Life as a Student at MIT and Cambridge

Last night I went to a dinner sponsored by the Boston Society of Civil Engineers. They have a Student Night dinner every year, mostly to hand out scholarships and other awards. The program was a nice dinner, followed by a lecture on Saving Venice by the former department head of Course 1. The last part was the presentation of the scholarships. It was pretty cool to see other Course 1 students again and I had a chance to talk to some 1E people who I haven't seen for a long time.

The part that I really appreciated was the statement by both our current and former department head of how students are the life and blood of the department. The dinner cost $40 for professional members to attend. But our department had paid for all its students to attend. (There were students from other schools as well, namely Northeastern and Tufts.)

This type of thing would NEVER happen in Cambridge. There is a student organization in Cambridge for the Engineering Department but you have to pay for everything. You have to pay for membership, dinners, etc.

At MIT, we have CEESA (Civil and Enivronmental Engineering Student Association). CEESA membership is free. There is free food provided at meetings, courtesy of the department. They hold study breaks, arrange tutoring sessions, and will even talk to professors on behalf of students to get things like more office hours, less homework, or even to inform the professor that he/she is going too fast and should slow down. Last year, the community service chair of CEESA organized a group to volunteer at the Boston marathon and the department paid for the renting of a car.

I just feel that the Cambridge University Engineering Department does not care about its students. Students are not their first priority. Maybe that's just the way they are, the way they do things. But I don't like it. As an undergrad there, I don't even have a place to eat lunch. Which is crazy because the graduate students get a lounge where they can buy hot food and professors get a huge tea room next door where they can hang out. What do the undergrads get? Vending machines in the basement. It's not like this in other parts of Cambridge. In the Sigwick site, where a lot of the humanities are, there is a small cafe (run by the university) where you can buy hot food for lunch. In the Asian and Middle Eastern Faculty, where I'm taking Chinese, there is a common room for ALL students and faculty to use.

The more I think about things like this, the more I realize how much MIT cares about its students. The administration really tries to take care of the undergrads. They look after our well-being, not just academically, but physically and mentally. It's not perfect but at least they try.