The Boston-Cambridge environment offers the cultural and recreational opportunities and diversity of a major metropolis with the accessibility of a small city. The heavy concentration of colleges, hospitals, research facilities, and high technology industry provides a populace that demands and finds an unending variety of theaters, concerts, restaurants, museums, book stores, sporting events, libraries, and recreational facilities.
Few cities can boast such an array of schools.
MIT is one of more than 50 schools located within the Boston area. Others include Harvard, Radcliffe, Boston University, Northeastern, Boston College, Brandeis, Tufts, Simmons, Wellesley, and many specialized art and music schools. The concentration of academic, cultural, and intellectual activities in the Boston area is one of the largest in the country, and there is an extraordinary variety of young people, over 250,000 from all over the country and the world. Within a two-mile radius of the Institute are the Museums of Science and Fine Arts, the Gardner Museum, the New England Conservatory of Music, Symphony Hall, the New England Aquarium, and the Boston Public Library, as well as Fenway Park and Fleet Center arenas for professional baseball, basketball, and hockey games. Students can travel easily to the theatre district where Broadway plays are previewed and local productions are staged.