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.
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.