Colleges Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT www.mit.edu

Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private institution that was founded in 1861. MIT is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from downtown Boston in an urban setting with a campus size of 166 acres. It utilizes a 4-1-4-based academic calendar. While MIT is a research university committed to world-class inquiry in math, science, and engineering, it has equally distinguished programs in architecture, the humanities, management, and the social sciences. MIT offers housing in one of the coolest dorms in the country, commonly called “The Sponge,” designed by architect Steven Holl.

Academics

MIT’s strength is the fusion of academic knowledge with practical purpose. MIT believes the best education occurs when students are self-motivated and engaged. Consequently, MIT education combines rigorous academics with a “learning-by-doing” approach. The “Independent Activities Program,” a four-week term between fall and spring semesters in January, offers special courses, lectures, competitions and projects. MIT features a student-faculty ratio of 3:1 and 71% of classes have fewer than 20 students. Popular majors include Engineering, Computer and Information Sciences, Mathematics, and Statistics.

Special Highlights

The Deshpande Center. The center empowers some of MIT’s most talented researchers to make a difference in the world by developing innovative technologies in the lab and bringing them to the marketplace in the form of breakthrough products and new companies. In turn, those innovations can help solve large and daunting problems in health, information technology, energy and other fields. The Deshpande Center is helping researchers become change makers—people who don’t just leave things at the idea stage but push ahead and actually make their ideas happen.

Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. The Koch Institute is a state-of-the-art cancer research facility as well as the hub of cancer research on the MIT campus. The Institute brings together biologists and chemists along with mechanical and materials science engineers, computer scientists, clinicians and others, to bring fresh perspectives and an interdisciplinary approach to advancing the fight against cancer. This multi-faceted group of investigators is at the core of our mission to develop new insights into cancer, as well as new tools and technologies to better treat, diagnose and prevent the disease.

School Mission & Unique Qualities

Our campus is a workshop for inventing the future and we are all apprentices, learning from each other as we go. Through signature experiential learning programs like UROP, MIST, PKG, IAP, D-Lab, and Sandbox, students can pursue numerous co-curricular and extracurricular projects—here at MIT, throughout the Greater Boston innovation hub, and around the world. Honeycombed with legendary laboratories and dozens of makerspaces, a wind tunnel, a research nuclear reactor, and a glass lab, our campus of uniquely numbered buildings adds up to a prime spot to make the most of your potential.

Student Reviews…

“MIT is an outstanding university with numerous opportunities in research and academics. Classes are indeed difficult, with homework and study consuming a large chunk of time. Everyone is there to make the world a better place and that’s what makes MIT so special.”