Hey there! I'm a Sophomore at Harvard who's helping run HAIST. Congrats on your acceptance to Harvard! :) Some initial thoughts, which others might disagree with:
If you want to talk to Harvard/MIT/Stanford students working on technical alignment, I'm happy to connect you with some people!
And if you end up deciding on Harvard, I'd absolutely love to introduce you to people in HAIST & to give you advice on anything and everything Harvard-related. :)
Hi Naomi!
The advice about applying to MIT/Stanford is probably correct, if just to have the option. That said, I definitely don't regret ending up here!
We are quite similar! I was also accepted to Harvard REA – exactly one year ago – and was too lazy mentally drained by the application process to apply to MIT after that. I arrived intending to study physics, but I've since realized AI safety is a much more important and exciting problem to work on. Seems like you got there a bit sooner than I did! HAIST is a wonderful community, and also a great resource for finding upskilling and research opportunities.
I've only been here for a semester, so take this with a grain of salt, but I don't think you should be too worried about taking classes that interest you. It seems like professors are generally pretty flexible if you reach out to them, and it's easy to fulfill general education requirements with hardly any effort (I just took a class on "Anime as Global Popular Culture" which required essentially no work).
Let me know if you have any questions! I also have some older friends who can give you more specific advice. I sincerely hope I get to meet you soon!
First, congratulations - what a relief to get in (and pleasant update on how other selective processes will go, including the rest of college admissions)!
I lead HAIST and MAIA's governance/strategy programming and co-founded CBAI, which is both a source of conflict of interest and insider knowledge, and my take is that you should almost certainly apply to MIT. MIT is a much denser pool of technical talent, but MAIA is currently smaller and less well-organized than HAIST. Just by being an enthusiastic participant, you could help make it a more robust group, and if you're at all inclined to help organize (which I think would be massively valuable), you could solve an important bottleneck in making MAIA an awesome source of excellent alignment researchers. (If this is the case, would love to chat.) You'd also be in the HAIST/MAIA social community either way, but I think you'd have more of a multiplier effect by engaging on the MAIA side.
As other commenters have noted, I think there are a few reasons to prefer MIT for your own alignment research trajectory, like a significantly stronger CS department (you can cross-register, but save yourself the commute!), a slightly nerdier and more truth-seeking culture, and better signaling value. (To varying degrees including negative values, these are probably also true for Caltech, Mudd, Olin, and Stanford, per John Wentworth's comment, but I'm more familiar with MIT.)
I also think it will just not take that long to do one more application, since you have another couple weeks to do it anyway. I would prioritize getting one last app to MIT over the line, and if you find you still have energy consider doing the same to Caltech, Stanford, maybe others, idk. Not the end of the world to end up at Harvard by any means, but I do think it would be good for both you and humanity if you wound up at MIT!
My advice:
Hi! I'm a current MIT student. Here's how it works at MIT. Feel free to reply back for more information:
MIT is great in terms of classes. Getting out of prereqs is pretty easy. You just talk to the professor and get permission to take their class. I've done this in two classes so far (this is just my first semester here!) and they approved me without a problem. I also took many concurrent enrollment classes in high school at a local university and the process was much the same. My experience has been that professors are very willing to let ambitious students take their classes, even if they're uncertain about those students' abilities to succeed (though they may caution against it). You'll probably see the same at whatever university you choose to attend.
On the other hand, fulfilling general institute requirements (the general education classes at MIT) is a pain here at MIT. MIT offers advanced standing exams (ASEs) to get out of some of these, but they're only the most introductory classes. There is only one computer science ASE, for example, and it's basically a test of "Have you seen Python before?" If you're goal isn't to graduate, this isn't really much of a problem. If you do hope to graduate, on the other hand, it's a hard to get out of classes for which you know the material.
In terms of Alignment clubs here at MIT: I haven't been, but I've heard there is an MIT/Harvard Alignment club. There's also a branch of EA out here, and I've attended one meeting. I do think it's much bigger on the west coast though.
Overall, MIT is a great place, especially for people wanting to go into math/CS. I think you'd enjoy MIT a lot, and I definitely recommend at least applying. MIT's application is really easy--I did it all in one day (the due date for Early Action)--and rather different from other colleges'. For example, MIT doesn't have any essays (there's just lots of short answers), and many of their prompts are optional. I think you would be a great fit for MIT, and I'd be excited to see you come!
One thing you should be tracking is that I think CalTech and Mudd (and probably others, but I don't remember) require a very large amount of humanities as well as classes in science fields you might not be interested in. You can get almost all the Mudd opportunities with almost none of the requirements at either Pitzer or Pomona. Both these schools (as of 2011, my data might be out of date) have almost no gen-ed requirements, while Mudd has quite a lot. The degree looks worse (At least for Pitzer. Pomona might be comparable), but you can take almost all the same classes if you want to. (Scripps and CMC also have fewer requirements than Mudd, but more than Pitzer and Pomona).
However, it is worth noting that not having the STEM dorm mates is a nontrivial sacrifice, possibly larger than the sacrifice of how good the degree looks.
I went to Pitzer for 3 years. Pitzer did not have a CS major, so I was able to get a CS major with an advisor from either Pomona or Mudd. I chose Pomona, and got a double major in math/CS. The entire time I was there, I took nothing but math classes. Even for the CS major, I only took two classes where I had to program a little bit, and the rest were theory, and all of my (very small number of) gen-ed classes were math-adjacent. (They let me skip the intro level CS classes where I would have had to program.) Because it was all math, the classes were easy enough for me that I could take 6-8 at a time, and graduate early. I think graduating early would have been much harder at Mudd. Most of my classes were through Pomona, CMC, or Mudd.
A decade later, I sometimes wish I had rounded out my studies a little more, but in directions I would not have predicted, like history/philosophy/CogSci (If I had to predict the directions I would have wished I branched out, I would have predicted physics/econ.) but overall I have no major regrets, and undergrad worked out very well for me.
FWIW, I personally consider MIT, Mudd, Caltech and Olin to be the "top tier" undergrad schools in the US; Harvard/Stanford are one step down. If I were to make a case for Harvard, the case would be "well, you can cross-register for classes at MIT".
MIT, Mudd, Caltech and Olin are basically the only undergrad schools at which ~100% of the students are top-tier in STEM specifically, and are required to take the full set of core STEM courses. Therefore they are basically the only schools where all the courses can be designed on the assumption that ~100% of the students are top-tier in STEM and have all of the core background knowledge. Courses will generally not need to review basics of calculus, courses past freshman year will generally not need to review the basics of linear algebra or differential equations or mechanics, because basically everybody knows all that. The result is that most courses can spend less time reviewing basics, and more time covering the main substance - and that advantage further compounds over time.
(Source of my models here: I did my undergrad at Mudd, have audited courses at Stanford, and have used lecture videos from MIT pretty heavily and Harvard once or twice. I've also worked at the sort of tiny high-frequency trading firm which needs really top-tier technical people; the person who handled recruiting there told me that they only bother with MIT, Mudd, Caltech and Olin. You can find top-tier people elsewhere, but it's generally a much smaller proportion of the student body.)
(Also there's more to my models than just this - e.g. MIT, Mudd, Caltech, and Olin all share a kind of culture that I think is pretty important. But that part is less legible.)
Hi all, I'm a highschool senior trying to make some college-related decisions, and I'd like to ask for some advice.
My current situation is:
My considerations are:
The impression I got about Harvard (probably not so well-justified, just from anecdotes across reddit/etc) is that they're much less flexible in terms of class choices or prereqs compared to more traditionally "engineering" colleges like eg MIT. I also think the alignment community is mostly centered around the Bay area and that it hasn't really developed much around Harvard yet (I know about HAIST, though!)
Would Harvard be a good option to just go with, or is there enough additional value from Stanford/MIT/Harvey Mudd that it would be worth applying to any one of those colleges? Thanks!
(Apologies in advance if I broke any posting norms.)