Academic Comparison [MIT vs. CAM]

Here's an attempt at an objective comparison.

--	MIT	Cambridge
Focus	Application	Theory
Lectures	90 minutes	60 minutes
Professor Uses	Chalkboard	Overhead projector
Lecture Notes	Self-taken from board	Professor’s typed handout/packet
Homework	Problem sets, turned in, graded, 1 per week per class	Examples papers, not turned in, not graded (“as long as you tried”), 1 per 2-3 weeks per class
“Recitation”	60 minutes problem-solving in classroom with professor or grad student; ~10 students	No equivalent
“Supervision”	No equivalent	60 minutes going over not-for-grade and as-long-as-you-attempted-it examples paper; 2 students
“Office Hours”	2 hour blocks during week where professor’s undivided attention is devoted to students who come in	No equivalent
Work Style	Two words: “p-set parties” people tool together – collaborative – learn by doing problems/practice	Work together? Huh? Together? Library – independent – learn by reading books/notes
Laboratory	Instructor-guided, clear instructions, conducted in direct relevance to course work, labs vary by class (e.g. 2.007 is extremely-lab-intensive whereas 2.005 doesn’t have lab)	Sign up for slot before term starts, done independently (little help offered), might be doing it without having any lectures (e.g. in 1st week), one lab for every class
Computing Facilities	Athena clusters: you’re rarely more than 50m away from a room of 10-70 computers, all within same (Athena) system using same username/pw	One central room in entire engineering department with ~60 computers; in college, only 2 locations with ~8 computers each; all these run on different systems with different logins!
Printing	Free, unlimited, more printers across campus than you can count	Pay for every page, printers scarce
Internet	Wireless, signal anywhere and everywhere (e.g. dorms, student center, soccer field, classrooms, by the river, at the boathouse, in the gym), unlimited usage	Wireless? What is this wireless of which you speak? Don’t even think about getting it in your room, only in some lecture halls and college bar, restricted use! (2.0 GB/day … WHAT?!)

I did try to stay objective throughout, although I could not resist making a subjective remark here and there. Despite my opinions, facts are facts and the details about how things run are just the way they are; I can't make up or exaggerate how free the printing is at MIT, or how long a supervision is at Cambridge, in order to make things appear better/worse.

While I personally most appreciate the resources/opportunities/system that MIT offers, there are also virtues to the Cambridge system ... for example:

• I really like having typed handouts professors give in lectures. This guarantees my notes are comprehensive and ensures that I don't miss something just because the lawn mower on Killian was too loud for me to hear what the professor just said. This is also how they can keep lectures so short at Cam - because they're not spending ages writing everything out on the board (they use pre-printed overhead projector slides).
  
• Despite hating Cambridge labs at first, I am starting to realize the benefit of them. The major grievances with labs is that (a) you have to sign up before term even starts, (b) you might be doing it the 1st week or the last week - so you shouldn't necessarily need lectures to understand what you're doing, (c) but you do need lectures to understand what you're doing if you want to do it properly, (d) there is almost no help, (e) it is so disjointed from the course/lectures itself as a standalone one-time experiment for each class. But, on the bright side, it forces me to sit down and really analyze theory put into practice, and scramble to teach myself the theory because otherwise (since there is little to no guidance provided during your lab - just several other students who are equally as confused as you) I'd have no idea what to write about in the report. [my first lab at Cambridge, I explained that I was an exchange student, hadn't taken the first two years of classes the engineers took here, and asked the instructor for his email in case I had any questions. His response: "oh .. well, I'm not really supposed to help you ..." and left it at that.]
  
• Super limited contact-time (supervisions/recitations) and the lack of office hours: forces me to do a lot of independent study. Since professors/supervisors are really inaccessible (in comparison) and it's rare to find someone to help you/answer any questions, I find myself often sitting down in the library poring over notes until I finally figure it out on my own.
• Light workload/fewer assignments: MIT always has you scrambling frantically just to get things completed that people never sit down to just read. We're too busy trying to solve problems and apply the theory, that I never, ever read textbooks at MIT, and the only context in which I review lecture notes is when I'm trying to solve a pset problem. At Cam, since classroom + supervision contact hours are so few, you get all the time in the world to just chill in the library and review notes. Inherently in the system of shorter lectures, it is implied that students will do post-study of lecture notes. The fact that we have much fewer assignments/actual work to do just makes you think, well, I better be doing something productive if I have no more problems to solve - guess I'll just study/read.

Updates to this list as I think of them. The aim is to give a comprehensive comparison concerning academics.