Pluspunten
- Chance to work with stellar academics and fellow students; conduct and contribute to cutting-edge research. - Relatively decent pay for RAship/TAship - Great opportunity to take courses from the top researchers in their respective fields. - Easy degree requirements allowing plenty of time to do research (depending on the departments). - Graduating from MIT opens a lot of doors in both industry and academia. - Great resources - Extracurricular activities in pretty much everything. (MIT students are a lot more socially active than people think) - Flexible summer work/internship options (depending on the research group).
Minpunten
Have been a PhD student here for several years, so I have seen plenty of the dark-side as well: - Exploitative behavior by many professors in various departments. Departments often turn a blind-eye and students often don't complain due to fear of retaliation (and some professors actively do retaliate). - Very difficult to maintain work/life balance, very easy to burn-out. Most students don't speak out for fear of being judged. - Very high graduate student tuition disrupts funding and causes student-advisor tension (e.g. PhD students often cost twice as much as Postdocs) - Very complicated handling of funding by the institute (e.g. Fellowships don't cover astronomic tuition costs, and departments have to do a lot of scrambling to get the remaining tuition, again causing friction between the professor, student, fellowship institute and the department) - Extremely high rates for work-related mental and physical health problems throughout the institute, MIT medical is pretty inept in addressing many of these issues in a timely and professional manner (e.g. was once told by a MIT medical doctor to finish my paper before taking time off due to physical pain). - A lot of politics and bureaucracy. ( e.g. since there are many successful students at MIT, departmental elimination rounds for fellowships can be very competitive and political). - Archaic systems live alongside cutting-edge infrastructure (e.g. The indecipherable Websis/MITPAY payment system is guaranteed to frustrate you every time you need to pay anything). - Very heavy (and sometimes exploitative) TAship loads, which deter students from signing up for TAship to improve their teaching skills.