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Actually, I don't think MIT cultivates as much of an entrepreneurial culture as you might expect, especially considering how solid the computer science departme

Actually, I don't think MIT cultivates as much of an entrepreneurial culture as you might expect, especially considering how solid the computer science department is, and how there's the Sloan school. It's kind of hard to describe, and I didn't go to Stanford so obviously I can't truly compare the two. I loved MIT but I can say without a doubt (unless things have changed dramatically in the last 9 months) that you don't see flyers recruiting for startups, and startup CEOs/CTOs tend to be more than a stone's throw away. The caveat here is that a lot of (compsci) professors at MIT were indeed at one point involved in a startup of some sort, but it's not the kind of thing that everyone knows about (so they might be a stone's throw away, but in disguise, which is effectively the same thing). Almost nothing about being at MIT made me think "after school I want to be involved in a startup". Ironically, I now work for one.

endtime 18y ago
Okay, well I'll admit it, I am surprised. There's a very big startup culture here - I've definitely heard more than one (qualified) person say that they aren't applying to companies like Amazon, Yahoo, and MSFT because they'd rather work at a startup. People throw the word impact around a lot. And during grad student orientation, they joked about the frequency with which PhD students leave the program to go start companies. I supposed I just assumed MIT was the same because the CS departments are comparable.
- madmanslitany 18y ago
  This kind of goes back to pg's "Cities and Ambition." Even amongst top CS departments, I think the atmosphere of the surrounding area does influence what the students want to do with themselves. Entrepreneurial spirit isn't necessarily something that's ingrained into CS students by default; students need to be exposed to it, and more importantly they need to see how far they can go with it (which you would see constantly in CA) before they start taking it seriously.
- anamax 18y ago
  > I supposed I just assumed MIT was the same (as Stanford) because the CS departments are comparable. Comparable != same. They're both good, but they're different.

endtime 18y ago

Okay, well I'll admit it, I am surprised. There's a very big startup culture here - I've definitely heard more than one (qualified) person say that they aren't applying to companies like Amazon, Yahoo, and MSFT because they'd rather work at a startup. People throw the word impact around a lot. And during grad student orientation, they joked about the frequency with which PhD students leave the program to go start companies. I supposed I just assumed MIT was the same because the CS departments are comparable.

madmanslitany 18y ago
This kind of goes back to pg's "Cities and Ambition." Even amongst top CS departments, I think the atmosphere of the surrounding area does influence what the students want to do with themselves. Entrepreneurial spirit isn't necessarily something that's ingrained into CS students by default; students need to be exposed to it, and more importantly they need to see how far they can go with it (which you would see constantly in CA) before they start taking it seriously.
anamax 18y ago
> I supposed I just assumed MIT was the same (as Stanford) because the CS departments are comparable. Comparable != same. They're both good, but they're different.