Ask HN: I got into MIT. Should I go?
Here’s the skinny:
I applied to two schools: MIT, and a bigger-but-less-prestigious school we'll call Z. Growing up, I always wanted to go to Z: my parents met there, my extended family lives in the area, and I have friends and cousins there. But MIT has also always been a dream (and I have friends there too). My original plan was to go to Z for my undergrad, then go to another school like MIT for grad school. I applied to MIT for the sake of completeness, and honestly didn't expect to get in. For that reason, it’s pretty easy to see how getting into MIT has thrown a big wrench in my plans.
To make matters worse, MIT hasn’t offered me any financial aid. My parents have saved enough money to help me pay for some of the tuition costs of Z (which I’m immensely grateful for). But other than that, it is clear that I’m fully responsible for paying for the rest of college on my own. (To contextualize how expensive MIT is: the college savings I have now are barely enough to cover one semester at MIT.)
On top of that, Z has offered me what essentially amounts to a full-ride scholarship. If I went to Z, I could realistically finish my undergrad in two to three years (from the college credit I’ve accumulated in high school) without going into debt. If I went to MIT, I’d be paying sticker price for a full 4-year degree: even with well-paying internships/work-study, I’d still be close to $180k in debt. (I realize that to some in the tech industry $180k may seem like nothing, but for an 18-year-old right out of high school, it may as well be like asking a dolphin to swim to the moon.)
After my undergrad, I want to pursue a Master’s/PhD in Machine Learning or Symbolic Reasoning. The problem with getting into MIT now is that I feel like I have a proverbial ‘foot in the door’: MIT has a lot of undergrad programs that feed directly into their graduate programs, which are top-notch for these areas of research. If I decided to go to Z, I’d have no guarantee that I’d be accepted to MIT’s (or a similar school’s) graduate program, even though I was accepted to their undergraduate program previously. (Of course, I have no guarantee that I’d get into grad school at MIT even coming out of MIT’s undergraduate program, but the chances are significantly higher.)
Additionally, just because I have no financial aid from MIT now doesn’t mean that I won’t have financial aid in the future. My siblings will be starting college in a couple of years; there are a lot of changing factors to consider.
Regardless of whichever path I take, I want to work for a larger tech company to gain experience before I bootstrap a sustainable startup (I mean, that's the dream, isn't it?). I would like to weave together some of the disparate threads I’ve started with my open source work to pursue an idea I think could have a really long-term impact on the way we communicate and collaborate.
So here’s my question: Although I know they’re both really good paths, how would you weigh this choice? I’d love to hear about your experience with college (especially if you went to MIT), your career path, and any advice you’d have for someone in my situation. Thank you!
189 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadP.S. — I started programming when I was fairly young (about 10 years ago), and I've spent hours each day since then programming, reading blogs, and poring over books (SICP, Let Over Lambda, etc.). I'm especially passionate about OSS, and I've contributed to a number of projects of varying ilk over the years. Academically, I've worked really hard in school (while maintaining a balanced social life, of course). I particularly enjoy mathematics (I’ve taken up through Linear Algebra) and the sciences (I'm taking AP Physics II, AP Bio, and AP Chem this year). I understand that I’ve been very lucky, and want to make the most of my situation so that I may one day make the opportunities I’ve had access to more readily accessible
P.P.S. — I’m using a throwaway because, aside from this being a fairly personal matter, I've been active on HN for quite a while. A couple years ago, an open source project I started got a lot of traction on HN. Through HN, I have learned a lot from the blogs, books, and projects that have surfaced over the years. Needless to say, I wouldn't be in the position that I am today without your support, so thank you!
P.P.P.S — If you’d like to reach out privately, feel free to email
as I realize your replies may be, well, a bit personal.School isn't end-all, be-all of life. I'm a martial artist. Many people look at the martial arts and think obtaining black belt is the goal. Here's the secret - obtaining black belt is the start. Now you're ready to study the art!
It's the same with school. Getting degrees isn't the goal, it's the beginning. The beginning of what? That's up to you!
You already know you can learn on your own, so you should have learned by now you don't need school to learn. Your internships are going to be the most important thing you do - that's where the doors are going to be opened.
I'm not from the US, so I cannot give any direct practical advice. But, all I can say is, if you choose to go to MIT, just make sure that it is not the only worthy accomplishment in your whole life. Most people from prestigious institutions tend to say they they graduated from XXX/YYY as the only thing worth mentioning about them. While not bad, if that is the only worthy thing to share, then those prestigious schools are not great after all ...
Whatever you decide, all the best.
That's a great idea. I'll reveal the contents of this hash to prove that the person who posts in 10 years is indeed who I am:
> But, all I can say is, if you choose to go to MIT, just make sure that it is not the only worthy accomplishment in your whole life.Even if I decided to go to MIT today, I'd still probably say that some of the OSS work I've done is something I'm more proud of than having gotten into MIT. That said, I hope that in 10 years neither of those things is what I'm most proud of.
You can get student loans and pay them off later with the inflated salary you will get as a result of having an MIT degree.
This is based on IRS earnings data, not surveys. The median salary of a CS grad 3 years after graduation is $163,496, I assume Z is also represented (though if Z is notably less selective than MIT, your place in the salary distribution might also be quite different)
So AP BC calculus and calculus based classical mechanics and E&M. The biology and chemistry requirements can be satisfied with sufficiently disparate courses they can't be assumed as base knowledge, there are now five different options for Introductory Biology (http://catalog.mit.edu/mit/undergraduate-education/general-i...) and you can do wet or solid state chemistry.
Arguably the most important part is social. You've read SICP and already contribute to OSS so I'll assume you already know you can teach yourself. Understand that modern university is mostly a social thing and less of an educational thing. Look at the clubs on campus and see if you think you'll enjoy them. Most of my friends and a couple people I dated came from the robotics club for example.
Don't underestimate the value of the financial aid. Not having everything paid for can add a lot of stress and once you start getting internships you'll probably want to use the money for side projects/investments/dates etc.
I think that, given that I have a lot of family and friends in the area, I might have an easier time getting started socially at Z. But at the same time, I grew up out of state and have never lived there so I can't be sure for sure.
Thanks for taking the time to write a thoughtful reply!
Going to university should be all about new experiences, and those can often be quite limited by your previous connections. Meeting an entirely new group of people, having to be more independent (in terms of living, socially and work), and a "blank slate" are all really important for growing as a person.
With that context, my advice is twofold:
1. Surround yourself with people who will challenge you
2. Make financial decisions using net present value (NPV)
I've taken classes on four campuses over the years and found the quality of the instruction in the classroom was universally high and uncorrelated with the prestige of the institution. However, I found that I learned more deeply and tackled more ambitious goals when I was surrounded by other students in the most challenging programs. Furthermore, I continue to observe stark difference in the post-college opportunities for graduates that are highly correlated with each institution's reputation.
As for NPV, your chosen field means that the money you save or spend in the next few years will be swamped by your income later in life. Make a spreadsheet that stretches out over your working life and calculate the NPV of both paths.
TLDR: Go to MIT.
What do people peg the OPs chances of following the stated career path at State vs MIT?
(Disclaimer, have gotten a terrific education at state schools and have what I take to be a reasonably successful career from that starting point. So default bias to choose state over more expensive alternatives.)
Path : Ivy > big tech > ivy > research lab > startup
You're here. You're going to make millions over your career.
If I could give any advice to 20-year-old me, it'd be to stop being such a miser and just work hard instead.
Consider the counterfactual: let's say you can't make back that $180K. Say you're 40 years old and $180K is still unfathomable. What happened?
They might get into college and hate it. Might get into the industry and hate it. Might get hit on the head while doing intramurals and suffer a brain injury and never get to their full potential. Life is full of good and bad events, and banking on everything going well, including that their inklings at 18 are actually what they end up enjoying in life is a non-trivial gamble.
I give my own kids the advice to make choices that do not limit future options. MIT is a good school, but the expenses are not something to be dismissed.
It took less than five years of it to essentially retire though, we print money. As far as I can tell salaries are now generally higher than they were for me plus there are more jobs about.
Compare against the opportunity cost. I don't really know anyone in a career that hasn't had to put in the same effort (e.g. dollar for law/medical school) that isn't just completely screwed with 0 money and no hope of ever owning anything.
I've taken for granted the fact that OP wants to like, have a decent life at some point rather than being a wage slave forever.
I have no idea where OP lives, or where they intend to live, but banking on hitting that story is exactly what I am arguing against. Because there is zero guarantee for any specific person to live that path.
It's like life expectancy. A 20 year old in a developed country has a far higher life expectancy than a child at birth in Somalia. You can completely discount the vast majority of the group.
Advice I got from another person that went to MIT was to make sure you know what you want to do. He said that a lot of the faculty are world-class (not as big as Cal tech of course :-).
This person told me that if you’re simply going for a general education there are much better places to get that. But if you know what you want to do and you can carpe diem the opportunity to work with world-class experts, you can make things very good.
Don’t worry about your ability to succeed, you will. You’ll also fail a lot. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down it matters how many times you get back up.
Go to MIT and network with others (I've often heard that is the value of Ivy and top tier schools). When you land your first job, use 50% of your salary to pay off loans and you'll have that 180k wiped out in no time. I was going to joke that a college education set of loans is like a mortgage but mortgages are outpacing a lot of things these days.
As someone who went to a flagship state school for undergrad and ivy for phd…
A) Most of the people I know who turned down higher-ranked schools for lower-ranked ones because of money regret it. You will make a lot of life-long friends in college, and you will just be exposed to a different caliber of person on average at mit. Random people you meet through friends of friends at brunches or happy hours will be weirdly accomplished and teach you things.
B) Your analysis seems to hinge on doing a phd at a top-n school. What if it turns out after a few years of college that you don’t want to do a phd after all? Then instead of being either mit phd, or mit bs, you are z school bs. This may not be terrible, but not optimal.
D) On the other hand, I think the differences in career outcomes on average are small, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the probability of starting a company with any given level of success x is 10 times higher for mit alum than Z school alums. Anyway, median mit cs alum has some faang-y job throughout their careers, and these companies all know/understand that many top students can’t all afford top colleges, and so they recruit from state schools as well. So the tail outcomes can be quite different, mean/median isn’t that much.
E) For careers like management consulting or investment banking, some top firms only recruit at top-n schools. However, eg mckinsey even does on-campus recruiting at places like ut austin or georgia tech now, so then it doesn’t matter. You just need yo be at an on-campus recruitment target school.
In my opinion, the lifetime of friends and network effects is most of the benefit, and not to be underestimated. You only live once.
What do you base this on? What about people who went to higher-ranked schools that regret having 100k+ in debt when they graduate. College helps you get your first job, but after that I don't think anyone cares in most fields (true in engineering from my experience, as long as you have a technical degree and even then you can get by). A lot of the difference in outcomes is selection bias. You should look to see how someone who got in a selective school but didn't go compares to someone who got in and went. I've read that the differences are not that stark.
> You will make a lot of life-long friends in college, and you will just be exposed to a different caliber of person on average at mit.
I don't know. I went to a mid-tier state school and my friends were just people I happened to be lumped together in housing. Is it "optimal"? No, but I enjoyed it. My friend crew consisted of a stoner, a very religious dude, a meat head and a Brooklyn hipster. I don't know, I liked it like that. None of them really taught me anything (wtf does an 18 year old know), but it might be different in technical fields. Both have trade offs.
> On the other hand, I think the differences in career outcomes on average are small, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the probability of starting a company with any given level of success x is 10 times higher for mit alum than Z school alums
It'll probably help you raise money, but I think being ex-[FAANG] would be better at least now. And raising money is not the same as starting and running a successful business. FAANG has considerably broadened their outreach and hire outside of top schools. I have a non-technical degree from a mid-tier state school and interviewed with a few FAANGs, more than once.
> In my opinion, the lifetime of friends and network effects is most of the benefit, and not to be underestimated. You only live once.
From what the author stated, I think he would have more experiences from going to school Z with his friends and family. Unless he really wants to get away from everyone, which doesn't sound like the case.
If you have a degree from Harvard/Stanford/MIT/etc, this is not true. Those name brands will help you for decades after. Plus they will also help your college friends, so your network will be much better than if you went to a state school.
In regards to a network, unfortunately 10 years out of school I don't keep in touch with many people I went to college with. We just went in different directions and many of my relationships were relationships out of convenience. Maybe others had different experiences.
These schools generally are different.
Yeah, my ug friend group was similar. It’s completely valid to have different preferences in what one wants out of life. However, I personally did feel much happier / interested later on in life being in friendgroups where everyone had some kind of serious career aspiration.
There are many reasons to choose MIT, but I don't think this qualifies.
I studied at one of Canada's top schools, and also have the qualified experience of a drop-out.
Some of the people who impacted my worldview, and also earned the most respect I have for anyone, were a selection of Vietnamese refugees† I worked for in a warehouse after dropping out. At U of T I met some smart people, but also some of the thinnest people in terms of personality, worldliness, and compassion (worse, many of them thought they were already the tops in all of those categories simply because they were where they found themselves in life—often because of where they were born).
No matter where you are, if you go looking for people who will influence your life in an expansive, positive way, you will find them. You don't need to go to school for that. There are countless other reasons to choose one school over another.
Don't quantize your life, kids. It doesn't work that way. It's only you who has to live with yourself your entire life. You've got a heart—use it.
† turned out these brothers I ended up working with were bloody genius-level electrical engineers who designed and resolved bugs in high-powered lighting systems in their sleep. And some of the kindest souls I've ever had the pleasure of knowing
I agree with this. Also less prestigious universities can have better people to influence the OP right now, even if the end goal is to do a PhD at MIT.
For example, take a look at how some great football (soccer) talents are managing their careers. Many deliberately decline offers from top teams in order to keep growing organically. Knowing when to get into a top team (or university) without getting burnt out is an important aspect in managing your career.
Depending on the OP's personality, getting into MIT too early might be detrimental. Lots of students might not enjoy an excessively competitive place for an undergrad for instance.
In my case, if I was going to college again, I would probably consider small liberal arts programs and some ivies (with access to great CS coursework, e.g. Dartmouth) rather than MIT, if both admitted me of course. That's just me, as I value more that kind of academic lifestyle.
So long as you don't get distracted by the freedoms of university, MIT will pay for itself many times over. It's an unfortunate reality that there are prestige doors everywhere and merit only gets people so far. MIT will blast those doors wide open in fields like VC, consulting, and academia.
My MIT friends seem to largely have been underwhelmed by the quality of instruction (as with students at any university), but the career opportunities the brand and connections have opened for them have been enormous.
One caveat I'll give here is to be honest about your academic ability. The worst ROI by far is flunking out of MIT and other $$$ elite universities. MIT is actually pretty generous about how they treat freshmen, but you should 100% focus on ensuring that you can pass (or ideally excel at) your classes. Depending on your educational background, you may never have been properly challenged before and it can be a bit of an adjustment. In my experience the easiest techniques for doing well at top universities are sobriety, 8+ hours of sleep, strategic course selection, and tutoring at the first sign of trouble.
While it of course doesn't always get it right, MIT is very serious about undergraduate education. For example, with 1-2 exceptions that prove the rule like SF author Joe Haldeman, all classes are taught by tenured or tenure track professors, and you don't get tenure at MIT without being a adequate teacher.
Professors who break the rules about the work they assign can have their class taken away from them, and many if not departments also closely monitor student assessed quality of instruction.
I've witnessed first hand from the administration.staff viewpoint a well known professor who is very serious about teaching royally screw up a class on a subject he's not so good at, every student evaluation except for one special case was negative (I and another staff member read all of them). The department head sat him down and made him read every one of them, and then told him he'd never be allowed to teach that course again (which we could overhear because of how our offices were laid out).
You can also be reasonably assured courses won't be cargo culted as I've seen in lower rank schools, and that the Institute will move heaven and earth to make sure you can graduate in four years, unlike some state schools which aren't quite the bargain they appear because they ration spaces in required classes.
Pay close attention to academia_hack's last paragraph: work hard on academics until you get them under control then you can commit to doing other things like the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) which incentivizes professors to hire students during summer and the January "Independent Activities Period" by not "taxing" them with the overhead they have to pay on all other types of people they might hire. And there are of course many student groups, many quite hard core.
As far as succeeding in any given class, if you diligently do the "problem sets" (homework) and picked the right major, you can expect to make As and Bs and have a good outcome. Note grading is by mastery, would be unfair to the student body to grade on the curve, nor does it follow the model of some state schools and I've heard also some European ones of allowing people it doesn't think can succeed and weeding them out in early required courses.
I wound up going to a different private engineering school, with some discounts applied, and I regret making my parents pay much of that tuition instead of going to our state’s good state university.
You’ll be fine if your pick MIT. $180k at 5% interest is $9k a year. It’s less than a mortgage. It’ll be a fraction of rent in most places you’d consider working at later. You’ll want to pay it off as slowly as possible as long as the inflation rate is higher.
You go. Full stop. Do not pass it up. The connections you will meet will put your life on a totally different path.
If after one year you totally hate it, you can transfer to the other school. But going the other way may not be an option.
So then the question is what gives you the most optionality towards what may be your goal?
As others have said, the PhD may or may not be a goal after a few years of college (or, haha, a few years of PhD studies).
So I'd focus on the bachelor's. Then the question is, what do you gain from Z vs MIT.
On the Z side:
* Financial freedom (bc full ride)
* Some opportunities
On the MIT side:
* Higher caliber acquaintances and friends
* Pedigree
I am here to tell you that you can have a successful career (in terms of money) without any pedigree at all. But on the other hand I had one high school acquaintance with the exact same gpa and she went to MIT and has had a far more illustrious career than I (was also more ambitious too).
The question then becomes what do you value the most: the connections and pedigree and career achievements or the financial freedom and the chance to make your own way?
I have chosen the latter through most of my life and been pretty happy, but that's me.
What about you?
PS the comment to ask MIT for more money are spot on; it never hurts to ask.
I faced a similar situation years ago. Go into debt with a much higher ranked school or exit debt free from a lower ranked state school. I chose the latter, because deep inside I liked the idea of being debt free. I didn't regret it.
I went to grad school at a higher ranked school with financial aid.
Here are my notes:
- Opportunities in research, and employment are better at higher ranked schools. So going to a better school gives you an edge initially.
- You will have motivated students in all the schools. It's your choice to build your circle.
- I did find the quality of instruction better in my grad school, but it highly depends on the course/Prof. you take.
- the location of the school does matter as well in terms of opportunity and cost of living.
I think some criteria you can think about:
- long term potential of yourself
- would you regret not taking MIT
- how much debt can you endure, would it affect you?
One piece of advice (take or leave). Whatever choice you make, make it a point to not regret it in the future.
Good luck!!
It's very very hard to calc what an identical person would get Salary wise with MIT vs Z.
Very likely the average MIT grade makes 2-3M more during their lifetime than the average Z grad, for a tech-y degree. Which is why they can charge 180k.
FWIW I went to state school and did fine, but I know many people at big name schools did better. But now I run my own startup, so my degree doesn't even matter.
are you sure about that? Multiple tier 1 schools have a semi-official policy against reacceptance of undergrads into grad; idea being that it’s better for your development to get exposed to different university cultures.
Computer science has not been the subject of thousands of years of study and there's much less agreement on a great deal of it, so there's a higher chance a department will accept its own. But a MIT degree, especially if you do some research, will put you in a good position to get into a very good graduate school. And that should be no problem given what a self-starter the OP is.
ADDED: Also just notices MIT now has a "SuperUROP" program: https://www.eecs.mit.edu/academics/undergraduate-programs/op...
"The Advanced Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, better known as SuperUROP, is designed for MIT juniors and seniors seeking an advanced research experience working closely with a faculty advisor and producing publication-worthy results. Since 2017, the yearlong program has also been open to students in the School of Engineering and the School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences (SHASS)."
Back to getting into a good graduate school, the single best way to get admitted is for a professor at the other school to be told by a professor at your school who he personally knows that you can do research; success in the SuperUROP program would also help demonstrate that, especially if you can get a paper in the process of publication. The other big issue of proving general mastery of the field would be pretty well assumed if you graduated with good marks from MIT.
that is 100% the correct answer. “hey alice, it’s bob. undergraduate charlie just applied to your department; he’s in my lab now and kicking ass” will trump nearly every other consideration, if alice has funding and tenure.
That said, I did my undergrad at MIT about 25 yrs ago. I met my best friends there who, along with a lot of other students there, expanded my horizons in terms of ambition and possibilities in a good way. 20 years later, having MIT on my resume (along with a track record of solid tech work) still gets me a pretty incredible hit rate on job applications. I was offered a decent amount of financial aid but still came out with ~$80k in student loan debt which was a lot 25 years ago. Even in the early 2000s, I was able to pay that off pretty easily. I think that in the case of many career choices, the cost of a degree from an elite university is not worth it, but in the case of tech, I think the MIT degree is clearly worth it.
The one minor proviso I would add since you mentioned graduate work is that doing doctoral work at MIT is typically more difficult if you've done your undergrad there. On the other hand, doing an M.Eng. at MIT is quite easy if you have reasonable grades. The one-year M.Eng. _might_ be worth the extra year, but outside of narrow specialties, the opportunity cost of doctoral work relative to 3-5 years building experience and earning money in tech tends to favor the latter.