Entry level is entry level.

To an extent, but I'm not seeing that you're gathering the distinction.

If I hypothetically transferred from CC to MIT, I wouldn’t have access to MIT’s entry level class. There was far too much time being spent on cell structure.

How about taking classes NOT in the field of study you want at MIT. Don't take BIO courses, take something completely not applicable like business courses or humanities.

Its entirely possibly the shit talk was justified.

To summarize what I overheard the teacher saying, she was complaining about how unintelligent the regular session students were compared to the summer session, while also commenting about how unengaged the summer students were. The reason was the summer students are home on vacation from better schools are are just filling out credits.

Right, that just sounds like noise to me. It sounds like you took offense, and instead of just ignoring the noise, you let it cloud your decisions on how to reach your goal. In life you're going to run into all kinds of different people and (spoiler) everyone is flawed in some way. What you posted above could have been a perfectly fine person having a bad day. You going to have to learn to deal with all kinds of people going through life. You don't get to pick and choose the quality of all the individuals you deal with. Further, I've worked with some absolutely toxic people that are brilliant in one specific area. I learned their specialty from them and compartmentalized my relationship with them so their toxicity didn't really affect me much. This is part of being a mature adult.

This same teacher also recommended that we decided on experiments based on what would the the easiest and used her example of barn cat behavior that only required her to sit on her back porch watching cats. When she denied me cultivating biobutanol microbes, I gave up on actually learning anything and left the class. She wasn’t interested in teaching.

She might have been an adjunct professor overburdened with too much work and underpaid. Its hard to get excited in those situations. In your pure quest for your own personal self improvement, you might have closed off an avenue of learning because it didn't meet your exact specifications. I'd caution against doing this too much.

I think you should probably be careful with these expectations.

I’m already friends with and have professional relationships with university researchers. I know what to expect.

But you're not one of their students. You're not going to get the same level of access and attention when you're one of 400 students in a giant lecture hall when the TA (grad student) is who you interact with 99% with during the 100 level classes. The Uni researcher is in the lab or with their 300 or 400 level students doing research not teaching freshman classes.

Hell, previously, I only considered MIT type schools as places that actually do things. My “local” state university was mainly known for wasting money on their sports program, but now I realize that they actually do interesting and important things.

Right out of high school and beginning college we believe we have the world figured out and we have the answers for everything. Black and White. Unambiguous. Hubris is the best friend of young adults in these situations. I don't exclude myself from this. I did the same thing. I'm seeing many of those ideas in your posts too. I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. Most people I know only learned by going through it themselves and that's okay. Your 20s are for having fun, making mistakes, and learning how to adult.

I wish you the best of luck!