asportking

As an MIT student: it depends. Take four classes a semester and nothing else, you'll more or less be fine. Take five classes, four hard classes, or an extracurricular or two and it's easy to get wrecked. Also, MIT is much more hard than it is time-consuming. In my experience, homework hasn't been "I had to work for twelve hours on this one problem set." It's more often "I looked at the first question on this problem set and I literally have no idea what to do."

I'm not saying it doesn't take twelve hours, I'm saying it's more akin to staring blankly at the paper for eleven hours and actually working for one, rather than doing monstrous calculations nonstop. Also, this probably varies depending on your major. I'm a math major, but I could imagine a mechanical engineering major would probably spend more time doing "manual labor" (3D-modeling, running tests, things that are more time-consuming than hard).

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