Alright, so the obvious question I get asked all the time is "how did you get into MIT?" for better or for worse. The honest answer is that I don't know, but here's what you get to piece out of my profile I guess.
You can drive yourself insane trying to "replicate" my entire messy high school experience but I highly advise against it. Go with the flow, don't make being perfect your life, and do what you love in a productive way. Basically, do't be the person you want to be but the person you have to be. Lots of platitudes, but if I get another helicopter parent hounding me about why I didn't deserve to get in but their kid did, I'm just going to be upfront with the fact that the more quantitave you choose to be, the less human you are. What separates you from the upcoming AI that are able to program is that human element, embrace it. If you just want to program for the rest of your life, there are bootcamps for that. Step back and ask yourself what you really want out of a college education.
and overall, just be someone I want to be classmates with.
Test Scores (everyone's least favorite part of college apps)
SAT: taken once in December 2017 junior year winter, never again, but it did spark some email acquaintanceship with Daina Taimina due to one of the reading passages.
1510 with 770 English, and 740 Math and 7/6/8 essay
ACT: taken once in September 2018 senior fall, please finish your testing early this was stressful.
36 with 36M/35S/35E/36R and 12 essay
SAT II: I retook these multiple times down to the last possible test date. (don't do this, get your tests done early)
Math II: first a 680 that I suspect was a CollegeBoard scoring error, then 800 a month later at the last possible date with no additional prep.
BioM: 750, taken at the last possible date too.
(why take subject tests so late? I really didn't think that applying to MIT was a serious possibility until I visited campus with WISE. loads of people in hs thought I was "dumb" for being with the smart kids crowd when really I just didn't do the conventional smart kid activities,)
To reiterate, scores are not everything, all they do is qualify you within a certain range.
GPA/Courses
My weighted GPA was a 4.61/4.0 and unweighted 3.95. That's right, I got some B's. Wasn't even close to being valedictorian or salutatorian. The guy at the DMV jokingly judged me for my scattered B's. What can I say, not perfect.
- If you care enough, all my courses are here. spreadsheet
- highlights:
- taking nine AP classes, 5's in only 3 that were mostly humanities
- I got B's in APUSH, AP Lang, AP Lit, AP Physics C, AP Calc BC, leave me alone I survived
- never taking study hall and wishing I kinda did
- frequently never getting enough sleep from homework + studying + EC's all self-imposed
- condescension from my peers for not taking the "right" smart kid classes because I was all over the place with interests and did what was right for me
- despite not being a premed, still taking Anatomy & Physiology and Intro to Organic Chemistry
- interdisciplinary for the win, don't get too invested in your field and be open to new ideas and inspirations
- never actually taking an engineering class
- loving Honors Advanced Research (HAR) as the best class of high school, teaching me to develop research projects and my presentation skills
- long frustrated after class chats with my humanties teachers and the humanities-heavy kids being frustrated with the STEM-heavy kids moaning about essay writing because it's fashionable to support STEM without communication skills for some stupid reason ???
Extracurriculars
My excuse for not having more interesting EC's is that I can't and don't drive, which in a suburb means mostly doing things through school or staying home. That and the fact that I don't have depth perception, which makes sports very hard. That being said, let's walk down my resume.
- Yearbook - all 4 years, 2.5 years as Editor-In-Chief
- the most time-consuming extracurricular, I dumped hundreds of hours designing covers and layouts, photographing events, coordinating people to do work and just making the yearbook all year, dealing with complaints because no one wants to make the yearbook, just have it.
- I loved it and being able to hide in the office from time to time, but a lot of people scoffed it because my main thing wasn't a STEM thing.
- Holmdel Academic Review - started in junior year, kept running it until end of high school
- Science Communication (SciComm) became a passion of mine after learning how much presentation went into doing research projects in high school. I created this publication as a way to improve my classmate's own short form communication skills and as a marketing tool to parents, teachers, other students, and the community, about some of the amazing work we did in Honors Advanced Research.
- It's probably died by now, but not because it was a "shell project to get into college". I'm just not physically there to run it anymore and no one had the interest to continue.
- Student Archivist - sophomore year and beyond
- I recorded concerts, plays, musicals, homecoming, PowderPuff, proms, etc and uploaded videos to my Youtube channel to document it all. I was already there taking pics for the yearbook anyway.
- Student Government - class president in sophomore year, attended meetings without a position in junior year, Student Advisory Board Representative senior year
- yeah I kinda became class president in sophomore year and disrupted the continued presidency of another girl who ran unopposed (following my move to even attempt to campaign, the subsequent years had more candidates run. they lost.) I will be honest, I was not a good president. I didn't have all the hidden connections with the town and it was hard to get thigns done when my cabinet and a lot of people didn't quite like me or that I wasn't able to be present for everything. It was a good experience in leadership and public speaking, but sophomore year was also my worst year. I like to think that I helped the other president come back stronger now that there was some kind of challenge, but I was glad to leave the office.
- I still attended the weekly Student Advisory Board meetings through junior year because I cared about what was going on in the school. As the only non-voting member, my commitment shined through. This continued in senior year, as the third Student Advisory Board representative helping out with senior year activities.
- I started a few things while in student government, including underclassmen crowning the seniors at homecoming, student photographers covering school events for better perspective and photos, and a lot of crafty things that made events a little better.
- Newspaper - 3 years, editor in sophomore and junior year before stepping down in senior year to make room to train more underclassmen.
- not much to say other than I fully attribute the 800 grammar score I got on the SAT to correcting grammar errors all the time.
- I wanted to write very sharp, witty, critical articles. I did that sometimes. My crowning achievement was probably a pun-filled mockery of the school's new logo-branded soap dispensers.
- Science Olympiad - founding member and participant
- ah yes, I helped establish my school's SciOly team since we didn't have a high school team. I won a few medals in our second and third years, mostly in Fermi Questions (briefly #1 in the state) and Forensics.
- overall, lots of fun to miss a few days of class and prep for events outside of classwork.
Notice the lack of Science League and math competitions and all that. I tried pretty much every year and failed the qualifying exams and that's okay.
Takeaway? Soft skills aren't any less valuable. (Clubs need logistics and marketing too.) No, not everyone has access to research internships and it's fine to not be super refined as long as you're doing something.
Here I'm going to list a few of the projects I worked on in high school
“$25 Recycled Polargraph” — Independent Project
(January 2017 - March 2017)
Created a wall-mounted mural drawing robot with recycled supplies and $25 worth of electronics.
Documented process in a tutorial (https://www.instructables.com/id/25-Recycled-Polargraph/)
Waksman Student Scholars Program — High School Participant
(September 2016 - Present)
Knowledge of lab work including overnight clones preparation, PCR gel
electrophoresis, restriction digest, and analysis use of bioinformatics databases
such as BLAST searching.
Two clone analyses submitted to NCBI: 96AJ01.15 and 96AL4.13
Modeling and Analysis of the Degrees of Separation in Modern
Relationships — Independent Research Project
(Conducted from May 2017 - September 2017)
Used graph visualization programs Gephi and Plotly to model and analyze
relationship closeness in social networks of friendships and classmate relations
among the class of 2019 at Holmdel High School
Analyzing Antimicrobial Properties of a Pine Needle Extract from
Balsam Fir Trees — Lab Assistant
(September 2017 - June 2017)
Assisted in preparing agar plates, using sterile technique, and smearing sewage
water dilutions to be incubated for testing antimicrobial effectiveness of extract
from used Christmas tree needles in an ongoing student project during the Honors
Advanced Research class
and of course, there's my most recent project the midiKEY that you can read about in the press, etc.