> The expectation of high standards is unconsciously absorbed and adopted by the students, and they carry it with them for life.
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.
Caltech grad here. Having worked with a couple of MIT newgrads just after graduation, I think the biggest contributor to the difference in attitudes is the degree to which Caltech undergrads are isolated from the world during undergrad.
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.
> It is a fact, confirmed by the history of science since Galileo and Newton, that the more theoretical and removed from immediate applications a scientific topic appears to be, the more likely it is to eventually find the most striking practical applications. Consider number theory, which only 20 years ago was believed to be the most useless chapter of mathematics and is today the core of computer security.
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.
I am not sure how much is sarcasm and how much is in earnest. I went to a highly ranked school where professors did the bozo act of assigning unsolved problems to assignments. And some of these individuals had no business teaching (saying this as someone who turned into research scientist and is mid-career). Teaching does not have to be throwing someone into the deep end and laughing to see who manages to swim out and survive. Now that Internet video courses are prevalent, I am astounded by the quality instruction offered by gem-like instructors at lesser institutions. Key in my mind is attitude. Are they treating the students like adults and peers or as children? While students in University should not be spoon-fed, the average top tier University student in STEM deserves better.
The article hints at this, but peers and cultural values (aka an ambient expectation that everyone can do x, y & z) may be more important in pedagogy than the quality of instruction.
All professors can be replaced by YouTube videos. Researchers are simply not teachers nor provide anything particularly special unless it's very specific and the class is already experienced in the related field.
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.
The point (don't remember which of the 10) of "wow your proposed courses are a lot harder than when I did undergrad" combined with "hahahaha my problem sets are so hard they turn into papers" portrays MIT as some exponentially increasing hazing.
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.
To clarify the chronology and background here: Rota was born in 1932, and starting teaching at MIT in 1959. He died in 1999.
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.
Very nice article. I wish I could have went there, but instead MIT's was the quickest rejection letter to arrive after I sent in the application so many years ago.
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.