Mad Science Blackness enfolded us as Lilly bolted the door shut and I flipped the lights off. The darkness played tricks on my eyes when I glanced in Lilly’s direction and heard her muffled footsteps on the newspaper-covered floor. Suddenly, a dim red glow illuminated the room when she switched on the safety light attached to the wall above our heads. I carefully placed the large metal box I was holding onto the table in front of us, undid...

MIT prompt: Tell us about something you do for the pleasure of it. (100 words or fewer) I love to bring my imagination to life by building. In elementary school, I built blanket forts, cardboard playhouses, and puppet sets. By middle school, I delved into woodworking and fuel cell cars, and when high school rolled around, I explored drafting and website construction. My biggest endeavor was a two-week summer project spearheading the remodeling of our attic. With my dad’s help,...

MIT prompt: What attribute of your personality are you most proud of, and how has it impacted your life so far? This could be your creativity, effective leadership, sense of humor, integrity, or anything else you’d like to tell us about. (200-250 words) I use creativity to splash color across any blank canvas I face. This is demonstrated by my experience in Mathematical Modeling, a class revolving around modeling situations. I never considered a project “work”—rather, it was...

Brown prompt: Tell us about an intellectual experience, project, class, or book that has influenced or inspired you. (500 words or fewer) Mathematics and I started out as good friends. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division were always rather pleasant and easygoing; I had a few feuds with algebra, but quickly made up with geometry. The real challenger was calculus and its various derivatives. Since first grade, I had thought of math as a simple undertaking: plug-and-chug. Now, for the first time,...

Looking back, I realize I must've been much better at BSing in high school than I am now. My essays make me cringe now, but at the time I wrote them, I was trying to be genuine. I think my personal statement is a good reflection of where I was at the time and what kind of road I wanted to head out on. I think my MIT essays were very typical of the MIT stereotype, and part of that...

I had one recommendation letter from a humanities teacher that I did not waive, and I looked at the letter when I was in college. I've forgotten why I didn't waive it. Maybe it was an accident. But it was a...

MIT interview: The guy I talked with was a pretty young visiting professor at Duke. We talked a lot about his experience at MIT, building robots and stuff. He told me that I had to watch the July 4th fireworks over the Charles from a rooftop one summer, even if I had to climb onto a building illegally (he admitted to doing this). He asked me what I was interested in, and I talked about my love of a certain field and its relation to medicine. I wasn’t sure what he thought of me, but we had a really...

Look locally before you look nationally. It's much easier to win local competitions than national ones because there are fewer competitors, and not as many students actively look for local scholarship opportunities. I personally entered...

Med school is next! I highly recommend coming to MIT as a premed, even though it's tougher to get good grades than at other schools. If you can handle MIT, everything will feel much easier afterwards, but I've also heard that you might get a little bored after coming out of a place that makes you problem-solve so much and realizing you have to just memorize...