
Stanford = Army, MIT = Marines - shalmanese
http://www.google.com/buzz/piaw/B4wChKfzFka/Theres-no-reason-why-the-Boston-area-shouldnt-be#1275962135261000
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brlewis
It's more complicated than that. Many MIT professors are unapologetic about
their relentless focus on engineering, but the MIT administration sees it as a
problem that so few alumni achieve business success and make big donations.

~~~
sethg
Ayup.

When I was an undergrad about twenty years ago (brlewis, you were an undergrad
then, too, right?), the Dean for Undergraduate Education was on record as
saying “too many MIT graduates work for too many Harvard and Princeton
graduates”, and the administration was retooling its admissions policy and
curriculum so that the school _wouldn’t_ have such a single-minded focus on
training people to be brillant engineers.

Has the pendulum swung back since then?

~~~
rglovejoy
I was an undergrad there twenty years ago too, but I was a physics major, not
CS. My experience was that for science graduates, their training is mostly
geared towards getting them into graduate school, not a job in industry. The
prevailing attitude then (and probably now too) was that if you went into
industry instead of academia, there was something wrong with you.

~~~
Periodic
I went to University of California - Santa Cruz for my undergraduate in
physics. Around my year, the administration realized that a lot of the
students were having trouble transitioning to non-academic jobs. So much so
that they started an "applied physics" program which allowed more classes in
electrical engineering and computer science, and made a required class called
Physics in Industry that I have had the privilege of speaking in a few times
to tell young physicists how and why they could transition into a career in
software.

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julius_geezer
Does anybody remember (for example) Reagan's cabinet? George Schultz, captain
of Marines in WW II, secretary of labor then of treasury for Nixon, secretary
of state for Reagan. Donald Reagan, lieutenant colonel of Marines in WW II,
CEO of Merrill Lynch, secretary of the treasury, later chief of staff for
Reagan, James Baker, USMC service in Korea, switched jobs with Regan. And
isn't the current governor of Oregon a Marine veteran?

As for Stanford & MIT I couldn't tell you.

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khafra
There are certainly Marines who've been tremendously successful after their
military career--but that's not what the training and culture optimizes for.
Look at Marine heroes--Chesty Puller[1] was such a "candid speaker" that the
thought of a political career is laughable. Smedley Butler[2] retired, then
wrote a booklet called "War is a Racket." These are the men that are the
subjects of Marine running cadences, not George Schultz and James Baker.

Full disclosure: I did a tour in the Marines, found I couldn't get a civilian
job, joined the Army for one more tour, and am now employed by a Fortune 500
company.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesty_Puller>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler>

~~~
balding_n_tired
I agree that I cherry-picked reservists (and could have gone on to Chaffee,
long-time senator from Rhode Island, Paul Moore, long-time Anglican bishop of
New York, etc. etc,)

But frankly, the regular Army types who have gone on to distinguished
political careers have been relatively few and not always distinguished as
politicians: among presidents, Taylor, Grant, Eisenhower. To the extent that
Army veterans, regular, reserve, or Guard, are more conspicuous, the
disproportion in numbers must count for something.

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Jun8
Like all good and easy to understand argument this one simplifies things and
glosses over some details, but overall I buy it. At least it's definitely true
nowadays. MIT had a spectacular history of Electrical Engineering but for the
last N years they have concentrated on the "next cool thing" syndrome, the
worst case being the MIT Media Lab.

We have to remember that there are major outside influences that are shaping
these institutions, especially for Stanford, being in the eye of Silicon
Valley.

~~~
anamax
> MIT had a spectacular history of Electrical Engineering but for the last N
> years they have concentrated on the "next cool thing" syndrome, the worst
> case being the MIT Media Lab.

Stanford doesn't seem to have suborganizations that are as externally visible
as Media Lab and the like.

> We have to remember that there are major outside influences that are shaping
> these institutions, especially for Stanford, being in the eye of Silicon
> Valley.

I may be too close, but I don't see Stanford as being radical or innovative in
its organization.

For some relevant comments by Stanford's current president see
<http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/100526.html> and
[http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi-
bin/videologger.php?target=100...](http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi-
bin/videologger.php?target=100526-ee380-300.asx)

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dugmartin
Sounds like the old joke any Marine will tell you:

"A Marine gets out and goes on his first job interview. The interviewer asks:
'I see you were a Marine. What did they train you to do?'. Marine answers: 'TO
KILL PEOPLE SIR!'"

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rywang
As a PhD student at MIT with many friends at Stanford, I'd like to say that
both schools provide an abundance of opportunities for an engineering student
to choose a less specialist path: business school classes, leadership in
student organizations, student advocacy, business plan competitions, even
industry consulting.

As with most universities, the opportunities are there, and your education is
what you make of it.

As to Rebecca's comments on large-scale projects, when DARPA funding first
dried up, the CS and AI Lab (CSAIL) turned towards industrial sponsors and
pursued a vision of pervasive computing, incorporating advancements in
networking, speech, and NLP. But there has been no shortage of recent DARPA
sponsored large-scale projects (e.g. the DARPA Grand Challenge, command and
control systems for urban search and rescue, semi-autonomous forklifts for war
zone unloading).

~~~
hga
But are any of those large scale DARPA projects pushing the foundations like
some of the prior ones did? The ones you list are very applied, which may be
appropriate for a nation at war, I took her point to be "where will the
foundation for the next big thing come from?"

Hmmm, where would we place their VLSI project
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project>), which among other things
according to Wikipedia supported BSD?

~~~
rywang
IMHO, semi-autonomous robotic control is one of the holy grails of CS.

Robotics hardware is maturing rapidly, but the software algorithms for visual
sensing, planning and manipulation aren't there yet. This is standing in the
way of robots running (vs walking) efficiently, tidying up your cluttered
desk, or taking care of our elderly.

~~~
hga
" _semi-autonomous robotic control is one of the holy grails of CS_ "

Agreed 100%, and it's a difficult and worthwhile set of AI problems (just not
ones I'm personally interested in :-). I have no trouble with the Grand
Challenge given that the state of the art makes it practical, it's that other
... perhaps more foundational stuff is apparently being neglected. The stuff
that's "wow!" in 10 years.

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robot
There is a point of exaggeration. I don't think smart as they are, MIT
engineers need an adaptation program like the marines to the real world.
That's what comes with smartness, flexibility to think and adapt. You cannot
say the same for a marine with physically extreme skills.

~~~
jey
Not really. If you're an expert at "psets" that doesn't make you an expert at
the far wider array of skills needed to survive and prosper in the real world.
Sure you might have a 160 IQ and are able to instantly slice through any
engineering problem that comes your way, but that alone will at best get you a
permanent cubicle job as "Sr. Engineer".

That said, I agree that smart people have a far better chance of being able to
_learn_ the other skills. But the difference between the two outcomes relies
largely on the attitude the person has. So the culture they're trained in
should somehow instill in them the importance of the wider array of skills, so
that the individual will internally emphasize and strive to learn them.

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awze
I'm not sure I agree with the analogy for MIT/Stanford as an _institution_ (in
terms of the curriculum, administration's goals, etc.), but I definitely think
it's true for the students and overall atmosphere.

Blowing things up and hacking on random projects :is to: MIT students ||
Starting a new business :is to: Stanford students

MIT folks also often use the word "Sloanie" (referring to someone in the
business school) as a fairly derogatory term. (Though I guess this is a common
view in general).

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Volscio
Not really relevant, but the Army isn't much better than the Marines at
preparing soldiers for the real world...

~~~
gaius
That may or may not be true, but it doesn't mean that it's not their goal.

Here in the UK the Army's advertising is all about people who joined up and
learned skills. I think the current one is about a girl who joined the Royal
Signals and 8 years later she's an expert in "telecommunications" (it's an ad,
so they're no more specific than that). By contrast the Royal Marines
advertising is simple: "99% need not apply".

~~~
Volscio
Functionally, ex-military folks often end up in DC doing government
contracting or consulting related to military agencies and intelligence. So
that's mainly for signals and intel guys. They earn way more money doing the
same old job.

For everyone else, their skills are useless although pretty much everyone I
outprocessed with were angstful stop-lossed guys wanting to go into law
enforcement in their old towns.

Besides, the incentives are to keep people in the military, not train them to
get out...so it's really either DC or bust.

~~~
n2linux
I think you are _mainly_ right. There are a small subset of us ex-Army folks
with special skills that weren't signal or intel guys. That number is
dwindling every year, partly because those highly skilled jobs (mine was
calibration related) are being pushed to the DA civilian side. Also (as you
correctly mention), you can do a short 4 or 5 year active tour, then get out
into the civilian world and make literally 3 times the salary doing the same
type of job.

I think the Army tries to pride itself on training people to get out ("Hey we
pay for college, we help find you jobs when you are outprocessing!"), but the
reality of the situation is that _most_ of the Army isn't getting trained for
their exit to the civilian world.

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Anechoic
Wow. I don't know about Stanford, but she captured my MIT experience (Course
2, '95) perfectly.

~~~
endtime
Stanford student here, I don't much about MIT but I guess that's true of
Stanford. I don't know if I buy the implication that Stanford is sacrificing
the quality of its engineers for it, but she's definitely right about the
focus. There is a lot of emphasis on entrepreneurship here.

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pcestrada
I remember seeing Stanford advertise a full semester course in iPhone
programmig back when developing for the iPhone got really popular. I don't
think MIT had anything similar, and it does show how Stanford is willing to
quickly adapt to today's software landscape.

~~~
simplegeek
Around the same time & if memory serves, I saw "Hacking the Google Interview"
course by MIT so I guess that tells the story.

~~~
hga
Heh. But the course you're referring to is 4 day IAP (January, the Independent
Activities Period) course and clearly wasn't for credit.

There are some formal, frequently with a small amount of credit, more serious
courses that are taught during IAP, like 6.092 "Introduction to Programming in
Java" or even (as captured by OCW in in 2009) 6.096 "Introduction to C++".

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angelbob
Interesting. If you assume Carnegie Mellon and MIT are parallel (and in this
respect, they are), this explains a lot about CMU :-)

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pvdm
I don't know about the army/marines analogy but I know that "IHTFP" would not
have taken hold on Stanford campus :)

~~~
hga
What about the Institute Screw Contest: <http://www.mit.edu/~apo/big-screw/> ?

Note that while participants/targets have to agree to be in it, it is
generally rewarded for poor preformance of one sort or another, e.g.:

1989 Gerald Sussman: for a _really_ bad 6.002 term he taught.

1985 Shirley M. McBay: amazingly bad Dean for Student affairs.

1971 Ken Browning: Also a legendary Dean for Student affairs; a parody issue
of the student newspaper was entirely dedicated to him. Although I don't know
if he was indeed really bad, my only solid first hand info is from a member of
a failing residential fraternity chapter.

~~~
pvdm
Thought about it some more, seems if you want to use the arm forces analogy,
MIT is more like Navy Seals Hell Week :) Tough while you're going thru it, but
the friendships last a lifetime.

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thafman
I'm just surprised that Buzz seems to have taken the place of FriendFeed.

