a break, decompress, have a little fun. The world is a better place with you all in it.

RIP Fes-Mike http://tech.mit.edu/V113/N3/martinez.03o.html

bootload2• 11 years ago

@Anechoic, I'm sorry for your loss.

Anechoic2• 11 years ago

Just for full disclosure, I wasn't close to Fes-Mike, but we lived in the same dorm (New House, I was New House 3, he was Spanish House 2 floors above my room), but we crossed paths a number of times in the halls and he always made time to wave and greet me. I was/am friends with people who were close to him, and the devastation they experienced when we all learned what happened was unforgettable. And to cap it off, some friends and I had to talk a classmate out of committing suicide a little while later.

Overall I enjoyed my experience at MIT, but there were a few soul crushing moments in my time.

choppaface• 11 years ago

Also went to a tech school with similar problems. Depression is an infection of the student's motivation and reason; it's a fixation with the thesis that one is destined to doom. I think the main problem here is that school admins often want to yank problem students for everybody's safety rather than effect policy change that improves livelihood. The latter requires being good at politics, and the leaders who are good at politics usually spend most their time raising money and opening opportunities for the students who aren't struggling. When the chancellor gets involved like this, the admins have failed horribly.

My senior year I took fewer classes and exercised 5x more than ever. I was the happiest I had ever been and had my only straight-A year. I'd advocate tech school admins adopt at least two changes:

1. Professors rarely share stories of their own failures as well as stories of students who failed. The classes should cover not only the consequences of doing well (i.e the key ideas and contributors to the topic) but also the consequences of doing poorly. Evidence and analysis of failure helps debunk convictions to hopelessness

2. "Work-life" balance can be very difficult to achieve in college for a variety of reasons. MIT requires students to pass a swim test, but this is hardly a mandate that students maintain a reliably supportive extracurricular (e.g. sports, art, community involvement etc). Pass-fail should be replaced and/or complimented with a requirement to commit weekly hours to an alternate activity so that students diversify themselves.

Pass-fail can help, but there's a ton of value in having brutally rigorous courses (even if they inspire inordinate competition). It's not useful to make the programs softer but rather make students aware of the realistic (and certainly non-gloomy) consequences of not getting As.

hharnisch2• 11 years ago

It's not just MIT, it's pretty much any college with a 4 year engineering program. Almost everyone of my classmates took at least an extra semester or summer classes. 2/3 of the Freshman class dropped out (most of them to business school). A few schools have switched over to 5 year programs. Not everyone is cut out for an engineering degree and that's perfectly fine. Yes it's hard, but when you find that one thing you fall in love with you never give it up... That's when you graduate.

madisonmay3• 11 years ago

I disagree with this sentiment. Suicide rates this high are not acceptable side effects of simply studying engineering. Yes, it's typically a tough program, but action needs to be taken to address a deeper issue. It's the intense pressure to succeed in an environment where stress is worn as a badge of honor that creates these issues, not the academic rigor of studying science/engineering.

hharnisch2• 11 years ago

These disciplines attract a certain type of personality and are often people of high intelligence. Suicide rates among these cohorts is elevated to begin with. I don't know if it's enough to make up for an extra 4 per 100,000, but I can't help but wonder.

pokpokpok• 11 years ago

engineering school environments can be very toxic. I think that for the most part it's possible to cover their amount of content in 4 standard years, but there needs to be changes in the structure of constant bewilderment and test taking

madisonmay3• 11 years ago

If you're interested on a radical new take on engineering education, take a look at Olin College of Engineering. It's not perfect, but it's a move in the right direction -- Olin has traded strict competition for teamwork, tests and exams for project-based learning, and has gone a long way towards removing the stress associated with many other engineering schools. It's a sort of institutional petri dish, and I'm curious to see how many of the principles put in place at this smaller institution are applied in more common settings.

paganel• 11 years ago

engineering school environments can be very toxic

I still have very intense school-related nightmares from time to time, even though I'm now in my mid-30s. I decided to drop-out in my last year of CS school, but before that almost any joy of attending my school lectures or studying for its exams had been killed off inside of me (luckily enough for me I discovered PHP and Python during my student years in my free time, which gave me back the joy of building and discovering things).

aceperry• 11 years ago

"It's not just MIT, it's pretty much any college with a 4 year engineering program"

Not at all. I went to a school when engineering was in high demand, and most of the students seemed to be in the program mainly because of the abundance of jobs. Most of the students seemed to disdain people who were really interested in technology and science. Most of the instructors were demoralized by the low quality of the students and had a lot of contempt for the students. It was hard to find a lab partner who could do the work. Most students seemed to be slackers and disparaged students who tried to do things outside of class. The administration was uncaring as well. It was a shitty experience and I had always been envious of the MIT, CalTech, and Berkeley students. I have a lot more respect for the grads from those schools than from my school.

auxym• 11 years ago

Don't thind that's true. My 4 year program was definitely very challenging. It was tough, there was a lot of pressure to achieve Great Things (culture and history of large, successful student projects).

There were no suicides. And that's in the canadian province (excluding territories) with the highest suicide rate, especially for young men. I did hear about one person who collapsed during an end-of-semester presentation. From stress and exhaustion, I'm assuming.

My theory is that it's because the atmosphere was very much more cooperative than competitive. No one was competing for grades, it wasn't rare to have the whole class helping each other out before exams. There was no grading on a curve, and I think most people realized that at the end of the day grades were not really that important to get a job. Turns out I wish I had realized that they were important to get scholarship money in grad school, but hey, at least I had fun working on awesome projects (while fucking up on exams).

From the campus talk, it seems the Medicine program had it way harder. Very competitive to get into specialties or whatever. There definitely were suicides one in a while.

ef4• 11 years ago

Class of '03. I certainly saw a lot of classmates under unhealthy levels of stress. But to add some counterpoint, it's not universal.

I think the biggest source of the pain is not MIT itself, it's the way many high schools -- even "good" ones -- fail to prepare students. Learning for mastery is very different from studying for the test. You can get straight A's in high school just studying for the test, so unless some outside force or quirk of personality drives you to work for mastery, you never learn how.

That won't cut it at MIT. So a lot of people discover to their horror that they never actually learned how to master hard material, and they have catching up to do.

I felt well prepared, and I certainly wasn't the only one. Which is actually one of the sources of the stress: the students who are struggling can look around and see others who are not.

madisonmay3• 11 years ago

I think part of it is also the big fish, little pond --> little fish, big pond phenomenon. When high school teaches you to define yourself as intelligent, academic, and driven and then you're placed in an environment where everyone else has developed a similar set of character traits and amassed a similar collection of academic achievements, I think students suffer a bit of an identity crisis. All of the sudden very key components of one's character are the norm, and the transition is far from easy.

WalterBright2• 11 years ago

I attended Caltech, which is an equally high pressure school. But being around lots of smart and highly motivated people made for a great deal of fun, too. There were always interesting conversations to drop in on, and amazing projects people were working on just for fun.

Yes, we got pushed, hard. But it is amazing how much one can learn when pushed.

xvedejas• 11 years ago

Unfortunately the Caltech administration over the past four years hasn't made things easier. Banning benign traditions and kicking people out of their houses for no reason doesn't help with the stress levels.

WalterBright2• 11 years ago

I graduated over 35 years ago, and nothing stays the same. But I'd be sad if it was materially different.

reuven• 11 years ago

I went to MIT, and graduated in 1992. A well-known saying at MIT is "work hard, play hard" -- meaning that you're going to work like crazy to do well in class, and then when it comes to extracurriculars and sports, you're also going to work like crazy to win.

The positive side is that in such an atmosphere, you're always pushing yourself to the limits. You can learn a great deal, and you can accomplish a great deal.

The negative side is that it creates unhealthy expectations -- not necessarily from the MIT administration, but from the students themselves. If you're not acing your classes and running an extracurricular and also playing an instrument in your spare time and doing top-class research, then you're obviously a loser. If you're sleeping eight hours a night, then you're obviously a loser.

Anyone who goes to MIT (or another top-ranked university) is used to being the top student, or one of a handful, to whom everyone points and says, "Wow, they're amazing." And so to go from always being at the top to feeling like you need superhuman abilities just to avoid being classified as a loser, is very tough.

I'm one of those students who consistently failed math tests during freshman year. I remember very well calling my parents, crying on the phone. This was the first time I had failed anything, and to fail a math test of all things was just unheard of.

But then I went to the math department's tutoring room, and found that a huge number of other students, all of whom had been star performers in high school, had also failed. And suddenly I realized that MIT was hard for everyone, and that we were in a different place nowadays.

I was also fortunate to work on the student newspaper, where people talked openly about not necessarily getting terrific grades, or switching majors so that they could manage to graduate. Or just changing priorities, such that getting fantastic grades wasn't the be-all and end-all of being an MIT student. I ended up with a B average, helped in no small part by the humanities courses that I took. And you know what? I turned out OK, with a good career.

It's so, so easy for MIT students to be sucked into thinking that they're either superhuman overachievers or pathetic losers, and that their careers are over at the age of 19 because they flunked a course. For years, MIT has said that they worry about the students who feel this way, because some of them might end up hurting themselves or even taking their own lives.

But it's a tough balancing act to pull off. Because what's negative for some people, and causes so much trauma and damage to them, is a positive motivator for many others.

I'd like for MIT to start giving students a broader view of life. You don't have to be an amazing student to have a good career, family, or life. You can be a happy person and not be a billionaire startup founder. And you can even change your major to something less difficult, if it means being happier.

Really, when you leave college, you're just 21 years old. You have a long, long time to learn more things and change. And I hate to say it, but some of the people who were such stellar superhuman students ended up being the sorts of people you don't necessarily want to hang out with. Given the choice between being a nice person who enjoys life, and one who does groundbreaking research, I'd go for the former. I'm fairly sure that MIT doesn't make that sound like a reasonable, sensible, attainable, or even desirable option. Which is a shame.

pgbovine• 11 years ago

This is a topic I've thought a lot about ... here's a strawperson proposal that might incite some discussion, though it's by no means a panacea: http://pgbovine.net/undergrad-course-limits.htm

nicholasdrake9• 11 years ago

i think this is a good proposal, zero-sum competitive dynamics means that people are always going to work really hard, but with your course limit idea at least those competitive dynamics won't be directed towards taking lots of modules...one problem is that universities feel like they need to compete with each other in terms of how difficult the modules are and how much they teach their students (even though employers don't really care)..

i think one solution ironically might be to have much less holidays.. right now in the uk the top universities (cambridge and oxford) have two 8 week terms of learning a year, which means all the extra-curricular, social life and academics are crammed in these very compressed periods of time... compare this to tsinghua university (in china) where terms are 17 weeks long and weirdly that means everything is more chilled out because things are more spread out.

pluma• 11 years ago

strawperson

First time I've seen it put like that but Google seems to indicate this is a common synonym for "strawman" in this sense.

Is there actually a separate usage between "strawman" and "strawperson" or is it just political correctness? I'm genuinely interested.

nicholasdrake9• 11 years ago

i went to lse and the environment was supremely unsupportive. i think there are two fundamental problems with elite universities 1) because uni degree is a sorting/signalling function consumers have limited power. there is no other consumer product that i can think of where the consumer has a bad experience and that reflects on him not the producer's product 2) the misalignment of incentives, where profs towards research not teaching. i think the solution is to separate learning and signalling into two independent markets and allow market forces to act on them... there is definitley a zero-sum element to all this where people will always be stressed/over-worked as they compete, nonetheless i do think learning these university mathematics subjects can be made an order of magnitude more interesting/addictive.

mironathetin• 11 years ago

"...there is no other consumer product that i can think of where the consumer has a bad experience and that reflects on him not the university …"

sounds far fetched to me to relate education and a consumer product. But basically I agree that a university that is unable to maintain an inspiring atmosphere fails at its most basic job. Under stress, the brain is not receptive to new information. This is a very basic fact. Although handling stress is something to learn as well, education must not be stressful, except maybe prior to exams. If MIT students are under permanent stress, it is unlikely for them to learn and understand science. Hence, MIT can not be an elite university any more.

nicholasdrake9• 11 years ago

actually with professional qualifications like accounting, programming, finance and even music grades,, because there is a centralized qualifications board students choose where they get their education (kaplan, etc. ) based on teaching quality/price etc and they have much more consumer power...

i think the solution with elite universities is to have standardised university level exams, especially in maths and science where there is a high degree of similarity in the material at undergraduate level across different universities.. how elite unis differentiate themselves from non-elite is in annual research projects where better resources/professors as well as additional 'value-add lectures' where professors - rather than talking about basic maths and science concepts, instead take advantage of their 'superior research' and have them give regular lectures on what they are researching, so students at elite schools get exposure to high level research...

avnfish5• 11 years ago

Woah, fancy bumping into an ex-student - on HN no less. Do you have any survival advice? Something you wish your younger self knew? Exam season is approaching...

nicholasdrake9• 11 years ago

haha what's your degree? i was pure economics with a focus on econometrics..

lordnacho• 11 years ago

Do problem sets count for grades at MIT?

I did engineering at Oxford, where we had problem sets every week as well. I'd try hard, but not because there was a grade that counted. There would be a 2-on-1 tutorial for each set, and you really don't want to be the guy who didn't make an effort.

On the other hand, if something was simply too hard, we didn't let it stress us out either. I remember emailing a tutor at 2am once and telling him both students found it way too hard and needed more time. Got a response 5 mins later saying no prob.

As for impostor syndrome, you need a healthy confidence. Naturally there are people who are smarter than you, but equally when you're at a world class institution it's because someone decided you are world class. And they had a lot of people to choose from, most of who are doing quite well at less prestigious places. Where they learn the same stuff.

You also shouldn't worry about rank. Only one guy get the top prize, but everyone can understand the subject matter.

thanatosmin2• 11 years ago

Depends on the class. They're usually less than tests but not insignificant.

rajeevk• 11 years ago

Here is an interesting comment from Andrew S. Tanenbaum(a famous author on Operating system and Networking)

Did you experience culture shock going from M.I.T. to Berkeley?

Oh my goodness. Yes. It was so strange to be in an environment with people having I.Q.'s below 150 and where it wasn't necessary to study 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep up.

Source: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/faq.html

henshao• 11 years ago

I like this other comment more..

"Nobody likes M.I.T. People respect it. I respect it. But like it? Does anyone like taking a drink from a fire hose? I am still in awe of the place."

thanatosmin2• 11 years ago

MIT classes are individually quite hard, but I also find many MIT undergrads simply try to do way too much. Students frequently sign up for twice as many classes as one should, volunteer in two or three labs at once, or volunteer in three or more organizations. Success during high school and college admissions is largely based on quantity over depth, which is poor preparation for actual college and life.

P.S. I don't mean to blame the students for the consequences of these choices. I think the administration could help by providing a clear picture of success, and providing better services. I just think this is a source of stress outside of individual class difficulties.

simas• 11 years ago

“If everything's under control, you're going too slow.” - Mario Andretti

jmorrison• 11 years ago

Old VI-3 geezer from the late 70s, early 80s here - the time when the EECS faculty tried to handle their over-subscription problem by (unsuccessfully) imposing their own, separate admission requirements and flunking out a significant fraction of EECS wannabes into other majors. Had an advisor who tried to get me to join the Armed forces instead of stay in school. Watched the Dept deny tenure to the only EECS prof to actually teach us and treat us as human beings.

Certainly makes those calls/emails from the MIT full-time alumni fundraisers feel, well, surreal.

gtirloni• 11 years ago

"The Cost of Living" by Barry Schwartz has a whole chapter about education that seems to explain this kind of situation very well.

roflmyeggo• 11 years ago

My buddies and I experienced similar situations, albeit not at MIT, but at a private US D1 University as we pursued our dreams of medical school.

Luckily we basically threw in the towel one day and said it wasn't worth the stress anymore. We learned the importance of Pareto's Principle, Parkinson's Law, and a good nights sleep.

The crazy thing is our grades remained unchanged.

These were great life lessons that we learned that I wouldn't trade for the world.

Although I chose not to pursue medical school, both my buddies are in their first years and they constantly witness similar experiences to the article above and our initial undergraduate experiences, regardless of the schools that their classmates graduated from - MIT included.

Meanwhile my friends are doing very well in graduate school and continue to have just as much time as during our undergraduate years.

I hate to say it, but if it wasn't MIT, it probably would have been something else for these kids.

Hard Work != Productivity

iolothebard2• 11 years ago

Work smarter, not harder.

Figuring it out though can be the difficult part.

pizza• 11 years ago

Any specific advice you might have figured out?

mwg986• 11 years ago

For anyone else who was wondering:

Pareto principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes

Parkinson's Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".

vdnkh• 11 years ago

I agree. I got my ECE degree from Rutgers, which is considered by many professors to be the hardest at the school. I worked very hard but I always had time to relax with friends and unwind every day. I never pulled an all nighter and have never needed to, and feel it's a study habit smell if you do (barring extreme circumstances). I just learned to be efficient with my time, partition my work, and plan ahead. I considered relaxing as important as studying itself and programmed it into my routine. And you know what? I got excellent grades and had a great time.

Dewie• 11 years ago

I guess I should feel for these people since I'm in an academic slump myself - though not any equivalent of MIT or anything. But what do you expect when you willingly play in the big leagues of nerd status jockeying? If your self-worth was tied to being the best and brightest in class, you probably won't keep up with it at a place like that (I mean, do the math, it seems straightforward to me).

whoisthemachine• 11 years ago

I went to normal landgrant university in ND (NDSU) and received a Computer Engineering degree. I can tell you, my experience holds many similarities. Learning to accept and grow from failure is a key component of an engineering education.

balabaster• 11 years ago

I never attended MIT, nor any big name college, but I have first hand experience struggling with impostor syndrome that I had since leaving high school and never having failed at anything I set my mind to. It was immediately noticeable from the first university math lecture where I was amongst an entire class of people who grasped concepts I had never even come across at high school and struggled to understand - even though I had never struggled at anything before in my life. I'd coasted through high school and nery once had to apply myself at anything - except Phys Ed. which was more a toil of will power than enjoyment. The feeling lasted until probably 5 or so years ago (my early 30s) - in fact, it had been such a prominent part of my psyche during that part of my life that it hadn't crossed my mind that I'd moved on until just as I was reading this article.

Upon reflection, I think most of the feeling stemmed from my perception of how other people were handling themselves in a world I personally felt I was floundering in. They appeared to take everything in their stride, understanding everything while I understood nothing and spent many thousands of hours attempting to understand just to keep from failing academic life - forget trying to be top of my class as I was used to. Then I became a programmer, thinking that once I left university, I would be okay; at that point, I would have made it. But the feeling never went away as I continued to feel like I was floundering, while my peers appeared to breeze through concepts I had to work bloody hard to grasp. It took many years for it to dawn on me that I spent far too long looking at how other people looked like they were handling it and comparing it to the actual struggles I was having. This has been dubbed the Facebook effect, where everyone else appears to have such a great life because that's what they show the world and you compare that to the struggles you have just to find time to shower, forget looking perfect.

I have come to believe that impostor syndrome is a symptom of the lack of authenticity in society. Nobody is real with each other and that largely is the cause of our inability to gauge how deserving we are of the positions we hold. Behind closed doors, everyone is floundering in different aspects of their lives. Some areas of life come easily to some, while others remain a constant struggle their entire lives - but what they show you is a tiny snippet - the snippet they want to show you. As Baz Lurhman said in Sunscreen, "Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind, the race is long, and in the end it's only with yourself." It has only really been as I have come to see and understand this pervasive lack of authenticity in society that the impostor syndrome has gone away. I believe that eventually all people get there, they say that 40 is the age that you stop caring what other people think and start living for yourself. I think it goes deeper than this and isn't tied to an age. I think as soon as you hit the dawning realization that everything you see around you is no more than what those around you want to show you and that it's all a carefully sculpted illusion to make you believe what they want you to believe about them, their lives, their businesses etc. you will realize...

You are not an impostor. You are in the position you are in because someone sees or saw something in you that you haven't yet begun to see, understand or accept in yourself. They gave you the chance you asked for because they believed in you - even when you may not have believed in yourself. The impostor syndrome you are experiencing is an illusion. You may not understand that yet, you may not accept that yet, but trust me, as someone who spent a larger portion of my life battling it than not battling it, you will make it, you did deserve the chance you were given, you do deserve to be doing what you are doing. You are already what you are struggling to realize and you don't need to fake it until you make it. Have heart, everyone has struggles, everyone has failures, everyone has successes. Don't give in to your insecurities, they are the beliefs instilled in you by society's failure to you - they are all so busy faking it until they make it that it's leaving you comparing their fake with your reality.

myniggah• 11 years ago

I think this happens in all the top Universities. I study in one myself and professors expect people to put in 20-25 hours per week for a course with 9 hours worth credit. And the reason given is that it gives us a competitive edge!

MIT students open up about stress

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