The core course is divided up into 3 sections ( system architecture, system engineering, and project management) each of which is taught by a different professor ( bruce cameron, eric rebentisch, and bryan moser, respectively). It’s an interesting class I think, but some of the students complain about it because it’s a bit hand-wavy (answers to all the questions are “it depends” and assignments are difficult but not always well defined). Overall I think it’s pretty good at exposing you to a bunch of ideas, especially ideas from other industries. Lots of the students are from places like John Deere, Boeing, the US military, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, the Japanese government, etc etc, with a smaller number from traditional tech like Amazon, etc. And lots of those people have jobs like “System Engineer” or have worked in bigger organizations dealing with complex “systems” of various kinds. So that diversity is probably the most interesting part of the core course, the content is useful but it’s essentially a crash course that moves pretty quickly through a lot of ideas.
This list of example approved courses is a good set to check. If it seems interesting to take 2-3 from the Engineering section and 2-3 from the Management section then that’s a strong indication that the program will be interesting.
In theory, if you could get a Research Assistantship or Teaching Assistantship set up before you started at MIT it would cover at least 70% of your tuition (often it covers 100%) and you get a yearly salary of over $40K (applied for however long you keep that assistantship). At least that’s my high level understanding.