 MIT students refer to both their majors and classes using numbers or acronyms alone . Departments and their corresponding majors are numbered in the approximate order of their foundation ; for example , Civil and Environmental Engineering is Course 1 , while Linguistics and Philosophy is Course 24 . Students majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science ( <unk> ) , the most popular department , collectively identify themselves as " Course 6 " . MIT students use a combination of the department 's course number and the number assigned to the class to identify their subjects ; the introductory calculus @-@ based classical mechanics course is simply " 8 @.@ 01 " at MIT . 
