Lessons of an MIT Education

Thanks for the link! This thing is hilarious!

About 7:00: "And you think when you're 19, 'cause you're so clueless when you're 19, you don't know a bloody thing, you think, "well, I'm not really sure I want children anyway". Like, oh, yeah, you can tell how well you have been educated. Jesus. Dismal. Dismal. Without fail.

"I've watched women go through their professional careers, many, many of them. It's a very rare woman who at the age of 30 who doesn't consider having a child her primary desire. And the ones that don't consider that, generally, in my observation, there's something that isn't quite right in the way that they're constituted or looking at the world.

"Sometimes you get women who are truly non-maternal, you know, by temperment. They have a masculine temper [-ment?], disagreeable, they're not particularly compassionate, they're not maternal, they're not that interested in kids. Fair enough, man. But there aren't that many of them and there's plenty who will not admit to themselves that that's what they most desperately want."

AFAICT, in many cases (e.g., history) that's just to catch up with the rest of the world's pre-university humanities' level (and that the same applies in reverse for the humanities degrees).

Sorry about that. Wr,dr: Suicide is a bit of a problem at MIT.

"Over the past decade, the university’s student suicide rate has been 10.2 per 100,000 students, according to a Globe review of public records as well as university and media reports. More recently MIT’s suicide rate has been even higher; over the past five years the campus has reported 12.5 suicides per 100,000 students.

"The increasing rate has been driven by the school’s undergraduate population, whose suicide rate in the past decade has outpaced that of the school’s graduate students — 12.6 to 8.5.

"The national average for college campuses is roughly between 6.5 and 7.5 suicides per 100,000 students, according to three major studies that looked at undergraduate and graduate student suicides from 1980 to 2009."

On the other hand, over across the street at that other school,

"At least one other local school, Harvard University, has an above average rate for its undergraduate population. The rate of suicide at Harvard was 11.8 per 100,000 undergraduates over the past decade. When accounting for both undergraduates and graduates, the rate at Harvard was 5.4 per 100,000."

So maybe it's Boston.

But wait,

"...the university’s undergraduate rate has declined, particularly since the early 2000s. Between 1994 and 2005, the undergraduate suicide rate at MIT was 18.7 per 100,000."

Holy poop.e

Edit: And I just noticed the "Ten Lessons" were written in 1997.

The next two paragraphs go into more detail:

"One answer to this question would be following: One learns a lot more when taking calculus from someone who is doing research in mathematical analysis than from someone who has never published a word on the subject. [...] But this is not the answer; some teachers who have never done any research are much better at conveying the ideas of calculus than the most brilliant mathematicians.

"What matters most is the ambiance in which the course is taught; a gifted student will thrive in the company of other gifted students. An MIT undergraduate will be challenged by the level of proficiency that is expected of everyone at MIT, students and faculty. The expectation of high standards is unconsciously absorbed and adopted by the students, and they carry it with them for life."

I'm going to look funny at the claim of "expectation of high standards"; I suspect he's delusional.

But there is, in my experience, a considerable difference between "someone who is doing research" and "someone who has never published a word on the subject"; I've never met any "teachers who have never done any research [that] are much better at conveying the ideas." Further, the "ambiance" bit is right; being surrounded by people who are deeply interested in a topic beats the pants off people who are just there to get a grade.