I’d hope that you’re biased towards what you had decided for yourself :P.
In short, I entirely agree with everything you said about MIT ultimately being the best school in terms of providing the best education, smartest peers, and probably not destroying my free time. If my only goal were to become the best technically-skilled person I can be, MIT, CMU, or Harvey Mudd (prolly MIT) would hands down be my top choice.
I’m somewhat concerned about my ability to maintain my non-traditionally-technical skills at MIT though, particularly in fields like writing.
However, the main argument against the best schools is that they’re also more expensive, and less likely to give me any money. Going to MIT would probably cost at least $200k, and I have a sibling, and parents who’d like to retire (they’re in the range of a decade away from that). I’m not sure if my going to a more expensive school would be worth their working for the rest of their lives, but I’d have to talk to them about that.
Alternatively, I could just take out loans. The main argument against this seems to be the fact that I’d then need to pay them off, and doing so would probably require me getting a job. I’m not worried about my ability to do so, but I might prefer to have a few years of freedom during which I don’t need to worry about paying off any debts, and only need to make enough money to support myself.
I see, so the potential issue is financial. I have been fortunate enough to not have to deal with financial issues, so I’m not sure I’m particularly qualified to comment in this area. One comment is that you realistically don’t know what you’re going to be doing with your life, and if a better college has, e.g., a 10% chance of improving your decision-making in this area significantly then that is fairly worthwhile (unfortunately the actual probability is pretty hard to measure, so it’s hard to put a specific value on this).
If you feel particularly competent academically (e.g. plan to take more than four classes per semester), an option is to graduate in under 4 years to alleviate debts somewhat, or to spend your 4th year as a Masters’ student so that MIT pays your tuition (this latter option might only be possible for CS majors at MIT, and otherwise is college-specific). But $150k is probably still a substantial sum.
Class-wise, your concern about writing is probably valid; we have plenty of writing classes, but my impression is that the grading in said classes doesn’t usually incentivize quality, at least from my perspective. But there are at least some humanities professors that take writing seriously, so if you can find them and take their classes, you could get good feedback. Otherwise, if you don’t care about feedback and just want to practice, you could take the opportunity to get easy A’s in (some of) your humanities classes.
Yeah, pretty much. I don’t feel like a better college would substantially improve my life-choice decision making, but I’m pretty sure that it would have a big influence over what life-choices I notice myself as having, can follow through on, or have available to me.
$150k is $50k less, which is probably a year or so of post-graduation income, so its pretty significant. Thanks for the advice.
Writing improvement could probably be done over the internet.
And if I fail at finding those professors, I could probably convince one of my English teachers to hang out with me after I graduate.
Thanks for the reply.
I’d hope that you’re biased towards what you had decided for yourself :P.
In short, I entirely agree with everything you said about MIT ultimately being the best school in terms of providing the best education, smartest peers, and probably not destroying my free time. If my only goal were to become the best technically-skilled person I can be, MIT, CMU, or Harvey Mudd (prolly MIT) would hands down be my top choice.
I’m somewhat concerned about my ability to maintain my non-traditionally-technical skills at MIT though, particularly in fields like writing.
However, the main argument against the best schools is that they’re also more expensive, and less likely to give me any money. Going to MIT would probably cost at least $200k, and I have a sibling, and parents who’d like to retire (they’re in the range of a decade away from that). I’m not sure if my going to a more expensive school would be worth their working for the rest of their lives, but I’d have to talk to them about that.
Alternatively, I could just take out loans. The main argument against this seems to be the fact that I’d then need to pay them off, and doing so would probably require me getting a job. I’m not worried about my ability to do so, but I might prefer to have a few years of freedom during which I don’t need to worry about paying off any debts, and only need to make enough money to support myself.
I see, so the potential issue is financial. I have been fortunate enough to not have to deal with financial issues, so I’m not sure I’m particularly qualified to comment in this area. One comment is that you realistically don’t know what you’re going to be doing with your life, and if a better college has, e.g., a 10% chance of improving your decision-making in this area significantly then that is fairly worthwhile (unfortunately the actual probability is pretty hard to measure, so it’s hard to put a specific value on this).
If you feel particularly competent academically (e.g. plan to take more than four classes per semester), an option is to graduate in under 4 years to alleviate debts somewhat, or to spend your 4th year as a Masters’ student so that MIT pays your tuition (this latter option might only be possible for CS majors at MIT, and otherwise is college-specific). But $150k is probably still a substantial sum.
Class-wise, your concern about writing is probably valid; we have plenty of writing classes, but my impression is that the grading in said classes doesn’t usually incentivize quality, at least from my perspective. But there are at least some humanities professors that take writing seriously, so if you can find them and take their classes, you could get good feedback. Otherwise, if you don’t care about feedback and just want to practice, you could take the opportunity to get easy A’s in (some of) your humanities classes.
Yeah, pretty much. I don’t feel like a better college would substantially improve my life-choice decision making, but I’m pretty sure that it would have a big influence over what life-choices I notice myself as having, can follow through on, or have available to me.
$150k is $50k less, which is probably a year or so of post-graduation income, so its pretty significant. Thanks for the advice.
Writing improvement could probably be done over the internet.
And if I fail at finding those professors, I could probably convince one of my English teachers to hang out with me after I graduate.