Question: Is getting into MIT worth it?

MIT So this is a post I copy-pasted from Quora. The purpose of sharing this post is to say that:

1) It's ok to take gap year(s).

2) It's ok if you don't yet know what you wanna major in, even when you are applying.

3) Most importantly, it's ok if you are not attracted to conventionally attractive majors/subjects.

Question: Is getting into MIT worth it?

Answered by Rona Wang:

Define worth it.

I know a guy a few years older than me. He attended MIT briefly, but decided to drop out and become a mail carrier. Perhaps lots of people would view this as an odd choice, but for him, it was the right one.

Whether or not getting into MIT (which is a different notion than actually attending, I’ll add) is worth it depends on who you are and what you want.

I attended MIT as a freshman from 2016–2017, but opted to take a gap year instead of returning as a sophomore. I got a job in New Zealand and didn’t look back.

Why? There’s many reasons, but one major consideration was that at MIT, I didn’t know what I wanted. Most eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds don’t know who they’re supposed to be or what they want. Heck, at my current job, I work with people in their late twenties, and they tell me they don’t know what they want, either.

At MIT, I thought I wanted to go into consulting. I was a computer science/math (18C) major, and most of the 18C majors I knew went into consulting or finance. It was stable, lucrative, and interesting. As far as career paths went—not shabby.

But it wasn’t what I really wanted. It was what I thought I was supposed to want, because everybody else around me seemed pretty happy with it. But it simply didn’t feel like the right career for me. Like, hey, maybe I wanted to be a teacher, or an entrepreneur, or the next Bill Nye (not that anyone can ever really replace Bill Nye). Maybe I wouldn’t earn as much as my classmates going to Goldman Sachs or Google, and maybe that was okay.

MIT is also one of those things you’re supposed to want.

Many of the other answers here touch upon the many doors MIT opens: prestigious jobs and graduate programs and respectful nods from colleagues. There’s a lot of value in those opportunities. But not everybody wants those things.

Maybe you just want to be a mail carrier, and that’s awesome, too.