Hi Blog Readers, today I am writing about a frequently-asked question—what is it like taking MIT classes?
This semester, I am cross-registering to take an MIT course about entrepreneurship. (This is my third time cross-registering at MIT—read my posts from sophomore and junior year about cross-registering!) This class is insanely cool—we are placed into groups and paired up with a local startup company that we work with for the semester. My group and I are working with a small activewear company and helping them with their relaunch! We meet with the company’s founder once a week and do a lot of work outside of class, like consumer surveys, market research, pricing analysis, etc.
Today, I will give a rundown of what it looks like to go and take this class.
My class is once a week on Monday evenings for three hours. I take the Wellesley shuttle over to MIT on Monday afternoon and depending on traffic, it takes roughly an hour to get there. We get dropped off right in front of MIT’s Stratton Student Center.
I typically have about an hour before my class begins, so I use this time to grab an early dinner. Cross-registered Wellesley students have one meal swipe at MIT’s dining services, and I use this to eat at the small food court inside of Stratton.
Then, it is time to walk over to my class. My class is about a fifteen minute walk from Stratton. I remember when I first cross-registered at MIT during my sophomore year, I was so worried about getting lost on the sprawling campus that I went to MIT and staked out my classroom two days before my first class!
Views during my walk to class
My class is about thirty to forty students, so pretty big compared to Wellesley’s smaller class sizes. This class is part of the Sloan School of Management, MIT’s business school, so most of the students are MBA students. There are also graduate students from Harvard and Tufts University taking this class, and of course there’s Wellesley representation! My classmates span all ages and backgrounds. In our first class, we all introduced ourselves and our backgrounds, and it was insane to hear my classmates’ different accomplishments and the diverse fields they had worked in prior to returning to school. Some of my classmates have even been college lecturers themselves!
The first half of the class is typically a lecture on topics like market research and go-to-market strategies. The second half of the class might be an activity—we have had the founder of a local company come to class and present. This week, we went into small groups and came up with a fun pitch for a made-up product.
Class usually finishes around eight and then I take the Wellesley shuttle back to campus. I hope this provided a little glimpse into what taking MIT classes are like for a Wellesley student. I am super grateful that we have the opportunity to utilize not just Wellesley’s resources but also other colleges that we can cross-register at. Thank you for reading!