Former MIT employee (W20, Stratton) here.
I would say that there is a sense that school should be difficult and a little painful among the many MIT students I worked with and got to know over the years. It certainly was true of the staff and faculty who were alums and worked there. Almost a Nietzschean sense of “the harder you work and the more you suffer, the better off you’ll be.”
Then all of the tragedies of the late 1990s happened. Suicides, binge drinking deaths, even self-immolation. It has changed significantly. There’s a lot more concern about students’ well- being, not to mention greater supervision of students. When I worked there, there were many independent living groups in Cambridge and Boston with frosh. Now I believe every frosh lives on campus for at least a year.
Of all the schools I’ve been around, I find MIT students to be the most quirky. I’d wager you could find something incredibly interesting about every single student in a five minute conversation. Being that I worked with student leaders, I was always blown away by their smarts. I had considerably less interaction with grad students. Seeing as I went to grad school at that other school in Cambridge, I will point out that I rarely saw MIT grad students in social settings, though…