First up is a shot of Harvard. I lucked into joining a tour that was in progress while Jim headed to Special Collections to do his usual gig. It was really interesting and learned lots of things.
* That Harvard chooses the best people then finds money in grants, work study, etc. to make up the $40 K US tuition for those who don't have parents that can pay the whole shot. Also, new this year is that anyone whose parents make less than $40K will not have to pay anything.
* 97% live on campus for the entire 4 undergrad years
* most classes have no more than 14 students
* As one would expect, they want students to take a broad range of courses outside their specialty but what was rather cool is that instead of things like Biology 101, they will design directed studies courses for you. For example, the student giving the tour took the Physics of Musical Instruments".
Then on to MIT to take a pix of their Media Lab for my son, pick up a souvenir from MIT for him, and to see the new Stata Centre (not quite finished) by Frank Gehry that is getting lots of press because it is so wild in design. Gehry says the inside of the building is more important than its striking outside. The MIT faculty, he says, wanted to "produce collisions of people by accident".
I thought this building was a total "WOW" inside and out. Everything else there is sooo.... boring that this building comes across as absolutely brilliant by comparison. This opinion probably isn't shared by everyone. The person I asked directions from on campus (probably a prof) referred to it as the "drunken building" but did admit that now they had something (like Harvard does) that people would want to see.
