[]Inri137 3868 points 3 years ago*

Alright, sorry about the delay. I was too busy celebrating the New Year. ;) I
hope you're still checking in on this account.
Anyway, I think I have a bit of a unique perspective. I've seen MIT admissions
from the perspective of the applicant, a student, a teacher, and now as an
alumnus conducting interviews of prospective students. The fact that you
mentioned MIT specifically really made me feel like I should take the time to
produce a good response!
I wanted to start by writing out standard admissions advice (e.g. no one
thing like SAT scores will keep you from being admitted, etc.). While all that
is true, the problem you're dealing with is so much bigger than that. The
problem you're coming up against is one I've seen so many of my fellow
students encounter. If I could set up a wavy-fade flashback, I'd show you my
freshman year.
I moved into one of the dorms at MIT thinking I was hot shit. I had, after all,
just gotten into MIT. And beyond that, I had tested out of the freshman
calculus and physics classes, meaning that I was able to start math "a year"
ahead in differential equations and start with the advanced version of the
physics 2 class we have. Registration went by easy enough and I was
pleased with my decisions.
Term rolled in and I was getting crushed. I wasn't the greatest student in high
school, and whenever I got poor grades I would explain them away by saying
I just didn't care or I was too busy or too unmotivated or (more often than
not) just cared about something else. It didn't help that I had good test
performance which fed my ego and let me think I was smarter than everyone
else, just relatively unmotivated. I had grossly underestimated MIT, and was
left feeling so dumb.
I had the fortune of living next to a bright guy, R. R. was an advanced
student, to say the least. He was a sophomore, but was already taking the
most advanced graduate math classes. He came into MIT and tested out of
calculus, multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, real
analysis (notoriously the most difficult math class at MIT), and a slew of other
math courses. And to top it all off, he was attractive, engaging, sociable, and
generally had no faults that would make him mortal.
I suffered through half a semester of differential equations before my pride
let me go to R. for help. And sure enough, he took my textbook for a night to
review the material (he couldn't remember it all from third grade), and then
he walked me through my difficulties and coached me. I ended up pulling a

B+ at the end of a semester and avoiding that train wreck. The thing is,
nothing he taught me involved raw brainpower. The more I learned the more
I realized that the bulk of his intelligence and his performance just came from
study and practice, and that the had amassed a large artillery of intellectual
and mathematical tools that he had learned and trained to call upon. He
showed me some of those tools, but what I really ended up learning was how
to go about finding, building, and refining my own set of cognitive tools. I
admired R., and I looked up to him, and while I doubt I will ever compete with
his genius, I recognize that it's because of a relative lack of my conviction
and an excess of his, not some accident of genetics.
It's easy to trick ourselves into thinking that "being smart" is what
determines our performance. In so many ways, it's the easiest possible
explanation because it demands so little of us and immediately explains
away our failings. You are facing this tension without recognizing it. You are
blaming your intelligence in the first two paragraphs but you undermine
yourself by saying you received good grades you didn't deserve. You
recognize your lack of motivation as a factor in your lack of extracurricular
activities but not in your SAT scores (fun fact: the variable that correlates
most strongly to SAT performance is hours of studying for the SATs). Your
very last statement could just as well apply to your entire post:
But none of this has to do with my intelligence; I'm just rambling.
You got A's because you studied or because the classes were easy. You got a
B probably because you were so used to understanding things that you didn't
know how to deal with something that didn't come so easily. I'm guessing
that early on you built the cognitive and intellectual tools to rapidly acquire
and process new information, but that you've relied on those tools so much
you never really developed a good set of tools for what to do when those
failed. This is what happened to me, but I didn't figure it out until after I got
crushed by my first semester of college. I need to ask you, has anyone ever
taken the time to teach you how to study? And separately, have you learned
how to study on your own in the absence of a teacher or curriculum? These
are the most valuable tools you can acquire because they are the tools you
will use to develop more powerful and more insightful tools. It only snowballs
from there until you become like R.
MIT has an almost 97% graduation rate. That means that most of the people
who get in, get through. Do you know what separates the 3% that didn't from
the rest that do? I do. I've seen it so many times, and it almost happened to
me. Very few people get through four years of MIT with such piss-poor
performance that they don't graduate. In fact, I can't think of a single one off
the top of my head. People fail to graduate from MIT because they come in,
encounter problems that are harder than anything they've had to do before,
and not knowing how to look for help or how to go about wrestling those

problems, burn out. The students that are successful look at that challenge,
wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and stupidity, and begin to take steps
hiking that mountain, knowing that bruised pride is a small price to pay for
getting to see the view from the top. They ask for help, they acknowledge
their inadequacies. They don't blame their lack of intelligence, they blame
their lack of motivation. I was lucky that I had someone to show me how to
look for that motivation, and I'm hoping that I can be that person for you in
some small capacity over the Internet. I was able to recover from my
freshman year and go on to be very successful in my studies, even serving
as a TA for my fellow students. When I was a senior, I would sit down with the
freshmen in my dorm and show them the same things that had been shown
to me, and I would watch them struggle with the same feelings, and
overcome them. By the time I graduated MIT, I had become the person I
looked up to when I first got in.
You're so young, way too young to be worried about not being smart enough.
Until you're so old you start going senile, you have the opportunity to make
yourself "smarter." And I put that in quotes because "smart" is really just a
way of saying "has invested so much time and sweat that you make it look
effortless." You feel like you are burnt out or that you are on the verge of
burning out, but in reality you are on the verge of deciding whether or not
you will burn out. It's scary to acknowledge that it's a decision because it
puts the onus on you to to do something about it, but it's empowering
because it means there is something you can do about it.
So do it.

EDIT Did not expect this to blow up like it has! I'm terribly sorry I only got
back to checking it so late. I'll make it a point to sit down sometime in the
next few days and bang out the responses all your great questions and
comments deserve. Until then, I'm glad I could share this story with so many
people.

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[]eigenfunc 276 points 3 years ago

Thank you for writing this. As a recent MIT grad, this really resonated with
me, since I came to very similar conclusions over the last few years.
When I first started MIT, I stood in awe of fellow freshmen who were taking 8
classes a semester and getting ready to do graduate work in math and
physics. And I rambled on to my parents and whoever would listen about
how unfathomably smart these kids must be. I was obsessed with this idea of
the genius MIT student that I clearly wasn't.
My dad told me something that I wasn't able to appreciate until much later
--- that it's not about being "smart", but about sustained focus, dedication,
and discipline. I didn't believe him. I figured that some people are just born
smarter, and there's an upper limit on your intelligence that holds you back,
and that I had hit that limit. No doubt some people are more predisposed to
certain kinds of achievement. It's very very easy to blame your intelligence
than your motivation when by all accounts, you are busting your ass, killing
yourself spending 20 hours on each analysis problem set and those guys are
spending less than 5.
But then I started thinking about those kids I idolized. Some of them had
been doing programming or math competitions since they were in
elementary school. One of my friends would tell me things like "I'm thinking
of going through a complex analysis book this summer and going back
through my notes to review my topology." Now this was a guy with /focus/
and /dedication/! I thought to myself: until I spend that much time doing
focused work, how can I expect to be as good?
I realized that "genius" is overrated. It is rarely just there. You have to focus
and keep pushing yourself to get there.
[]Middens 116 points 3 years ago

I agree with both you and Inri, these describe my time at MIT almost
perfectly.
They tell you at orientation that attending MIT is like drinking from a firehose.
And I did not truly understand what they meant until I got back my first
assignment and it was a 50%. I didn't know what to do, my usual study
habits were failing me. Apparently I can't just memorize things for tests and
then forget them immediately. Oh lord, it was hard and it took many failures
before I understood how to succeed. And it was glorious.
The absolute best thing I learned at MIT was HOW to think and HOW to find
information. The classes themselves were hard, yes, but that school taught
me above all else how to thrive in high pressure situations.

MIT doesn't teach knowledge, it teaches wisdom. And I wish everyone could
learn what I learned, because it goes so far beyond books.

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[]int3gr4te 112 points 3 years ago

Definitely jumping on the MIT bandwagon here to agree. My study habits in

high school were "hah, what study habits?". I went out to arcades with my
friends before finals because I just knew I'd ace everything. I used to play
with Rubik's Cubes in class because why take notes? Everything made sense
already.
MIT kicked my ass. I had to learn HOW to study for tests just as much as I
had to learn the actual material. I had to learn how to ask people for help
with psets. I had to learn how to LEARN.
And I was humbled so vastly, as I was suddenly finding myself in situations
where I was the dumbest person in the room. Not just occasionally, but
pretty much all the time.
It was horrible, and I was depressed, and I hated TFP. But looking back at my
high-school self, I really needed that. And it was also the best experience of
my life, and one I wouldn't trade for anything in the world.
[]tritlo 35 points 3 years ago

Could you relate what you learnt about learning?

[]teh_boy 36 points 3 years ago

Another MIT grad here. These posts really resonated with me. I'll take a crack
at answering your question. Sorry if it comes off as glib. The best way to
learn how to learn is to push yourself into situations where you aren't the

smartest person in the room, and to observe and get help from the people
who are the smartest, to find out how they do it. This is what inri137 did by
going to MIT and then getting help from R.R. After that comes practice,
practice, practice. I absolutely love Norvig's essay, Teach Yourself
Programming in Ten Years. He writes specifically about learning how to
program, but a lot of his advice is trivial to generalize. Learning to do
something well takes deliberate practice over a long period of time.

[]int3gr4te 22 points 3 years ago

It's not as much "what" as "how".

I literally didn't know how to study for an exam. I had to learn, by trying and
failing repeatedly and eventually improving. I didn't know how to ask for
help, because in high school I never had to ask for help; I was doing the
tutoring. I had to learn how to work with groups of people, by trying and
failing and being told I was being obnoxious, and adjusting my behavior, until
other people wanted to work with me.
The best advice I can offer that I did learn at MIT: surround yourself with
people who are better than you or smarter than you. Then, ask them
questions, and listen to their replies. Imitate them in your life. Realize your
failings and your weaknesses, and spend time improving them and filling in
the gaps. And above all, be interested in everything. Don't dismiss things as
"boring" or "hard" - ever. Stay curious and keep trying.