Travis McVoy
MIT Blogs
I have been irregularly reading the MIT blogs since 2017 and the wisdom, perspective, and humor of the posts never cease to brighten my day. Many of the blogs contain information that goes well beyond MIT and is just something good to know or think about. Some are just enjoyable to read. All of them, well, all that I've read, embody why I love MIT so much: values and personality. The MIT community strikes me as a group of people that, above all else, care. What do they care about? Depends on the person, but boy do they care about something (usually many, many somethings). Perhaps best of all, there does seem to be an underlying commonality among everyone: MIT students love to learn and to build. Some may care about one more than the other, but they are all very, very capable (and passionate) problem solvers.
In this section of the page, I'll highlight some of my favorite blog posts and why I liked them.
My favorite part of this blog is the graphic at the end. The graphic is a plot of time (over a week) and happiness in the 6.009 course, and I think the plot is representative of what an ideal week should be. First you get an assignment and it looks really hard, so you're frustrated. Then you work a little, you think you know everything, so you're really happy. Then the assignment slaps you in the face, reminds you that you're human just like everyone else (which is a very, very healthy reminder), so now you're frustrated again. As you get closer to the end of the assignment, your frustration oscillates with your progress and setbacks. The best part of the graphic is the end. At the tail end of the assignment, frustration peaks because you've given everything that you think you can give, but you're not quite there yet. You push forward, finish the assignment, and then frustration plummets...only to return because the next assignment isn't released yet! I love that the author included the endlessness of learning with the last increase of frustration via impatience for the next assignment. You're never really done, and the frustration of waiting to start is something I struggle with myself all the time, but is not something I can regularly talk about with my peers. So, this post was a breath of fresh air.
This blog discusses MIT's motto and how students typically come into MIT with a strong bias towards one of science or engineering. I enjoyed this post because it spoke to my values. When I learn about something, I typically jump back and forth between the ideas of the subject and how the subject is pragmatically useful. In high school, I noticed that this made me unusual. Most of my peers seemed to care only about theory or about building things, but not both (which is representative of the author's observations, as well). In my opinion, the dichotomy between theory and applications is not something that should be celebrated, it should be something that is fought against. Theory in a vacuum is dangerous; without the guard rails of practicality, I find it is far too easy to go deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole that, while fun, does not necessarily achieve anything of importance. Conversely, building something without any appreciation for theoretical foundations is also dangerous. A prime example of this can be demonstrated with regression. Fitting a line is a very useful practice, but you can't just willy nilly fit data (though many people do exactly that). Suppose, for instance, that your data has serial correlation that isn't noticeable in exploratory data analysis, but is still large enough to negatively influence your results. Without the theory of regression analysis (Gauss-Markov assumptions in particular), such a situation could lead to poor statistical analysis. Anyway, back to the blog.
The author essentially argues that MIT's values exerts a natural pressure to gain competency in both theoretical and applied problem solving. The key word here is "natural". One can always require students to take courses in both applied and theoretical subjects, but that doesn't ensure anything about the likelihood that the student internalizes the value of both. I believe that MIT's natural pressure is exactly what I needed as a developing student. Admittedly, I don't do well with rules. It's a weakness I'm aware of and have worked to improve upon, but I generally respond better to situations in which a consequence follows seamlessly and not because I'm told to do so. Another way of putting it is this, you could require me to take plenty of engineering courses, but you can't possibly predict when the right time to require those courses is. If you make me take them too early, I could get overwhelmed and disengage. If you make me take them too late, that's a whole other problem (maybe I missed out on an opportunity that I would have been ready for if I had the course, maybe I've learned that material independently and now the requirement is just a senseless formality, and so on). Naturality (is that even a word?) circumvents the previously mentioned problems. Since the lesson happens in AND outside of the classroom, it would find me at exactly the right time (or at least, that's the hope).
This entire post is a report of a survey a student conducted for fun. There's a lot of detail—including a very nice graphic—and so far as I can tell, the author collected this information entirely for the fun of it. That kind of quirky curiosity is contagious in the best possible way. Note: this post is not the only post I've seen that has the form: "Here's this cool thing I thought about once upon a time. I got bored and did a whole mini-project about it. Check it out." I love that. The whole, "screw it, let's just do it," mentality is a blast, and much needed to complement the grueling hours spent psetting.
Many schools make many claims about their values and the experiences students will have and in this regard, MIT is no different from everywhere else; MIT promises a collaborative environment full of thoughtful, creative, passionate, and creative people [1]. The thing is, most schools promise this in one way or another. The difference between MIT and most schools I've considered is that MIT publicly demonstrates their promises through OCW videos and pages [2], the MIT blogs, and tons of random websites [3,4].
One of the MIT values that's really important to me is collaboration. I think this blog post is a decent example of the collaborative spirit I would expect to find at MIT. There's all sorts of information, advice, and links to other resources for incoming freshman and this is just some random post. So far as I can tell, nothing required the author to do this, he simply did it because he enjoys MIT and enjoys helping people.
[1] https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/what-we-look-for/
[2] Another piece of evidence of MIT's collaborative nature is found in the syllabus of 18.300 (continuous applied math course). The syllabus is linked below. Notice the team work section. MIT has a website dedicated to helping students find study groups, and rightfully so. I can't recall a single syllabus that hasn't mentioned the importance of working with your peers—hell, even most psets have a remark at the top about collaborating.
18.300 syllabus: https://math.mit.edu/classes/18.300/Course_Info/Syllabus2022.pdf
[3, 4] MIT also has tons of websites (presumably student run) that highlight important details students may want to know about a class. I believe the underlying themes of these websites is loosely boiled down to, "Hey buster. I know you're really smart and hardworking but you're human like the rest of us. If you don't want to find that out the hard way, pay attention to your limits and use these websites to gauge if your ambitious schedule is reasonable or not." Two such websites are the firehose guide and the course 18 (mathematics) guide:
https://course18guide.scripts.mit.edu
These are two of the first blogs I ever read on the MIT blogs website and I think about both of them regularly to this day. What I love about them both is their humanity. So much of the application process just feels gross, like what you do will never be enough. Like you're just another number. Blah blah *insert cliched, but true frustrations here*. These posts address many of the common frustrations an applicant might have and give you a glimpse of the other side of things.
A special note on Applying Sideways: everyone everywhere should read this. The advice in that post goes so far beyond the application process. In short, the author points out that if all you do is work really hard because you want to be admitted, you'll be just like everybody else. Instead, you should optimize for a set of core values (knowledge, kindness, pursuit of a passion that ignites you) that generalizes beyond college. In doing so, you'll be well-prepared for wherever life takes you, be it your dream program or otherwise.
I think this blog is one good example of what I mean when I say, "MIT students have personality." This post is about a number of things, but a gross simplification of the post is that it captures the duality of MIT's IHTFP (half the time it stands for I Have Truly Found Paradise and half the time it stands for I Hate This Fucking Place).
On the one hand, the author had amazing courses and friends and what have you, on the other, she suffered from perfectionism, which is not something you want to have when surrounded by some of the most talented and hard working people on the planet [2]. While describing her struggles, she regularly used footnotes[1] to make jokes. For instance, she mentioned how she signed up for 18.100B (the more advanced version of real analysis) and thought that if she applied herself she would be fine, followed by the footnote, "I was not fine," which I interpret to have humorous intentions.
One other remark about this post: the author is very honest about her struggles, many of which are quite personal. It takes strength to put oneself on display like that, and I'm glad MIT has a platform where students can do this. While I don't want to take away from the author's experiences, the feeling of not being enough is something that I imagine must be very common at MIT. By telling her story, she gives other students reassurance. Which admittedly, I'm now realizing is not something that needs to explained. The point is that there is a preexisting platform in which it is appropriate for her to do so, AND that that platform is accessible to anyone. That kind of support is special. Other schools may have similar support networks, but I certainly can't think of a comparable example anywhere else.
[1] Use of footnotes on the blogs is quite common, which I love. It captures a certain "my brain moves faster than I can coherently organize my thoughts" style of communication that I wish was more common, because it makes me feel at home.
[2] Some people from MIT might disagree with this phrasing. I can see both sides to that argument. At the end of the day, though, I still think it's valid that MIT is a particularly bad place to have perfectionism, especially if it takes the form of comparing oneself to others. Hence, I sympathesize with the author's struggles.
Wrapping Up Comments About Blogs (which were really comments about the MIT community)
At this point, I think I've probably made my point about the MIT blogs. I could include more, but to speed things up (both for me and for you), I'll highlight a few more things:
* Many blog posts contain humor, and I don't think I've emphasized the importance that enough in the posts above. People that know how to laugh are a lot more pleasant to be around than people who don't.
* A post by Anna H. highlights...well, I'm not quite sure how to put it, actually. She's clearly quite intelligent and curious, but she displays it in a very humble and approachable way; I value that because it's much easier to collaborate with people like that than people who are brilliant and almost too aware of their brilliance, if you know what I mean...Anyway, I've met some MIT students and so far, they've all had the wondeful balance that Anna displays in her post What I wish I known, and I what I'm glad I knew
* Defying That Sinking Feeling, by Emad T. highlights the firehose aspect of MIT particularly well with the following quote: So I guess while it’s fair to consider the MIT experience to be like drinking from a fire hose, I feel that, about seven weeks in, it’s a bit more like learning how to swim. You can cling for dear life to the pool’s edge, but the inviting depth of the water – the experiences you’ll end up missing out on – will taunt you until you turn around and dive in. And while there is more pressure the deeper you go, you’ll never know what you can accomplish until you push yourself.
* Perhaps the most important point of all is that I could just keep going forever. There are so, so, so many fantastic posts by equally fantastic people. I want to go to MIT for many reasons, but the key separator is the MIT community.