A great education and a terrible place to work
Pros
Incredible faculty, you will learn more than you ever thought possible. Your colleagues will be smart, kind, and collegial: I rarely felt like I was competing with other graduate students for resources or time. MIT's professors, or at least the ones I worked with, are generally kind, brilliant people who want to help their grad students. Yes, many have high standards, and yes, some are racist/sexist martinets who demand too much and are blinded by prejudice, but that is true of most institutions.
Cons
-Low pay relative to cost of living. Cambridge/Boston is one of the most expensive areas on earth and it is nearly impossible to find a place to live. Expect to pay more than 60% of your income on housing even if you have roommates or live in on-campus housing. -Out-of-touch administration. While at the department level administrative employees are highly capable and genuinely try to help students navigate the maze of academic bureaucracy, the higher you go on the admin food chain, the greater the level of incompetence and outright hostility to graduate student needs becomes. There's a reason nearly 70% of graduate students who voted in the 2022 union election chose to form a union.
