For example, a lecture on the mechanical properties of materials would end with the lecturer asking students to come up with an essay explaining why the Boeing 777 plane is built the way it is. Not all the answers are found in books. Sometimes, students conduct experiments or go on field trips to solve the problem. If there's a students are encouraged to go down to the basement, build the appropriate equipment, and develop a solution. The undergraduate research opportunities programme office matches students with ongoing research projects at MIT, most of which are funded by the government or industry.
Students can ask to be graded on their research work or ask to be paid.
You learn so much more this way and the whole relevance of what you are studying becomes apparent. You get to work on the real stuff here. For some students, their undergraduate research projects become their master's and even their doctorate research passions. And often at the end of their academic career, they would have an invention which forms the basis for a start-up company. Mr Robert Massie entered MIT in 1989 to study electrical engineering.