Also a question about MIT. In some countries it is possible to do an undergraduate degree purely in STEM subjects, or even purely in mathematics, whereas in the USA you usually have to spend a significant amount of time on non-STEM subjects. What is the situation at MIT? Can you focus more on STEM subjects compared to other American institutions, or do you have to do the same kind of "liberal arts" degree that most American institutions have?
I can speak to this, having graduated from MIT after transferring from UC Berkeley. With the AP courses that I had taken, I could have graduated from Berkeley taking one (upper-division) humanities course the whole time that I was there (which I did take during my one year there). When I transferred to MIT, because they did not give AP credit for many of my classes (and I had 5's on every test except French, where I had a 4), and because they had more humanities requirements, I had to take three or four more, and also more science distribution requirements than I would have had at Berkeley. That said, humanities courses at MIT do tend to have a more science-y feel to them, and they do tend to be taught with the assumption that this is a fun extra, not your core interest.
