So, I just felt like posting this because I have strong feelings about this program.
When I realized that I was accepted to an MIT summer program I was ecstatic. I had so many hopes for the program, most of which fell flat.
Let me preface this by saying: This does not mean I don't recommend applying for MITEs/MOSTEC/E2 or MIT. I still would love to attend MIT, but I think this outreach program is just garbage.
So, what is MOSTEC? It is a SIX MONTH "enrichment" program. You spend the first month doing online courses, a week at MIT for the "conference week" and the next five months doing online, mandatory webinars and blog responses.
You would think 6 months with MIT alum would be great, but it was quite the contrary.
Let me work backwards:
The last five months of the program were busy work. That's it. The blog prompts were one of the more useful things and even those mostly consisted of "what are your aspirations? What are your ideals? How does this effect your views of STEM?" and more platitudes.
Webinars were mostly just people talking to us about their jobs, mostly which were chemical engineering for some reason.
Discussion prompts seemed like they were more about social justice than about STEM. Okay, I get that there is a lot of social problems in STEM, but a lot of it had NOTHING to do with STEM.
The conference week was enjoyable, but I felt rushed between everything and we were given no actual time to absorb information, rather we were scurried between events that were over-glorified step-by-step processes. We were ALWAYS under supervision of multiple facilitators. I understand that we are still high school students, but it is absurd that we had to be escorted from Baker House to the Infinity Hall.
The online courses were okay. Nothing I would rank above some free coursera courses though. However I think I did benefit from the science writing course quite a bit.
And then comes the worst part of all: the nature of the (mandatory) discussions. The entirety of the discussions were that of an echo-chamber. Repeating exactly what someone else stated with slightly different wording was rewarded, while any form of dissent (especially on the social justice posts) was either ignored or "You have the right to an opinion"-ed (which happened a lot of the time when someone simply stated questionable methodology)
Brown-nosing was heavily rewarded and quantity of input was more appreciated than quality.
I am choosing to remain anonymous, but I will note that I was one of the few white MOSTECers this year. The MOSTEC community is supposed to be accepting, but a lot of the time I was asked "so, what are you?" my confused look would get them to continue "what minority are you?" and when I told them I wasn't they would usually respond with "why are you in this program?". For the record it is probably because I come from a low-income, rural background.
Look, I get that that does not come anywhere near to the discrimination that some minorities face in day-to-day life, but in a community ABOUT accepting each other in STEM fields, it felt wrong (as any form of discrimination should). Not to mention, my "cluster" leader very commonly skipped over me during the mandatory weekly meetings and would say things along the lines of "I know you don't have much of a cultural background, but how do you think it has affected your ability to pursue STEM?"
Okay, this may be a little disorganized, but I want to hit on one last thing: The facilitators.
They were downright unhelpful. They mostly seemed to be the low-achieving college students (yes they went to great schools, but they were definitely below the average for their respective institutions, in general at least). None of the ones I was able to contact were particularly helpful in my college application process (which is a big "advertising point" of MOSTEC).
You can simply say I did not "make the most of my MOSTEC experience" and I guess some people really liked it (I'm basing this on the fact that a lot of MOSTECers added me on Facebook and constantly spam the page and their entire facebooks are pictures of MOSTEC). You can say I wasn't the target audience for the experience, but I just wanted to expound on this.
I could have spent my time on many more helpful things. Luckily, it seems the program at least helped my college applications (prestigious summer programs seem to help those)
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