[super7man]

For many years, I was an engineering manager in development for a major computer company. Each summer I looked forward to having Summer Student Associates come in and work on some of my back burner projects. We hired the top students from Stanford, Cal, MIT, etc. These “kids” were great. They instantly understood the project assigned. They understood design, instrumentation and experimentation and they worked like dogs. Some even left with a patent application filed at the end of the summer. I loved working with them.

The corporation decided to make the SSA program a minority EO outreach. So rather than finding the best and brightest, they brought in candidates from lesser schools. I tried for two years and gave up. The students were not prepared to do anything, would not reliably show up for work, were not interested in providing any outcome at the end of the summer. I went to HR to understand how I was supposed to write their end of summer appraisal, when they had basically done nothing all summer. My appraisals were pieces of art, carefully scripted to have any subsequent interviewer read between the lines. Hmmm…. Was that a microaggession?

[pepsi_junkie]

We hired the top students from Stanford, Cal, MIT, etc. These “kids” were great. They instantly understood the project assigned.

As an engineering lead in a major firm I can say that with a lot of people from "name" schools you find that when the rubber hits the road they are the same as everyone else - some talented, some less so. But all of the MIT people I've worked with, all of them, were absolutely top notch. My biggest problem is keeping them challenged, not getting good work from them. Give them grunt work and they begin looking to go do something else.