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[MIT student]

>>Quality faculty or pretty buildings.

MIT has quality faculty, but I don't know if you've seen the MIT buildings talked about in the article.  They are NOT pretty.  Simmons almost won the ugliness contest on campus the year after it went up (it got beaten out by world hunger or something similar).  Some people like the stata center... it looks like a building out of "Oh the Places you'll go" by Dr. Seuss.

They're also extremely user unfriendly.  There is no privacy in the stata center-- everything is open so that the regular tours can see exactly what's going on in each lab.  

Simmons has all sorts of weird bulges inside and students are not allowed to move their furniture.  Each ceiling tile is hand-made and costs over $1K to replace.  Undergraduates really wish that MIT had decided to build an undergraduate version of Sidney and Pacific, a beautiful graduate dorm started at the same time as Simmons, with a larger capacity that is incredibly user friendly, went up on time and on budget but was designed by a practical rather than theoretical architect.