The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

That's the weird thing about this place, and I didn't even think about it when I chose to come here. The stuff that's done here isn't done anywhere else in the world. Period. Regardless of what Yale and Harvard students may say about their classes (some of which I've sit in on), they don't even begin to compare. They teach sciences as liberal arts. Now I'll be quite honest with you: Caltech is also a pretty good school, probably of the same quality in the hard sciences. But MIT also has top-notch programs in economics, management, and engineering (in addition to the core sciences). And it's right next to a city that seems to be designed for college students. And the students at Caltech are a little more weird than the ones here; at MIT, you can always find a group to fly with.

By far the coolest thing about this place is the attitude. You'll see a lot of student articles about how terrible MIT is, or how the administration isn't doing anything right. And most people don't really understand what these things represent -- they are our form of school spirit. The students here pride themselves in being able handle anything thrown at them, and always carry an attitude of "it's us versus the administration." And because of that, you always see students helping each other out. Nobody thinks that they're smarter than everyone else (even though there are some amazingly brilliant people here), and nobody competes for professors' attention. And nobody gets ahead by smooching. What matters here is what you can do.

I also want to say that, although this may or may not play a big role in your life as an undergraduate here, the research that goes on here is astounding. The guys that invented the world wide web and TCP/IP, those that discovered quarks and developed the theory of quantum chromodynamics and the MIT-bag model of quark interactions, those that seqeuenced a huge portion of the human genome at the Whitehead Institute, and one of the developers of the Black-Scholes equation in economics, they're all here. No matter what field you go into, you'll run into people who invented it. Seven of the people who won Nobel Prizes in 2001 studied or instructed at MIT. Stuff happens here, and it happens fast. And it's a pretty exciting place to be. And that's pretty cool.People always told me that the knowledge was made here, but I didn't realize it until I got here. And now that I'm here, I can't believe some of the things that go on around me.