The Idea Factory: 2learning to Think at M.I.T.

``Getting an education at MIT is like getting a drink of water from a firehose,'' says one of White's fellow students in this grad school memoir. Test anxiety, lab-project drama and stylish prose propel White's recollections with enough force to make three years of engineering study compelling, even to readers committed to the liberal arts. The professors' egos, the career stakes and the quizzes are presented as powers more intense at MIT Engineering than elsewhere. But the author's deft personality sketches and diary-like accounts of encounters with even such stuff as ``System Dynamics and Control Problems'' yield a technical school analogue to Scott Turow's One L. (Sept.)