Once upon a time not so many years ago, the end-of-term vacation period for college students meant days of visiting with friends or just loafing. This week, by contrast, three-quarters of the 8,000 students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be completing courses in what is billed as the richest extracurricular intersession program in advanced education. The range of subjects—totaling 500 different courses over a three-week period—is enough to satiate the intellectual appetite for an entire regular semester. Along with such basics as German and calculus, the curriculum offers:
> Archaeoastronomy -astromythology: Stonehenge, Mayan and Egyptian pyramids.
> How to build factories...
