What do Harvard students think of MIT students?
My wife is an MIT alum (we met senior year through online dating). We have a standard joke: whenever I fail at doing arithmetic, or whenever she misspells a word or gets some grammar wrong, our response when the other partner calls us on it is invariably, "Yeah, yeah, wrong end of the street." "The street" is, of course, Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge, on which both Harvard and MIT are located, Harvard being on the western end of Cambridge and MIT being on the eastern end.
The point is that we consider each other to have different strengths. This is not so much a trait shaped by where we attended college, as a trait that shaped where we chose to apply and attend. With some exceptions, my mind deals in qualitative concepts (art, history, politics, sociology, literature), while hers deals in quantitative concepts (advanced math, engineering, process analysis, statistics, modeling and simulation).
That distinction is one that carries over in part to how the schools' curricula are laid out. Although Harvard has many students who choose STEM-related fields of study, it requires a broad grounding in the liberal arts for all students through its General Education requirements, and there are only two Engineering degrees: A.B. and S.B. (separated by their rigor). MIT, in contrast, has multiple engineering courses, each encompassing a different field of engineering (I want to say five or six, but I may be underestimating; a "course" is like a major at other schools), but only one "Humanities" course; furthermore, it has several required classes that everyone must take, including single-variable and multi-variable calculus, biology, chemistry, and two fields of physics.
I personally think I would have failed out of MIT very quickly. I have nothing but admiration for the quantitative skills MIT students and alumni possess. On the other hand, I think my wife is smarter than me and would have done fine at Harvard, although she denies being smarter than me, so I guess we're at an impasse on that one!
©️ Quora (8 years ago)
✍️ Dm: @ton_adres
✔️ @fulltuition
My wife is an MIT alum (we met senior year through online dating). We have a standard joke: whenever I fail at doing arithmetic, or whenever she misspells a word or gets some grammar wrong, our response when the other partner calls us on it is invariably, "Yeah, yeah, wrong end of the street." "The street" is, of course, Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge, on which both Harvard and MIT are located, Harvard being on the western end of Cambridge and MIT being on the eastern end.
The point is that we consider each other to have different strengths. This is not so much a trait shaped by where we attended college, as a trait that shaped where we chose to apply and attend. With some exceptions, my mind deals in qualitative concepts (art, history, politics, sociology, literature), while hers deals in quantitative concepts (advanced math, engineering, process analysis, statistics, modeling and simulation).
That distinction is one that carries over in part to how the schools' curricula are laid out. Although Harvard has many students who choose STEM-related fields of study, it requires a broad grounding in the liberal arts for all students through its General Education requirements, and there are only two Engineering degrees: A.B. and S.B. (separated by their rigor). MIT, in contrast, has multiple engineering courses, each encompassing a different field of engineering (I want to say five or six, but I may be underestimating; a "course" is like a major at other schools), but only one "Humanities" course; furthermore, it has several required classes that everyone must take, including single-variable and multi-variable calculus, biology, chemistry, and two fields of physics.
I personally think I would have failed out of MIT very quickly. I have nothing but admiration for the quantitative skills MIT students and alumni possess. On the other hand, I think my wife is smarter than me and would have done fine at Harvard, although she denies being smarter than me, so I guess we're at an impasse on that one!
©️ Quora (8 years ago)
✍️ Dm: @ton_adres
✔️ @fulltuition