MIT students open up about stress
bostonglobe.com
bostonglobe.com
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
The nice thing about being in computing is that there is just so much work to do that you can have a lot of people working without ever competing directly for the "top job".
Do you know more than I do about something? There are lots of things that you (the general you, meaning anyone) know more about than me. All I want is to learn from you, and teach you some things that I know (which reinforces my own learning). That's it.
One of the reasons I left my last job was because it was very much a competitive, back-stabbing sort of environment. You could only get "better" in that environment by actively making someone else worse. How that makes sense when your goal is to produce a research product, I'll never know.
I guess what I'm saying with all of this is, I'm happy to see other people admit to the overall viewpoint that you've shared here.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
In at least one case it took 8 years to get back in, on average I'd guess 2-3 years of forced unenrollment. The one I think was the best off was the one who just gave up on the nonsense and went to a different university where he subsequently graduated with honors, probably also with a lot less stress.
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
Overall I enjoyed my experience at MIT, but there were a few soul crushing moments in my time.
close enough.
It's fucking scandalous that MIT tolerates such a high level of death by suicide.
I agree zero should be the goal, but I don't think it's necessarily achievable. There are multiple factors involved, and the school only controls some of them. Some of them aren't really controllable. (There were multiple suicides at MIT while I was there; none of them were simple cases of "the school didn't pay enough attention".)
http://www.henryford.com/body.cfm?id=46335&action=detail&ref...
If they can do it then a university can definitely do it.
I do understand the sentiment behind "zero is the aim, but pragmatically we can't stop all suicides", but that attitude allows people to die.
Even if we do accept that we can't stop every death by suicide we can say that the rate is currently far too high.
As one example: People have mentioned deaths from tall buildings. Research shows that you can reduce suicide rates by restricting access to means and methods, so better access[1] controls to rooftops, with anti-suicide fencing, and suicide-prevention telephone number signs, will reduce the numbers of people dying by suicide.
I'm not sure how comparable the two situations are, although there are certainly measures in the article you linked to that could be applied anywhere. The two populations in question (Detroit mental health services patients vs. MIT students) are very different, as are the environments.
> better access controls to rooftops
This was done while I was at MIT, but I think the controls were relaxed again some years after I left. One of the issues with any institution over time is that different administrations have different priorities, and often change things for no good reason. MIT, unfortunately, is not immune to this problem.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
what brings u to hn? u a programmer?
well this is kinda random but my best friend and i are looking to apply to yc, our idea is 'A new asset class: Human capital. By paying for a students university education who in return give back a percentage of their annual income (probably developing world) we allow investors to make long-term bets on specific industries and countries.
Anyway our first draft of our yc application is here , it will be great if you can take a look and give some feedback... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224487
Let’s compare Seldon to the financing structure of Make School (see: https://www.makeschool.com/admissions). It seems to me that your idea has three unique selling points: 1) it can cover the cost of going to any university, 2) % repayments are lower and last much longer and 3) student repayments become a tradable asset class. This has pros and cons. Pros: students have total control about where they want to study, return can be much higher and more kids get an education. Cons: students are incentivized to make expensive choices, education is commoditized, return is much slower (you might not break even for decades) and ‘human capital’ (as an unavoidably opaque financial product) is high risk. I think your biggest obstacle will be overcoming volatility and opacity – you’ll need to prove that the candidates you finance will provide good return on investment. What is it about Seldon that means they can offer a student loan a traditional Chinese bank cannot? Maybe adopt some of the strategies Make School and YCombinator use – a rigorous (and prestigious) application process, guidance, relationship building, sense of community, commercial nouse ect. I wouldn’t sell the idea as a cold-hearted asset class at the start and I certainly would change the name – it undermines the true value of your project. Make human capital a little more…human? Besides, tradable asset classes only really emerge once a financial product is big and established enough to be traded.
Other points: • 2% seems too low? (I’m not a numbers guy) • This business would not work in the UK (~50% of students never pay back the full amount they borrow…so no financial incentive to use Seldon) • Top US schools usually cover all their students financing needs – so not too much of a market there unless you want to grab higher-risk candidates. (MBAs are the BIG exception – probably some good opportunities there). • Highlight who you both are - your past achievements and work (because it’s good). • Take your private contact info off of the website (it’s in the public domain, yo). • I like the basic idea – but you need to be more conscious about the fact you’re dealing with 18 year olds and not, say, crude oil.
nonetheless in addition to what you said i would point out one more advantage for students (probably the biggest one) which is repayments are dependent upon your situation (because it's a percentage of income) so if you're 'unlucky' and can't find a job or only a low-paying job you pay less - which is good if you are a risk-averse/poor student..
in terms of the cons, i actually think hte aggregated income streams are likely to be very stable.. despite it's equity structure we see it more as a fixed income product than a vc equity product (stable but lowish ~5% returns). the moral hazard is an interesting issue that we hadn't thought about much - i suspect the larger issue what not be in their university choice but rather their post university choices... currently faced with debts students would look to find a high paying job immediately, whereas with our instrument they might travle the world care free knowing they don't have to pay anything unless they get a job? in terms of becoming a tradable asset class that is very much a long-term potential. we could end up trying to be originators for asset backed securities but right now our thinking is it's better for us to actually invest the money ourselves and get returns ourselves. the opacity issue is interesting - opacity from whose perspective? it mihgt only be a problem if it's traded on markets right?
in terms of proving returns - at this stage we can collect data on graduate incomes and estimate returns but of course the proof will be in the pudding. our selection process for the students will almost entirely be delegated to the universities ie.. if you can get into the best university in india we'll fund you
i think the big positives which your analysis missed (and actually we're most excited about) is not the student side but the investor side in particular we think that long-run income streams are a much better proxy for country/industry success than betting on a specific company in that industry (what buffet calls trying to 'pick the winners'). for example suppose your bullish on chinese software as an industry... what is a better long-term bet? the very risky (although higher reward) vc bet of picking a particular chinese software company or sending 100 of the brightest chinese students to study computer science with the assumption that if the chinese software industry does well so will employees in that industry. furthermore, this will bring in a lot more capital to big risky capital-intensive projects and through tranching out the risk will enable much more investment and ultimatley innovation in our societies...
re: 2% yeah it may be without going into the numbers lol 2% requires average annual income to be 11x cost of university. in america if uni costs $30,000 that means we need incomes to be more than $300,000 which even with the fact we're hand picking the smartest students and the fact you have future economic growth (and inflation) over 35 years to help you out it doesn't seem like a good investment. in china though the cost of the best 4 year uniiversity (accomodation + tuition fees) ~$3,000-$4,000 so it seems very reasonable that average incomes coudl be 10x that (and we find that the data supports that)... obviously from an investors stand-point a higher than 2% interest rate is better but we're not sure how much students will accept so we're currently testing that (at the 2% level) with our chinese version of hte website and asking for interested students to email us..
i think it doesn't work in the uk because financing is readily available and cheap. in the us the story is a little different where if you don't qualify for free tuition (which the poorest students do) there can still be a credit constraining aspect to university choice... i think mbas and masters could be a real opportunity as you point out, because masters/mbas are more optional but can lead to a big iincrease in income for the student.
haha yeah we've reworked the who we are section, no point trying to be modest lol!!
haha yeah i forgot about that, i suppose adding my facebook just makes things worst right lol?
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.
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
Figuring it out though can be the difficult part.
In baseball terms, round the bases with singles instead of always swinging for the home run.
Also, don't marry someone that you'll have to give everything you've ever earned to get out of your life.
It's hard to summarize all my life's experiences. I tried very hard to learn from my parent's and other's mistakes. I'm not a failure, but I'm not retirement wealthy either.
Best advice is read a lot of writeups on failed startups more than successful ones (if that's your goal). You learn more by seeing where people could have done better than by studying those that for the most part got lucky (yes they worked hard too, but sometimes timing, connections, location, etc. doesn't work out).
If you're looking toward just being successful in your career, that's a different line of study (how to win friends and influence people, etc.).
If you'd like to have an actual discussion, shoot me your email. I'd meet the criteria for failed startup founder (I'm on #7 or 8 right now, too lazy to go review how many failed I've had :-)
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".
Yes, we got pushed, hard. But it is amazing how much one can learn when pushed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
Certainly makes those calls/emails from the MIT full-time alumni fundraisers feel, well, surreal.
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.
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.