Extended Opportunities Program & Services: Fill & Download for Free

I studied computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it was an insane amount of work.A thick culture of work permeates MIT student life. Whereas it's a cultural faux pas at universities like Stanford to act like you're doing a lot of work or to outwardly stress about classes [1], MIT's culture openly embraces work, maybe even too much so.Friendships form and grow over problem sets. Weekend socializing often happens in study lounges next to problem sets. Bonding happens in computer labs or in study rooms over shared struggling on difficult problems. Some date nights even take place over problem sets.Students work so hard that there's at least one official MIT holiday a month, which has become known affectionately on campus as Suicide Prevention Day [2]. Of course, most students just spend the extended three-day weekends catching up on problem sets.Many students view all-nighters as building character. It's not uncommon to see students curled up and asleep at computer labs after long sprints. Taking seven classes a semester is considered crazy, but often in a "this person must be crazy smart and cool" sort of way. Some project classes expect 30-40 hours of work just by themselves.Part of what causes the work culture at MIT is the notion that students should take advantage of its world-class professors and soak up as much learning as possible while they're there. Security classes taught by Ronald Rivest (the "R" in the RSA cryptography standard), distributed systems taught by Robert Morris (the author of the first internet worm), and web application development taught by Philip Greenspun (one of the early internet entrepreneurs and early developers of database-backed websites) are just a few examples of classes that students often plan out multiple semesters in advance to make sure they'll have space in their schedule to take. Classes taught by the authors of widely used textbooks in certain fields, like Signals and Systems with Alan Oppenheim, Introduction to Linear Algebra with Gilbert Strang, or Theory of Computation with Michael Sipser supply another source of lectures that students brim with excitement to attend.The overemphasis on science and engineering at MIT comes with an underemphasis on humanities and a sense that many humanities are a joke. Many students have little exposure to history, philosophy, or literature classes; some like me even took a few algebra-heavy economics classes to satisfy the measly eight humanities classes required for graduation. I regretfully went through college without taking a single English class.Many students hesitate to study abroad -- why study at the University of Cambridge and when you might miss out on MIT classes in Cambridge, MA? Learning about worldly cultures seems less important than taking the best science and engineering classes. In retrospect, it's unfortunate that more students don't cross register at Harvard given that it's down the street and more often than not will have better selections of humanities classes in most fields.The hard work does have its payoffs; attending a world-renowned university at MIT opens doors to many opportunities. MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) [3] makes it easy for anyone to work on cutting edge research with faculty, like building Minority Report-like interfaces at the Media Lab [4], building self-driving cars at the Computer Science and AI Lab [5], sequencing the genome at the Whitehead Institute [6], or whatever you're interested in as long as you're confident enough and persistent enough to look for them.Employers often give MIT students and I'm sure students from other world-renowned universities the benefit of the doubt. Companies like Oracle offered me and other MIT graduates high-paying full-time jobs after a 30-minute interview on-campus interview without even asking a single technical question [7]. Microsoft offered internships to students after a single 30-minute on-campus interview (my only technical question was to write an in-order binary tree traversal) rather than requiring you to fly to Seattle for actual interviews like at other schools. Since graduating, just having the three letters on my resume is often enough to get an initial conversation with a potential employer.Of course, what I've described is just what I perceived as the common stereotypes around campus. Ultimately, college is what you make of it, and there are those who broke the mold and did in fact decide to study abroad, to expand their cultural horizons behind the grey stone buildings of MIT, or try to maintain a good work-life balance.I loved my time at MIT, and even though there would be some things I would have liked to change to get a more well-rounded education, I'm confident that it was the right place for me.--------------------[1] What are some cultural faux pas at Stanford?[2] http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N46/46silberstein.html[3] http://web.mit.edu/urop/[4] http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/[5] http://rvsn.csail.mit.edu/[6] http://www.wi.mit.edu/news/paradigm/fall_2010/urop.html[7] Anecdotally, many MIT graduates who accept jobs at Oracle tend to leave soon afterwards.

Depending upon the context, we see from “The Free Dictionary” the following definitions of ETOP:ETOP: Extended Range Twin Engine Operation (US FAA)2. ETOP: Education and Training in Optics and Photonics3. ETOP: Environmental Technology Opportunities Portal (website; US EPA)4. ETOP: Environmental Threat and Opportunity (business analysis)5. ETOP: Employee Training Opportunity Program6. ETOP: Elective Termination of Pregnancy7. ETOP: Enhanced Training Opportunities Program (continuing vocational education)8. ETOP: Engineering Turnover Package9. ETOP: Expedited Task Order Process

They are.I am Asian, and my fellow peers from church have the mindset that you have to be in a UC (as in, CSUs are already bad) to be a successful student. When I told them I was going to the local community college due to low funds, they went silent and refused to speak to me in as friendly a manner as they had been before asking.The truth is, university transfer students from community colleges have a much lower chance of dropping out of four-year institutions due to the college having already prepared them for the course load and strict rules. For example, my college has FYE (First Year Experience) for high school graduates, an EOPS (Extended Opportunity Programs and Services) for those financially struggling — usually families with children, or extremely low-income people — and MESA for the STEM majors. Generally, there are a lot more resources that you are informed of for you to draw from in community college, because the people there know you’re not used to looking for information on your own.It’s better than landing straight into UC Berkeley and then digging yourself a pit because you couldn’t stay on top of time management.