ichgtsnlas

[godream]

Talking to an old friend of my dad's/family friend yesterday, who went to MIT for grad school way back in the day (the early 70s).

So what are you taking this semester?

I list my four classes, with brief on-the-spot summary blurbs.

That's it?

(... well, yeah, and it's kicking my ass thank you very much.) Yeah --

Disappointed: You should be taking advantage of it more.

What do you say to that? I say 6.170's a lot of work, he's not buying it, whatever... I guess if nothing else this is evidence that the school isn't less hardcore than it used to be like everyone keeps saying, maybe?

Anyways. Being home is wonderful and relaxing and my little half-brother is adorable and brilliant and boy do I miss him. My other brother, age 17, and I get along much much better now that we don't live together anymore, which I'm not sure if I should be sad or glad about. I think he's also getting perilously close to six feet tall, I have to look up to talk to him, which is definitely not fair at all. And I haven't gotten any tooling at all done yet which is a very very bad thing.

The borrowed computer I am using doesn't have admin privileges on this account, though, so I couldn't really tool on 6.170 even if I wanted to. (Which I sorta do.) It also closes browser windows entirely of its own accord (my theory is something weird having to do with the touchpad) at random intervals which lends an interesting sort of finiteness to websurfing. I'm the type to leave twelve tabs open at all times with things I intend to look at more closely or send to people and it's actually probably upping my productivity not to be able to do that. But also messing with my mind.

Comments

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

I think that someone who went here in the early 70s and has not been around since is so out of touch that...I'm reluctant to say that somebody's opinion is not worth listening to, but yeah. Do you know how much more qualified the average MIT student is today than 30+ years ago? Not as hardcore, my ass. The alums who could seriously make that claim (and who I'd still tell off for saying that, and have done so) are the ones who are like 5 years out, not 30.

Who would a grad student be to talk anyway? Grad students at MIT aren't even allowed to take as many as four classes a term, who is he to tell you you're not taking enough? 6.170 in its current form (and possibly in any form) did not exist in the 70s. The CS field has developed so much since then, and is so more complex than it was at the time (especially in terms of what's accessible to the undergrad level), that it's ridiculous to even compare.

[blue-everglades.livejournal.com]

One of the guys I work with at the Media Lab - also an early-mid 70s student, and the lab whiz-who-makes-everything-work, I might add - has the opposite reaction. He thinks we're harder k0r. His back-in-my-day stories generally talk about how hard classes were and how he could never UROP like students do today.

And ditto jessiehl on the grad student thing. That guy wouldn't know what the hell he's talking about, anyway. Most non-MIT grad students that I've talked to here recognize after some fashion that they have it much easier than the undergraduates.

Now, if anything, what you should be taking more advantage of more is boys...
(I didn't say that.)

[blue-everglades.livejournal.com]

Wow. I guess I'm not feeling the is/are grammatical-correctness this morning...

[blue-everglades.livejournal.com]

erm, and by "non-MIT" grad students, I mean non-native-to-MIT-by-way-of-undergraduate Grad students

[godream.livejournal.com]

So I need some sort of six-unit seminar, maybe, Taking-Advantage-of-Boys.001?

[beat-the-beaver.livejournal.com]

Heh. No one else in my family has ever gone to MIT, but whenever people ask about my classes, and I respond, they scrunch up their eyebrows a bit and respond "But isn't that only *four*?" I've given up trying to explain...

[cassandraia.livejournal.com]

Home is good. Free food is good. Sleep and tooling is better. (and I can't believe that I just said that.) I'm sorry he was like that. If he was just a grad student here, and thirty years out, I'm not so sure that he's all that justified in making judgements. Besides, even if HE took 7 classes "back in his day" how much did he necessarily learn from them? Seven classes and I know I'd be doing the old cram-and-forget routine and screwing myself. And, taking "only" four courses myself, (even if I'm only a lowly frosh) I think that I may be qualified to comment that four is more than sufficient to keep people run off their feet even taking the rest of life out of consideration. If he still feels this way, perhaps he'd like to try a month of your four classes plus the ones he thinks you ought to be taking? I'd love to see how he likes the life of an undergrad at the current MIT whne thery take "full advantage" of the course offerings.

Alternatively, he could have been crazy smart in his day and able to take 6 or 7 classes and forget that he was rather unique in that aspect and is simply misremembering things. Take your pick.