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Additional items for international students:
- Report to international student office the International Student Office (ISO) at MIT right away: iso/
- Complete some stupid English test offered by MIT: MIT makes all the international students to take this listening + oral exams before your first semester starts. If you have spent any time in the States you would be fineit is very easy. If not, you might want to ask one of the recent international student in our department students for their experience – essentially they have . I recall they tested some American slangs during the exam that you might not be familar withand thinking this is really not fair for people that have learned their English somewhere else. If you fail this exam, you have to sign up for some ESL classes which I heard was worthless so are not very interesting and you probably don't want to waste time on that if you can avoid it.
- Get a bank account ASAP: Bank of America is probably the largest bank you can find in the area (Chase does not have any location near Boston unfortunately). You will probably not get a credit card until you have a SSN, so just get the plain checking and saving accounts so that you can pay rent and get paid by MIT. The other option is the MIT credit union, but I have never used it so I cannot comment.
- Get a cell phone plan: cellphone plans through major carriers like ATT and Verizon has been really expensive lately (roughtly $50/month/person?) so I got a google number and use SIP calls on campus where there is Wifi (you can call and text for free as long as there is wifi), and uses a service provider called Ting for data when there is no wifi. Though this requires some work to set-up so depends on how much work you want to go through...
- Get a SSN if you are employed (I think that means you have a RA or TA?): double check with the international student office on how this works...
- Get on your country's student organization's emailing lists (optional): sometime it could be beneficial to be on your country's specific MIT email lists for getting help and info specific to your nationality. For Chinese students, I think you are automatically on chn-all@mit.edu, and might need to sign up for chn-open@mit.edu( though this one has lots of spam so you might want to unsubscribe after a while).
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