Graduate Admission into MIT

jessiehl
Thu, 29 May 2008 09:42:11 +0000

Research. Do research. Lots of research. Build good relationships with your professors and get top-notch recommendations.

Computer programming skills are beneficial to pretty much everyone in the sciences or engineering, but are highly unlikely to make the difference between you getting in and not.

Being viewed as an absolute nerd is, if anything, beneficial in grad admissions, as long as you have adequate social skills to get along with people in your lab and department. Do the activities that you like, but most of them will provide absolutely no grad school admissions benefit, and you probably wouldn’t even put them on an application. Activities that might actually be helpful (other than the obvious “research assistant”) include clubs for students in your department, honor societies in your field, student branches of professional organizations (e.g. IEEE or ACM for CS people) in your field, and teaching assistantships.

No matter what, getting in will be a long shot. Make sure there are researchers in the target department whose research interests are a fit with yours. A PhD is about doing research…classes, no matter how cool, are a side note, a way to make sure you have the necessary background to do research.

The GRE is undergoing major gradual revision. I don’t remember what stage it’s at now, so look it up…the advice you get here may be out of date.