Why should you come to MIT?
A year ago I too was a high school senior with a decision to make — what college should I attend? Since you are reading this article, you can probably guess that I chose MIT. A year later, I can say that I am very glad that I did. Since arriving here, I have only discovered more reasons why it is, to use a popular high-school-senior term, “awesome.” So this article, which had to be cut down from my original 127 reasons, outlines the top 10 reasons why you — yes, you — should come to MIT in the fall.
The Golden Triangle of a public education system
This is the first of a three-part series on how we can fix public education in the U.S.
Iran’s Numbered Days
Some countries are no better than publicity-crazed celebrities. Britney Spears has a breakdown one day just so she can make a comeback the next. As a global example, North Korea claimed in April to have put a satellite into orbit with a Taepodong-2 missile. Of course, anyone who saw part of the very same missile fall into the Sea of Japan must be lying. And any radar tracking the missile must have been malfunctioning.
OpenCourseWare and the Future of Education
As we are all aware, MIT has and will continue to make relatively large cuts to its budget in light of the recent financial meltdown. The administration established the Institute-Wide Planning Task Force to evaluate ways to make these cuts with minimal impact to the MIT community. One proposal is to cut funding to OpenCourseWare (OCW) or continue funding only until the grant funding that has paid for 72 percent of OCW since its creation runs out. For those not familiar with OCW, it is a brilliant piece of intellectual philanthropy that MIT opened to the public in September of 2002. Essentially, anyone in the world can access the same knowledge and information that MIT students are inundated with by classes. Not just a few classes here and there in the most common disciplines — as of May 2006 there were 1400 courses online. This is an unbelievable resource that has been utilized by about 60 million people, both on and off the campus. Twenty years ago, the thought that one could log onto a computer and access nearly the entire curriculum at MIT would be unthinkable. But now it can be done.