Massachusetts Institute of Technology Top Questions

I have not had any anti-Semitic experiences on campus, and I am pretty obviously religious. I am Jewish, and in fact some of my best friends on campus are Muslim - we cooperate on events sometimes, and I just attended a lecture on Islamic calligraphy.

We are pretty awesome. Any group of people you can imagine you can probably find to hang out with. And MIT is almost exactly 50/50 women/men.

MIT takes great pains to make sure that there is a wide variety of people on campus. It is definitely no longer just a bunch of bookworms. We have a good mix of genders, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds here.

Diversity: The numbers look good but the people you hang out with are rarely of different cultures.

The student body is a pretty good mix. There are a lot of Asian people on campus and they might not even be students! I wish the LGBT community were more active and I wish that Caucasian people got more involved in cultural groups even if it's just going to their events. I do feel like there are a lot of well-off students here. Their parents have amazing backgrounds in math and science or connections to the government. All interesting people to meet. I've NEVER heard anyone talk about how much money they'll earn one day. The community is pretty politically quiet. I know what some people are but I feel there's a good mix of everyone - left, right, center, people who don't know what that means, and people who rather not get involved. You're definitely able to find a group that best suits you.

The LGBT community here is really strong. I think MIT was named like one of the highest LGBT-friendly schools in the U.S., which is really impressive. It's really multicultural, especially New House, where I live, which has French house, German house, Spanish house, IHouse, and chocolate city. Different types of students do interact plenty, although one definitely notices specific clicks--people of one ethnicity tend to stick together, but I think that's just human nature. Students--mostly--are not at all politically active. They have no idea what's going on in the outside world. :D

Many are good in math and sciences. Just, GOOD. Some are wonderful.

The student body is incredibly diverse with 11{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} of the class being international students and the rest of the class hailing from all over the U.S. There are students receiving no financial aid and students receiving full financial aid. The great part of MIT, however, is that you can rarely distinguish between any of these people. Our school is a large melting pot, and the Institute does a great job in giving us avenues to support each other's diversity.

By far the coolest thing about this place is the attitude. You'll see a lot of student articles about how terrible MIT is, or how the administration isn't doing anything right. And most people don't really understand what these things represent -- they are our form of school spirit. The students here pride themselves in being able handle anything thrown at them, and always carry an attitude of "it's us versus the administration." And because of that, you always see students helping each other out. Nobody thinks that they're smarter than everyone else (even though there are some amazingly brilliant people here), and nobody competes for professors' attention. And nobody gets ahead by smooching. What matters here is what you can do.

I have been able to learn more here than I ever thought possible. I have been able to acheive amazing things working through student groups. I look around at the faces of people in my dorm and I see thinkers, builders, artists, theorists, and great engineers. I know these people will one day change the world, or at least their own little part of it. Yet these same people are the ones I flirt with, pull pranks and hacks with, complain about workload with, order middle of the night pizza with. It's mindblowing. The diversity of culture here is fantastic--you can choose where you live. There's really a sense of community with where you live; it's not just a bunch of people living together. There's an option for everyone: the French speaker, the "cool kids" from high school, the pyromaniacs, the raging liberal hippies, the serious student, the serious drinker, whatever.