Education
At MIT, we revel in a culture of learning by doing. In 30 departments across five schools and one college, our students combine analytical rigor with curiosity, playful imagination, and an appetite for solving the hardest problems in service to society. From science and engineering to the arts, humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary programs, we offer excellence across the board.
Our undergraduates work closely with faculty, tackle global challenges, pursue fundamental questions, and translate ideas into action. The core of the Institute’s teaching and research enterprise, our graduate students and postdocs represent one of the most talented and diverse cohorts in the world. To complement its academics, MIT offers a vibrant campus environment with a wide range of clubs, teams, programs, and activities so that all students can cultivate personal growth, build community, and prioritize wellbeing.
Schools, Departments & the College
Across MIT, faculty help set the global standard of excellence in their disciplines: They are pioneering scholars who love to teach. Deeply engaged in practice, they topple conventional walls between fields in the push for deeper understanding and fresh ideas. In fact, many faculty actively work in at least one of MIT’s interdisciplinary labs, centers, initiatives, and institutes that target crucial challenges, from clean energy to cancer.
The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, opened in fall 2019, is a cross-cutting entity with education and research links across all five schools.
Teaching & Learning
Our campus is a workshop for inventing the future and we are all apprentices, learning from each other as we go. Because we like to make things, and we like to make an impact, iconic courses like 2.009 emphasize designing, inventing, collaborating, and translating students’ expertise to reach the world. Through signature experiential learning programs like UROP, UPOP, MISTI, PKG, IAP, D-Lab, NEET, and Sandbox, students can pursue virtually infinite co-curricular and extracurricular projects — here at MIT, throughout the Greater Boston innovation hub, and around the world. Honeycombed with legendary laboratories and dozens of makerspaces, a wind tunnel, a research nuclear reactor, and a glass lab, our campus of idiosyncratically numbered buildings adds up to a prime spot to make the most of your potential.
Open Learning
MIT is pioneering new ways of teaching and learning, on our campus and around the world, by inventing and leveraging digital technologies. MITx, the Institute’s portfolio of massively open online courses, offers flexible access to a range of interactive courses developed and taught by instructors from MIT. Another MIT innovation — the MicroMasters credential — is increasingly recognized by industry leaders hiring new talent. And MIT’s original digital learning option, OpenCourseWare, continues to offer teachers and learners worldwide the materials for more than 2,500 MIT courses, freely available online.
Professional & Executive Education
For executives, managers, entrepreneurs, and technical professionals eager to tap fresh thinking and new research from MIT, we offer dozens of executive and professional programs. Some are online. Some are on campus. Ranging from two days to 20 months, they all share MIT’s signature focus on practical solutions for the real world.
K-12 Resources
We delight in the beauty and creative power of science, technology, engineering, and math, and we make a special effort to spark that same passion in students from kindergarten through high school — in school, after school, and over the summer. Locally, we engage students, teachers, and families with a range of hands-on K-12 offerings, from structured field trips to MIT’s Edgerton Center to programs designed to encourage girls in their love of technology and science. We also offer an array of resources for teachers, to help them make science and engineering easy to grasp and irresistibly interesting.
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