What does it take for an international to get accepted?

purplecat
Thu, 21 May 2009 06:40:27 +0000

Just to give you an idea for what MIT may be looking for (and I’m definitely not telling you to copy them or anything, it’s just that it may give you some ideas)

This girl basically won some Math Olympiad Competition, had a blog completely dedicated to math formulas and stuff that she found off the internet, and I think she wrote her essay about a mathematician she really really admired… she was a very “math” person and that definitely showed through. She was one of the only four or five who got in from my country (and this is a country where competition to MIT is extremely fierce).

My advice would be to explore what you like, but you might want to try to work yourself around a theme that would make it clear for other people to say: “ok, so she clearly likes (or maybe is obsessed with) BLANK”. In fact, I think this was actually one of the problems with all of my apps.

JUST my two cents!

On the plus side, remember that MIT really values people with interesting cultural backgrounds, so as a Korean student living in Mexico, you might be at a TINY advantage (but an advantage nonetheless)

GOOD LUCK from a person who has just been through it