MIT Missing Semester 2026

It's interesting to see that MIT is still like this. Canonically, there were no classes that taught programming per se: if you needed that, there were (often volunteer-taught) courses over IAP, the January Independent Activities Period, that would attempt to fill the gap - but you were still expected to pick it up on your own. I taught the Caffeinated Crash Course in C way back when. Good times.

Way back in the day, you did have a few programming classes especially outside of CS/EE given that it was perfectly reasonable for students to have no or little prior exposure to computers and programming. See FORTRAN coloring book. And, as you say, although I haven't dropped by since pre-COVID, there was as you say a smattering of stuff during IAP.

But my general sense based on some level of connections is you're expected to figure out a lot of, for lack of a better term, practicalities on your own. I don't think there's a lot of hand-holding in many cases--probably more so in some domains than others.

I feel like anyone with enough talent to get into MIT will have no problem picking up a programming language in a month or two on their own. Heck there are freshmen there who write programming languages for fun