so i finally dropped a class

tl;dr this post is pretty boring and probably extremely boring if you’re not an mit student

---

as mentioned in the last post i talked to a bunch of recruiters. one thing i asked quite often was the relative worth of b.s. in math as opposed to a b.s. in cs or doubling or a masters in cs and i was consistently told there was no difference (provided these degrees are all from mit) except that maybe with a masters degree you have more negotiating power and can get a slightly higher salary. then i talked to startup people i’m living with and they predictably cared even less about these differences. this wasn’t a massive surprise as people have said this to me before, but i think i needed to hear it from people actually in industry before i could fully believe it

at the end of this semester i’ll be 5 humanities classes, 2 math classes, and 1 chem requirement away from graduating with a math degree, which is not a lot considering i supposedly have 5 semesters of college left. i’ve also been working towards a bio minor (5 classes) and will have 2 requirements left by the end of the semester. i always assumed i’d spend the rest of the time trying to double in cs, which would be an additional 7ish classes, but i noticed a while back that this was a major dampener on my college experience and now it looks like there might not even be a point to doing it. there’s certainly a few cs classes i want to take regardless because they’re important (eg. i still want to learn about low-level languages and computer systems and more ml) but i think that’s about it. every old person i’ve talked to for advice, from sparc instructors to professors to people here, has agreed that this is a magnificent rat race, but it’s taken me months to finally convince myself to let go of it all. i think it’s been a lot harder for me than it is for most people because i’ve traditionally tied a lot of self-worth to being a good student which makes it deceptively easy to just keep taking classes and go for easy benchmarks like degrees and i’m happy that it’s ending now

so i think i’m going to spend a few more semesters finishing up aforementioned math + bio + humanities requirements. while i’m doing that i’ll learn some cs and psych and maybe some engineering if i feel like it. if something or someone convinces me that i really need to stay at mit for longer then i will but otherwise three more semesters of class is probably enough. i might still graduate at the normal time of spring 2023 if i take gap semesters but i don’t really mind that

as for the present, i’ve watched all the lecture videos in 6.849 (geometric folding algorithms) and will keep looking at the problems but it doesn’t look like i’ll learn much from completing the project, which is basically the only part of the class remaining, so it no longer makes sense to stay in the class and i dropped it. my initial fear was that i wouldn’t be able to keep up with 6 classes while moving to new mexico and now that it’s been a month i’m certain i can, it’s just not worth it anymore

mit announced that next semester sophomores will be invited back on campus but as i wrote previously it doesn’t seem like a very appealing option to take, especially since i have essentially no idea who’d be interested in podding with me. i think a lot of people come to mit with the impression that it’s a paradise filled with amazing people so when some of them realize they don’t fit in they assume it must be their fault somehow but it’s okay to not love mit, it’s okay to feel like you don’t belong, it’s okay to insist that this doesn’t put you in the wrong, that doesn’t make you stupid or arrogant or difficult, you just need the confidence to believe it’s not because of you

i think the best first-order approximation of how i feel is that on-campus life is suffocating. i think mit as a collective has normalized habits of spending all your time on classes and student organizations and looking for jobs in the same way that high schools often do, and for many people that’s great because it helps support shared culture and community and whatever. but if you ever realize your interests are drastically different then that life quickly loses its appeal and i’ve decided i’d rather work on projects and socialize on my own terms and have more time to think. i think this effect surfaces in lots of subtle ways, like, obviously it’s not mit’s fault that i barely wrote blog posts last year, but i think it’d be silly to suggest that culture wasn’t a major reason why i felt like i couldn’t

a few weeks back i wrote that my beliefs were changing rapidly but i couldn’t determine how yet, and i guess this post is an answer to that

so in the spring i’m most likely either not taking classes or doing the light load option (which essentially means taking 1 or 2 classes at reduced cost). despite getting into intense ethics discussions during the interview (at one point we somehow arrived at the topic of how radio facilitated the rise of fascism and i didn’t even bring it up, my interviewer did voluntarily) i somehow still got into facebook and will try to either work there or find a startup to hang out at or maybe both, since i have the entire period from jan 1 – june 1 to fill up. i’d rather avoid facebook since it seems less flexible so i’m doing my best to find biotech startups and got pretty lucky in that someone in the house is friends with some healthcare startup founders but it’s not clear if they’re actually interested in hiring interns or not. if all these options turn out to be bad then i guess i’ll just take more classes, but probably not on campus

i don’t think these problems are endemic to mit or that anyone in particular is responsible, but it just isn’t the environment i need and i’ll come back when i’m ready to but right now i’m not