10 Lessons of an MIT Education
math.tamu.edu
math.tamu.edu
This is so very true, and unfortunately is commonly why mit grads are considered arrogant.
I say “unfortunately” because most recent MIT bachelor grads are arrogant* but that tends to fade after they encounter a real world in which there are other smart and/or hard working people. But the implicit assumption of high standards remains with many grads, including many who themselves can’t shed their imposter fears, even after decades. And that implicit assumption is often intimidating.
* As a startup guy I tend not to hire MIT new grads, preferring that they suffer the shock of the real world on someone else’s dime. But I have hired a couple of CalTech new grads and they haven’t had “the problem”. As an MIT grad myself I wish the Institute could figure out what Caltech is getting right. But MIT doesn’t really care much about undergrads anyway.
At Caltech, you pretty much never interact with any source of external validation. Because the graduating class size is only ~250, most companies don't actively recruit you so you never get the feeling that your skillset is in demand; the few companies that do, are often highly specialized or excessively selective so you're either a poor fit if you lack the specialization or you come to believe that the hiring standards are a lot higher worldwide than they are. As someone in startups, it feels like VC firms actively thirst after MIT students during undergrad to establish relationships with the students there, but pretty much no student at Caltech will ever interact with a VC prior to graduation. While Caltech may be reputable among a certain demographic, it's likely your extended family, especially if you're an immigrant, hasn't heard of the school or it's reputation. And even despite it's location in the SoCal Research triangle, most students basically never leave campus or interact with the broader LA community or even Pasadena.
The end result is that with no external sources of feedback to inflate your self-worth, you end up measuring yourself within the institute, which is among the smartest collections of people in the world. There's pretty much no way to come out of that measurement process without being humbled. A lot of Caltech newgrads entering into the workplace lack the "arrogance", because it's the first time they're getting feedback to help them realize that actually they're not dumb.
Sounds like survivorship bias. Sure, there are plenty of examples of math concepts that ended up being extremely valuable but were once considered esoteric. What about the ones that remained esoteric?
I understand this was just one point of the essay, so he couldn't dive too deep. Would be cool to see a fuller analysis.
This is a good insight, especially for the field of mathematics.
(Of course, both would be better...)
Unfortunately we are afraid of sane government reform. While the rest of the world is running circles around the U.S. in producing competent graduates we're putting federal funds towards middle aged researchers that can't survive in the private industry.
Can you share your top-5 or top-k?
Would love to find some new courses to learn.
As a working professional, that is made much easier when the instructor is fantastical.
OF COURSE this boomer had more opportunity, less stress, lower tuition, and now self-congratulates himself for abusing the next generation.
And OF COURSE his conclusion is "major in my major (math)", even though he explains elsewhere how unable MIT grads are at dealing with the "real world". Because he's a narcissistic boomer living in an ivory tower built after WW2 had burned down all the other ivory towers.
Rota was not a boomer; he taught the boomers (and the succeeding generation). The students he is talking about here are the young boomers-to-be. This page is dated 1997 but it reads like a reprint of something written much earlier. I was an undergraduate at Caltech in 1968-72 and this sounds similar to the faculty, students, and workload there at that time.
Regarding WW2, Rota was a child in Italy during the war until his family fled in 1945 to escape the fascists. He reached the US in 1950 via Switzerland and Ecuador [1]. Not really a pampered boomer upbringing.
And the preceding one (if he started teaching at MIT in '59, Boomers were still in their early teens at most.)
Reading through this is a fascinating reminder of how unrecognizable the modern academic environment is from that of 25 years ago.