Getting into top tier university

[twofish-quant]

Lol I knew there was going to be work, tons of work in fact, but I didn't expect we still get "grade letters". I thought it was your professor giving you a pass or fail.

It basically is.

A = high pass
B = low pass
C = you really messed up.

 

[Nano-Passion]

In a typical program, you take courses for the first two years, you get graded in those courses, and you can compute a GPA from those grades.

However, no one cares about that number. What matters is your dissertation.

Mind = blown. Thanks, I personally think that's pretty cool. I've always grown up with the idea that grades matter-- a lot.

You need to get used to uncertainty and randomness.

Assume that you won't get into MIT, and then figure out what you will do, if that is the situation. If you have a backup plan for what to do if you don't get into MIT (and you probably won't) then it won't matter as much if you get in or not.

Two things that you should know...

1) MIT physics graduate school has a matter of policy will not take MIT undergraduates. Your chances of getting into MIT physics graduate school if you are an MIT undergraduate is basically nil. That's why Feymann ended up at Princeton.

2) If you have your heart set on getting into MIT physics grad school, the biggest determining factor is not your GPA, research, or anything else, but the "division" that you apply to. MIT allocates graduate school positions into the divisions, and the applicant/places available for each division is different.

For 1) -- Wow, that is an interesting fact to know.
For 2) - Divisions? I've never really heard of this, what divisions are there?

Thank you so much for your time btw.

Also I think the most important reason for going to MIT is that you stop worshiping MIT. MIT is a really, really weird culture, and one of the things that you learn at MIT is to hate MIT (google for IHTFP).

You need to learn to hate MIT, because if you "love" and "worship" MIT, you aren't pushing it or yourself to be better. By contrast if you "hate" MIT, you are constantly thinking of ways to make it better. Also, MIT people tend to be cynical people. One thing that I learned at MIT is don't believe MIT propaganda. This is an important lesson, because if you are a part of the organization, and you start believing your own marketing, you are doomed.

Also if you want to get involved in MIT, you might consider joining the MIT Enterprise Forum. http://www.mitef-nyc.org/ One reason I post as much as I do is that MIT does a good job at making the "formal curriculum" available to everyone (see OCW), but I think it's important to make the "informal curriculum" also visible.

Something that is odd about this conversation is that I think that Rutgers does some things better than MIT does. Rutgers is better at teaching mathematical finance than MIT for some curious reasons.

Thank you for enlightening me on this, I've read your previous posts of this and found them to be very interesting.

Personally I don't like to be a mindless sheep in a sheep herd (following society and pre-set roles/values/ideas/paradigms without being aware) so I thank you for this.

What excites me about MIT though is that I will be surrounded by other other people that I hope care about school and are passionate about math and physics. I have a crappy community in my college and I am excited to be around other smart and driven people.

There are SO many different influencing factors when it comes to admission. This isn't undergraduate admissions where the universities don't even care what major you're getting in to. An undergraduate admissions committee, once they've let you in, have pretty much lost control over you and in a sense, wash their hands of you and simply expect you to give them lots and lots of money with tuition. Graduate school is the exact opposite. They're making a big investment in you, you're going to be around for years and years and they need to support you and find an adviser for you to work with and hope you pan out and make a name for the department.

With that in mind, no one can tell you how to get into MIT/Harvard/Caltech/Whatever, but people can surely tell you how to get rejected even with a perfect GPA and PGRE score.

Wow, I never looked at that way. Thank you so much. Graduate school is awesomee =D

It basically is.

A = high pass
B = low pass
C = you really messed up.

I hope this isn't a silly question because I am not sure if you are speaking figuratively. There are A-, B- and the such right?