But despite the grind I had a really really good time. Perhaps it was because I was (AFAICT) in the bottom half of my (tiny) high school so showed up never worrying about how I was doing compared to other students.

The Institute, at least back then, was impersonal and basically uninterested in undergraduates (not anti-, just didn't care). For me that was liberating: I could take classes in pretty much any department, and if my transcript was a mix of 5.0 and 3.0 that was OK since I was learning a shitload every day. As an undergrad I got to take a lot of graduate seminars and I got to spend a LOT of time in the lab (a majority of my last two years).

I wonder if this is self-reinforcing. When you're used to huge amounts of stress from school, it seems natural that companies will try to take advantage of that and simply start expecting more. Or when graduates from such schools get into positions of management, they might not even see that what they're asking of people is not healthy, because it's become perfectly normal for them. But it's a zero-sum game. How long before it spirals out of control, if it hasn't already?

I've never been competitive and no exam has ever driven me to tears.

Everything I've learned was self thought and I took it at my own pace which is way slower than academia requires but that gave me the opportunity to delve deeper and answer my own questions.

I don't care about competing with my peers I just want to see cool things and have fun building cool things with other people.

That's probably why stress never gets to me and I never push my self into psychological hell hole.

I've done it once when I was a student and I never want to go back to that and I'm certainly not going to accept an employer pushing me to that.

I would rather quit.

Do you know more than I do about something? There are lots of things that you (the general you, meaning anyone) know more about than me. All I want is to learn from you, and teach you some things that I know (which reinforces my own learning). That's it.

One of the reasons I left my last job was because it was very much a competitive, back-stabbing sort of environment. You could only get "better" in that environment by actively making someone else worse. How that makes sense when your goal is to produce a research product, I'll never know.

I guess what I'm saying with all of this is, I'm happy to see other people admit to the overall viewpoint that you've shared here.

The nice thing about being in computing is that there is just so much work to do that you can have a lot of people working without ever competing directly for the "top job".

1) I disagree entirely that this is good preparation for most people. Maybe if you go into academia, but not for the vast majority of graduates. In what I see as the real world, the ability to self-regulate your work load (which is a learned skill) and not fall into the trap of fetishizing working ridiculously hard is critical for long term stability. And I say this as someone who finished my PhD at 26. I didn't do it by working in unhealthy ways, and I sure didn't do it by doing every assignment I was given regardless of cost to my mental health. I did it by working healthy and asking for help when I needed it.

2) Surely you're aware of what happens to any undergraduate in our era who admitted to the administration that they were depressed. I have seen a dozen people shuffled off to McLean or just kicked out for years until they could convince MIT to let them back in. In all but one case I think MIT overreacted and significantly damaged those individual's lives by isolating instead of supporting them.

3) I think the biggest issue wrt stress is that undergraduates compete for who has the worst workload. I see it again and again, and it is insane to me. I honestly think a good portion of undergrads, either intentionally or subconsciously, practice horrible work habits just so that later on they can boast about how they finished a 40 hour lab in a three day no-sleep stretch. You know you've seen it too.

4) Depression != Stress. Admitting you're depressed is already hard. Admitting you're depressed when everyone around you is stressed out is a whole other level.

can you list some examples? I had to see a Medical Center counselor (who I didn't like that much) for therapy for a couple semesters, but in general I thought the support offered was well-intentioned and appropriate.

> You know you've seen it too.

I saw some of that ('06), but always thought those people were idiots.

In at least one case it took 8 years to get back in, on average I'd guess 2-3 years of forced unenrollment. The one I think was the best off was the one who just gave up on the nonsense and went to a different university where he subsequently graduated with honors, probably also with a lot less stress.

I refused to do this, and they refused to treat me. (I graduated a year later with high honors and a job offer from Google.)

Then I quit after my masters and got a job. Having money is so much better than living off of a stupid stipend. Fuck grad school! Wooo!!!

I'm appalled at how schools like Harvard and Princeton [1] (my alma mater) treat students with psychological challenges (effectively kicking them out) and am wondering what MIT is like in that regard.

[1] I understand their logic that the student is a thread to their own health and other students' well being, but their heavy handedness is revolting to me.

I'm currently at MIT now as a grad student. The notion that MIT is kicking out students who have mental health problems is a common refrain I hear from undergrads; the thought process being that MIT is trying to limit the on campus suicide rate by driving people out. I have even heard people say they suspect that medical shares psych records with the administration without their permission, which is completely untrue and illegal. I can't speak to whether MIT actually kicks people out for mental health issues (I doubt it) but the fact that this is even a commonly held belief is deeply troubling and counter productive.

I love MIT, but they need to get their shit together and be more transparent about their process in dealing with people who have mental health issues.

This was true when I was at MIT in the mid-80s as well. I agree it can help you to develop skill in dealing with pressure that will be useful in later life, but there's a fine line between that and beating yourself up for no good reason, and it's not always easy to see where the line is.

The administration when I was there was supportive once you asked for help, but you had to ask. I did not see much proactive effort to try to spot people who were having trouble but hadn't asked for help. There's a fine line there, too, of course.

It's really a bit of a hugely larger social and cultural issue, our willingness to work ourselves do the bone, with utter disregard for well being; all driven by anxiety and obsessive thinking.