Home > Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4.1 MIT's schools
MIT is organized into five schools which contain 27 academic departments:
- School of Architecture and Planning: Architecture, Media Arts and Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
- School of Engineering: Aeronautics and Astronautics, Biological Engineering Division, Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Engineering Systems Division, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering, Ocean Engineering
- School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences: Anthropology, Comparative Media Studies, Economics, Foreign Languages and Literatures, History, Humanities, Linguistics and Philosophy, Literature, Music and Theatre Arts, Political Science, Science, Technology, and Society, Writing and Humanistic Studies
- Alfred P. Sloan School of Management
- School of Science: Biology, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Chemistry, Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Mathematics, Physics
4.2 Other MIT labs and groups
MIT also has many laboratories, centers and programs which cut across disparate disciplines. These include:
4.3 External relationships
MIT has close ties to a number of institutions. The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, now an independent defense contractor, was founded as the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, and still shares some facilities and faculty with MIT. (The Draper Lab, which designed missile guidance systems, was spun off during the Vietnam War to assuage antiwar feeling on campus and in the city of Cambridge, while holding on to the more lucrative defense contracts at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.) The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution runs its graduate program jointly with MIT.
MIT has a friendly rivalry with Harvard which dates back to the earliest days of the Institute, and the aforementioned merger talks between the two schools. Today, they cooperate as much as they compete, with many joint conferences and programs, including the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the Harvard-MIT Data Center. In addition, students at the two schools can cross-register (i.e., MIT students can register for courses offered at Harvard, and vice versa) without any additional fees, for credits toward their own school's degrees. The city of Cambridge is notable for the presence of two major research universities within two miles of each other. A third major research university, Boston University, is located between MIT and Harvard on the Boston side of the Charles River. These three schools jointly run the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology.
MIT maintains an alliance with the University of Cambridge known as the Cambridge-MIT Institute, which was established with the British government to bring the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT to England and to increase knowledge exchange between universities and industry. The World Wide Web Consortium is also based at MIT. MIT also has close but informal ties with Britain's top engineering university, the University of Southampton, which has its own thriving collection of spin-off businesses.
5 Architecture
MIT buildings all have a number and most have a name as well. Typically, academic and office buildings are referred to only by number while residence halls are referred to by name. A network of underground tunnels connects many of the buildings, providing protection from the Cambridge weather. Students agree that this maze is a welcome feature, enabling them to get from class to class without getting cold or wet. The bridge closest to MIT is the Harvard Bridge. It is the longest bridge crossing the Charles River. The bridge is marked off in the fanciful unit called the Smoot: 364.4 Smoots and One Ear. The Kendall MBTA Red Line station is located on the far northeastern edge of the campus. The neighborhood of MIT is a mixture of high tech companies seeded by MIT alumni combined with working class neighborhoods of Cambridge (see Kendall Square).
