Outside of Corporate and Financial Accounting, there are 19 cross enrollments across five of MIT’s engineering departments. MIT boasts an engineering program that is much larger than its counterpart at Harvard.

After talking to his advisor, Salathiel Ntakirutimana ’16, an Electrical Engineering concentrator, said he concluded that MIT’s offerings on electrical power systems were more attractive than equivalent courses at Harvard. This fall, MIT’s department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science attracted 13 cross-registrations from Harvard students, according to Registrar data.

“If you are an engineer, [you] get to see some of their labs and work with students there,” Ntakirutimana said. “It’s an amazing opportunity.”

Even though MIT is often thought of as an engineering school, some students opted to take courses there in the arts and humanities.

For Anita K. Y. Lo ’16, the selectivity of Harvard’s creative writing workshops was the chief motivating factor to cross-register. Having been rebuffed by Harvard’s workshops multiple times, Lo turned to MIT’s Advanced Fiction Workshop, which still requires instructor approval but has much more open enrollment, according to Lo.

“I had applied multiple times into Harvard’s creative writing courses and not had a lot of success there,” she said, adding that some of her friends cross-registered into nontraditional MIT classes that have no equivalents at Harvard, such as one on video game making.

MIT’s Media Arts and Sciences department, which was the third most popular department for cross-registration, hosted 10 Harvard students this past fall. Harvard does not have a comparable department, leading some students pursuing an interest in media studies to turn to MIT. Five more cross-registered into MIT’s Humanities department.

Naomi K. Lang ’16 was one such student. After Claire A. Conceison, a former visiting professor at Harvard who specializes in theater studies, moved her class from Harvard to MIT, Lang knew she wanted to follow her there. Currently, Lang is not only taking Conceison’s class, but also considering pursuing independent study with her at MIT next semester.

Maggie Welsh, Harvard’s associate registrar for enrollment services, said that cross-registration is not just about taking a new course, but also about being exposed to different students, faculty, teaching methods, and culture.

Both Lo and Lang said that taking a humanities class in what is traditionally viewed as an engineering school provided for an interesting change of pace from Harvard’s environment.

“It’s a different experience because everyone in the class was doing something like engineering or physics or stuff like that. I think maybe that contributed to a little bit of different perspectives,” Lo said.

For some, venturing into MIT also opens the door to a new social network. For instance, Lang keeps in touch with many of her classmates at MIT and has even gone to watch some of their games.

ROOM FOR GROWTH

Despite the perks cross-registration may yield, MIT cross-registration remains a resource that some say is underutilized.

“I suspect what motivates them not to do it is the travel,” Welsh said. The M2 shuttle provides free transportation to MIT’s campus and students also have the option to take the Red Line. Still, according to some, the 15-minute ride to MIT can be a major deterrent, especially in the winter.