letrungkien7

Hi, I am here to ask whether I can compete for a place at EECS or not. Things about me:

Interests: Artificial Intelligence, Image processing, Machine Learning
Education: Tokyo Univerisity, 3rd year
Major: Robotics (official name of my falcuty is Mechano-Informatics)
GPA: 3.78/4.0 (will not change much)
Honors: Vietnamese Mathematics Olympiad 2007, 3rd place ( and many more local math contests prizes, and one physics one)
Work Experience: 2 month internship at Microsoft Japan (start on 2012/08/01)
TOEFL: I will take it at the end of this year, and I really hope I can reach 100/120 points
Computer skills: Master in C++, Java; others: C#, Lisp, Matlab; API: Opengl, OpenCV

Research experience: I am not having any right now, but I will enter laboratory and do research there during my senior year.

Something else: Solid background in Maths and CS(I have taken as many as possible maths classes, advanced or not, and I got A in all). Most of classes which I got B grade are not related to my major (Japanese classes, biology class...).

MIT is truly my dream, I really want to be there. I want to know if I am likely to be a competive candiate and please, give me some advice what to do next.

Do I have to improve my GPAs? The best I can get is 3.83 ( if I get A in all classes from now on). Is there any different between 3.83 and 3.78? I asked this question because I would be so so hard to reach that maximum GPAs, while I can easily maintain 3.75-3.8 GPAs)

Any advice would be much appreciated!!!

PCHope

3.78 and 3.83 probably won't make any real difference. Your lack of research experience may hurt though. It is quite common for applicants to top schools to have extensive research experience/exposure.

You may also look at CMU. Their robotics institute seems to be a good fit. Since Takeo Kanade was their former director, I am pretty sure that they know Tokyo U's Mechano-Informatics, which IMHO is among the best in the world.