10 Lessons of an MIT Education

April 23rd, 2007 | Education

From the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT, April 1997, Gian-Carlo Rota wrote 10 lessons of an MIT education.

  1. You can and will work at a desk for seven hours straight, routinely.
  2. You learn what you don’t know you are learning.
  3. By and large, “knowing how” matters more than “knowing what.”
  4. In science and engineering, you can fool very little of the time.
  5. You don’t have to be a genius to do creative work.
  6. You must measure up to a very high level of performance.
  7. The world and your career are unpredictable, so you are better off learning subjects of permanent value.
  8. You are never going to catch up, and neither is anyone else.
  9. The future belongs to the computer-literate-squared.
  10. Mathematics is still the queen of the sciences.

Well, MIT is one huge applied mathematics department; you can find applied mathematicians in practicially every department at MIT except mathematics. :)

Possibly Related:

Trackbacks/Pings

    Comments

  1. Martin Chandra

    So, should I send my kids to MIT? :D

  2. dimas

    “dare to face the mathematics”, i think this statement can be include as the point in the number eleven of MIT way, do you think so?

  3. Bambang I

    It was physics that became the mainstream when the industrial revolution took place about two centuries ago. Now it is only logical that when we inevitably moved to information-driven world, mathematics becomes the fundamentals that the whole information structure based on.

  4. Dino

    Caranya gimana ya biar bisa masuk MIT?
    Ngimpi kalee… Masuk ITB aja aku ga bisa..

  5. Noyski

    * to Dino

    Well many didn’t go to ITB. Neither did I.
    I think it’s not about the schools that matters, but the students.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts.