7 ms·

MIT alum from the early 00s here. MIT was a stressful place. Much of that stress was self-imposed, and in an environment full of ambitious, intensively compet

• leoh 12y ago
  I went to Columbia. We had nothing like this. Unsupportive admins. You couldn't retake classes necessarily. It was an awful environment. Props to MIT.
  • tricolon 12y ago
    While the campus plays host to protests, anti-protests, and anti-anti-protests on what seems like a weekly basis, the entire student body manages to agree on one thing: the administration is terrible. At their best, they are unhelpful. At their worst, negligent.
    • loblollyboy 12y ago
      you think they could do better with all that $$$$
      • tricolon 12y ago
        You would certainly think so. I, for one, will not be donating any time soon unless they get their act together.
  • _sword 12y ago
    But we did have the prestige of being consistently ranked the most stressful school!
• kelukelugames 12y ago
  I remember the school gave us random days off. They were called Stress Days or something like that. We also had free psychiatric care. I took advantage of it because I was very curious. So for an hour every week, I bitched to poor Edward about people who always told shitty jokes. I was definitely not in a happy place. Became depressed and just stopped caring. It got to the point where my adviser told me to stop fucking around. Then I quit after my masters and got a job. Having money is so much better than living off of a stupid stipend. Fuck grad school! Wooo!!!
  • madcaptenor 12y ago
    Class of '05. When I was there I heard the random days off called "suicide prevention days".
    • mayneack 12y ago
      '13 here. Some students still do.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• peter_l_downs 12y ago
  The administration has been a lot more fucked up recently. Current student wisdom blames it on Columbo, who came from Columbia, and seems to have brought a lot of his shitty policies with him. Nightline has been shut down, medical isn't 24/7 anymore, dorm culture is under attack, etc.
  • nugget 12y ago
    Sorry to hear that. I don't know Columbo but I just looked up his bio and he seems to be a more conventional type of administrator who spent almost two decades at Columbia. Why MIT would recruit someone like that from outside the community, and for such an influential position, I don't know - unless he really believed in and embraced MIT's values. Ultimately it's up to you and other current students to keep the open minded hacker culture alive, and on I hope the more the admins try to interfere the more determined and creative you become (another important lesson for the real world).
• hkmurakami 12y ago
  Do you know what the treatment of students with mental disorders was like? I'm appalled at how schools like Harvard and Princeton [1] (my alma mater) treat students with psychological challenges (effectively kicking them out) and am wondering what MIT is like in that regard. [1] I understand their logic that the student is a thread to their own health and other students' well being, but their heavy handedness is revolting to me.
  • DanBC 12y ago
    Aren't they protected under disability protection laws?
  • Thriptic 12y ago
    > I'm appalled at how schools like Harvard and Princeton [1] (my alma mater) treat students with psychological challenges (effectively kicking them out) I'm currently at MIT now as a grad student. The notion that MIT is kicking out students who have mental health problems is a common refrain I hear from undergrads; the thought process being that MIT is trying to limit the on campus suicide rate by driving people out. I have even heard people say they suspect that medical shares psych records with the administration without their permission, which is completely untrue and illegal. I can't speak to whether MIT actually kicks people out for mental health issues (I doubt it) but the fact that this is even a commonly held belief is deeply troubling and counter productive. I love MIT, but they need to get their shit together and be more transparent about their process in dealing with people who have mental health issues.
    • madcaptenor 12y ago
      Those rumors around medical sharing psych records with the administration were around when I was there (undergrad, class of '05).
  • kchoudhu 12y ago
    Princeton at least is one good HIPAA lawsuit away from a scandal. When I had issues, I went off campus -- to New Brunswick -- to get help and avoid the additional stress of dealing with the administration.
• astazangasta 12y ago
  MIT alum from the early 00s here. The administration did very little to make mental health services available to students, did its best to cover up rather than face issues, and generally seemed not to give a shit about students' stress, which is why it had the highest suicide rate in the country. People would joke about how the school colors were "blood and concrete" because of people killing themselves jumping off tall buildings on campus, which happened frequently. My personal experience, when I had a rough early semester, included no offer of mental health services although I was severely depressed, although an administrator did advise me my academic career was over thanks to my poor performance and I would never get into grad school. I suppose this is good prep for a world full of bitter, uncaring, unfeeling people. MIT was a great place in many ways, but this was not one of them.
  • xxxyy 12y ago
    Did you consider seeing a psychiatrist outside the school? Depression is absolutely not specific to MIT students.
    • astazangasta 12y ago
      I did later, yes.
  • gumby 12y ago
    MIT alum from 1980s here (and former nightline staffer). I am disappointed to hear that NL shut down. We did get non-MIT callers, but the fact that we had dormline (probably doesn't exist any more either -- student-run internal phone system) and no mobile phones limited its reach. There were some horrible suicides back then too, and pretty much everyone had at least one all nighter per week. If I remember the Institute had pretty good mental health services for its time, though I doubt it had free, indefinite length psychotherapy or everyone would have been on it. But despite the grind I had a really really good time. Perhaps it was because I was (AFAICT) in the bottom half of my (tiny) high school so showed up never worrying about how I was doing compared to other students. The Institute, at least back then, was impersonal and basically uninterested in undergraduates (not anti-, just didn't care). For me that was liberating: I could take classes in pretty much any department, and if my transcript was a mix of 5.0 and 3.0 that was OK since I was learning a shitload every day. As an undergrad I got to take a lot of graduate seminars and I got to spend a LOT of time in the lab (a majority of my last two years).
• stdbrouw 12y ago
  > Turns out, this was good preparation for real life in the competitive fields that many of us chose. I wonder if this is self-reinforcing. When you're used to huge amounts of stress from school, it seems natural that companies will try to take advantage of that and simply start expecting more. Or when graduates from such schools get into positions of management, they might not even see that what they're asking of people is not healthy, because it's become perfectly normal for them. But it's a zero-sum game. How long before it spirals out of control, if it hasn't already?
  • tomp 12y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. Some careers are simply known to be very stressful - for example most transactional work (investment banking, corporate lawyers, accounting consulting). It is self-reinforcing in the sense that each company has to keep up with the competition, but I believe that would happen regardless of the level of stress students experience in school. Personally, I have managed to avoid such environments, but for some people, that's the easiest, fastest and least risky way to success.
  • Fuxy 12y ago
    Is it weird that I don't get this at all. I've never been competitive and no exam has ever driven me to tears. Everything I've learned was self thought and I took it at my own pace which is way slower than academia requires but that gave me the opportunity to delve deeper and answer my own questions. I don't care about competing with my peers I just want to see cool things and have fun building cool things with other people. That's probably why stress never gets to me and I never push my self into psychological hell hole. I've done it once when I was a student and I never want to go back to that and I'm certainly not going to accept an employer pushing me to that. I would rather quit.
    • pm90 12y ago
      No its not weird at all, just goes against the conventional notion of competitiveness. Which is a good thing; look at all the people worrying themselves silly about whether they're "better" than their peers. The nice thing about being in computing is that there is just so much work to do that you can have a lot of people working without ever competing directly for the "top job".
• pdonis 12y ago
  > Much of that stress was self-imposed This was true when I was at MIT in the mid-80s as well. I agree it can help you to develop skill in dealing with pressure that will be useful in later life, but there's a fine line between that and beating yourself up for no good reason, and it's not always easy to see where the line is. The administration when I was there was supportive once you asked for help, but you had to ask. I did not see much proactive effort to try to spot people who were having trouble but hadn't asked for help. There's a fine line there, too, of course.
• wahsd 12y ago
  Do you realize the self-fulfilling nature of the system you describe? It seems somewhat recursive to rationalize that the nature and environment you experienced at MIT was a good preparation for "real life", when the "real life" was also populated by equally damaged and self-harmed individuals. It's kind of an obsessive-compulsive abusive cycle that really isn't necessary, but no one knows how to break out of because, as you state, there is a belief that it is a "good preparation for real life". It's really a bit of a hugely larger social and cultural issue, our willingness to work ourselves do the bone, with utter disregard for well being; all driven by anxiety and obsessive thinking.
• neltnerb 12y ago
  MIT alum from '05 here. 1) I disagree entirely that this is good preparation for most people. Maybe if you go into academia, but not for the vast majority of graduates. In what I see as the real world, the ability to self-regulate your work load (which is a learned skill) and not fall into the trap of fetishizing working ridiculously hard is critical for long term stability. And I say this as someone who finished my PhD at 26. I didn't do it by working in unhealthy ways, and I sure didn't do it by doing every assignment I was given regardless of cost to my mental health. I did it by working healthy and asking for help when I needed it. 2) Surely you're aware of what happens to any undergraduate in our era who admitted to the administration that they were depressed. I have seen a dozen people shuffled off to McLean or just kicked out for years until they could convince MIT to let them back in. In all but one case I think MIT overreacted and significantly damaged those individual's lives by isolating instead of supporting them. 3) I think the biggest issue wrt stress is that undergraduates compete for who has the worst workload. I see it again and again, and it is insane to me. I honestly think a good portion of undergrads, either intentionally or subconsciously, practice horrible work habits just so that later on they can boast about how they finished a 40 hour lab in a three day no-sleep stretch. You know you've seen it too. 4) Depression != Stress. Admitting you're depressed is already hard. Admitting you're depressed when everyone around you is stressed out is a whole other level.
  • Taek 12y ago
    My school (RPI) did something similar with me. I went to health services and asked for help with regards to my mental health. They told me that I needed to drop out and take a full semester off, then attend a community college and consider coming back in a year. I refused to do this, and they refused to treat me. (I graduated a year later with high honors and a job offer from Google.)
  • kimbo305 12y ago
    > I have seen a dozen people shuffled off to McLean or just kicked out for years until they could convince MIT to let them back in. In all but one case I think MIT overreacted and significantly damaged those individual's lives by isolating instead of supporting them can you list some examples? I had to see a Medical Center counselor (who I didn't like that much) for therapy for a couple semesters, but in general I thought the support offered was well-intentioned and appropriate. > You know you've seen it too. I saw some of that ('06), but always thought those people were idiots.