d-d-d-d-drop date by Abby H. '20

tl;dr: MIT lets you drop subjects basically at the end of the semester which is different and wonderful

Oh, boy, I have been awake for many hours and in one more hour (it’s midnight rn) I will drive to Atlanta to attempt to fly back to Boston since essentially all of the flights out of my local airport were cancelled today and I have attendance-necessary, non-lecture classes to get to on Tuesday.

This was my first year not staying in Cambridge for Thanksgiving, and I understand why now (so much work so little reliable plane). Turns out it’s really hard to revise that paper and do that pset when you have a puppy to play with. Thanksgiving plane tickets cost so much that I ended up skipping 3 days of classes just so that I could go home for less than a thousand dollars. The fried turkey was nice, though.

The Wednesday that I missed was a really special day for MIT that we call “Drop Date.” November 21, 2018, marked the deadline to remove from your transcript any class in which you were currently enrolled. In the spring Baker House usually drops a piano off their roof to celebrate, but it’s too cold for that now.

What’s so special about Drop Date?

Maybe you completed a couple of midterms and a chunk of psets in a class and realized that it’s likely you won’t pass or get the grade you want. Drop the class!

Maybe you registered for like ten classes with the intention of only completing four. Drop the other five!

Maybe you just want to stay at MIT forever and retake classes over and over. Drop all your classes!⁠01 This is a joke. Please don't do this.

Over the break, I was talking to my sister⁠02 she goes to another university that recently lost the Iron Bowl about dropping classes, and she said that it sucks.⁠03 this is true of most colleges You have a week or two to drop a class and it costs money. If you drop any later the class will show up on your transcript as a withdrawal, which looks a little ugly to grad schools and such.

MIT is cool with you dropping classes 11 weeks into a 14-week semester. It will only show up on your internal transcript.⁠04 the one that MIT keeps, not the one that gets sent to people In fact, it won’t even show up on your internal transcript if you drop before the fifth week of the semester. Perhaps best of all, it doesn’t cost money. This probably has something to do with how at MIT you don’t pay tuition based on the number of credit-hours you take. Everyone pays the same tuition, and you can take as many classes as you can feasibly absorb. It’s great for nerds who want to study rockets and music and politics and physics.

Since I love to extensively plan and schedule and scheme to maximize my fulfillment of institute requirements without overextending my goblin brain, I’ve sparingly taken advantage of this resource. Nevertheless, it’s nice to know it’s there if I need it (like a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire lifeline).

Every post deserves pictures, so here are some precious moments from the past week. Enjoy!