all right welcome guys to my channel I know a lot of you are coming in from Mr Manny's video where he spent a full day with me so right now I'm back from MIT um right now we're on our Thanksgiving break you can see I'm back in my room um my Big Nate posters are here in the back shout out anyone who's a fan of Big Nate but yeah so with without out of the way today I'm going to be going over my MIT application how the hell I even got in and all the free resources that I used uh that really helped me you know even say a chance of getting in in the first place but before I review my MIT application I do want to start with a disclaimer that so much of it is just pure luck I think if I applied another 100 times I don't think I could get in again I am going to cover the things I did to increase my chances of getting in and some of the things you can do too in order to increase your chances of getting into a very top school so with that out of the way I'm going to be reviewing my test scores my GPA the courses I took my extracurriculars my general interview strategy and lastly my overall application strategy which I think is the difference of what can make or break an application so with that out of the way let's just hop right into things and talk about what I did to get into MIT first I'm going to go over my SAT my GPA and my coursework this is really the foundation of your application where if you don't have strong test scores or you don't have a strong GPA then the rest of your application doesn't really matter this is something so fundamental you need for a strong college application so specifically for my SAT I got a 780 in math and a 750 in Reading combined 1530 on my SAT which is I believe a little bit below mit's average but I have met a lot of students who have gone significantly lower than that so if your sat doesn't quite match that level I wouldn't really worry total I took the SAT three times um I know most people at MIT that at least I've talked to have only taken the SAT once maybe twice personally I'm not a good test taker at all for me tests are by far my biggest weakness but some of the strategies I did to increase my SAT score very quickly was firstly doing all the practice on KH Academy this is probably the best free online um prep that you can do for any sat um please don't pay for any course or pay for anything when setting for the SAT at all all the best resources can be found free online but if you are really struggling and want to get a top score the only thing I would ever recommend is buying an SAT prep book I'll I'll link the specific one that I use somewhere on the screen what I did was I went to the back and the back list all the questions by by difficulty and I just ended up doing all the most difficult questions and skipped over the easy and the medium questions and over the span of a week I just really grinded those most difficult questions and when it came time to the actual sat I just blew by every question moving on to my GPA and my course workor um so honestly this was not a standout part of my application so I had a four .5 GPA and was ranked about top 7% in my school I went to a very competitive school and getting even top 7% required getting straight A and taking and taking almost every single AP class that was available to me so I'm not going to list every single course for the sake of time but generally I just took the hardest classes I possibly could I'll I'll list them on the screen um right now I took every single AP class that I could uh with the single exception of academic history um my senior year here I'll briefly briefly talk about my Awards um I'm going to be completely honest I did not get any awards that I would consider to be very impressive I know a lot of people who got into MIT competed in math competitions or coding competitions and if that's something you're interested in and want to get into a top school I highly highly recommend you pursue it many people that I've talked to at MIT come from a very competition or science competition or programming competition background though I didn't really have a lot of that in my own personal um application it's something that I would highly recommend if I'm getting into one of these top schools is a big dream of yours the distinctions that I had include your typical honor societies which I'm not even going to talk about here for some of my other Awards was featured a lot for some of the startups and some of the programs that I ran and me and my team got accepted into IAP which was another entrepreneurship program hosted by local college and for my AP scores I'll briefly go over them again for Cal BC I got a five computer science principles I got a five world history I got a five English language and composition I got a four physics C mechanics I got a four and embarrassingly enough for computer science a I got a four um honestly there's no excuse for that I should have just gotten to five for the CSA amm hopefully when my friends see this they won't CL me too much for it but whatever all right so let's actually get into the good stuff first I'm going to talk about my summer activities so my first summer activity was AI Academy where basically all we did was just do a really really simple research paper that got published into a student Journal being completely honest it was a very simple model and it was a very simple research paper but it really opened my eyes to the world of research and I learned a lot doing it however if I had to do it all again I would not pay for any summer program whatsoever if you're able to reach out to a teacher or even a faculty from a local University ask them for help or just search up online because there's so many good tutorials on how you can get into AI research or any research for that matter the thing after that was M semester um was probably a very large reason of why I got into MIT in the first place so M semester is sort of a summer program where you take classes with MIT professors and you work on a couple of projects at the end and you sort of present them to your peers and at the end your teachers can write a letter of recommendation for you I think I got a pretty strong recommendation from them and this is a big part of why got into MIT in the first place and there are a lot of other programs I would highly recommend you applied to tmu has a very strong summer program MIT has a lot of other summer programs that they'll fly you out and do everything but the biggest piece of advice I would give is just don't pay for any summer program for example Harvard summer program is largely known to be almost like a scam you'll pay maybe like 20,000 or $10,000 to get into their program but it doesn't really mean a whole lot to admissions officers who know that it's really just a paid program and doesn't really mean anything so going into my extracurriculars first thing I put was scholar AI um which honestly was just a chat gbt rapper in the very early days of chat gbt skolar AI grew to 25,000 users and was closing in on five figures of Revenue honestly this was not a very impressive project I just think we got very lucky um especially with our timing even though we did end up making a little bit of money from it technically speaking we weren't doing that much more than what Chad gbt was already providing to the user but it was sort of my first big experience into creating a project that was pretty successful the next thing I did was student CS of Virginia Which just sort of my nonprofit where we would hold classes and a lot of students would come in and we ended up teaching several hundred students how to code and sort of handheld a lot of them on their individual projects so below that is Navaro Navaro was my next big Endeavor after scholar Ai and Naro was an edtech project where we helped over 700 students create their own AI projects which were a lot more advanced and had a lot deeper functionality and we even partnered with our local school system to bring the program into classrooms and we' go into classrooms and actually teaching students how to create these projects by the end of it we ended up declining an offer from this AI to acquire Navaro we're still making plans to further expand the program out to even more classrooms and lastly I had Vex robotics where I was a team leader head coder and Builder I was not all three at the same time I sort of rotated between positions we had a very strong team but unfortunately we got very unlucky and we never made it to Worlds we made it to States many many times and we placed very highly and we got several Awards and in addition to that we did a lot of volunteer events we worked very closely with Girl Scouts in our schools to hold a lot of volunteer showcases and by the end of it we built over six robots for different games and different volunteer opportunities and overall I think this was my favorite extracurricular and it it was just so much fun and building robots with my with my friends and competing and one more extracurricular that I talked a lot about especially in my interview was a research paper I did that eventually got published in it e where I compared the effectiveness of convolutional neural networks with recurrent neural networks specifically in computer vision applications in retinal scans so now I'm going to talk about my interview a little bit um I do think my interview was a very very big part of my application so even just going in I was already extremely prepared I knew that the MIT interview was a lot more conversational style and even before going into the interview I had already done a lot of research on the person who was interviewing me so I went to their LinkedIn understood what they majored in how long ago they graduated from MIT where they were working at now and I spent a good hour before the interview trying to connect what I was currently working on and what I was really interested in to the field that they were currently in and yeah so the interview went very very well um I talked with her for I want to say maybe 2 and 1/ half hours maybe close to 3 hours and the number one thing is just prepare prepare prepare for your interview I did a lot of practice I already knew what I was going to talk about even before going in and by the end it felt a lot more like a conversation than fell an interview going on to my application strategy I mentioned before that I did a lot of research but looking objectively at my application I knew that it looked a lot better if I put myself in a much more entrepreneurial light as opposed to a more research back light just because I knew my research was strong but I knew I wasn't the best of the best when it came to research even though I did include my research in the application it was necessarily the emphasis of my application the number one thing you have to do when building out your application you have to be building towards a theme or a character of yourself even though I did have research it didn't really build towards the theme of building businesses or building projects that do very well in the real world as opposed to just theoretical research and the same should sort of apply to you where you should try to have every extracurricular really build towards something as opposed to just having a string of random extracurriculars thrown all over the place and the way that you're able to do that is through your essays and through my essays I sort of emphasized that I wasn't just doing things randomly but they sort of all had like a greater purpose I was doing them all for a greater Mission so that pretty much sums up my MIT application but again I want to emphasize that so much of it was luck I don't know what exactly the applications officers saw in me over so many other talented people so two big pieces of advice I have for anyone sort of in the college application cycle be yourself and do things that you really really enjoy doing because if you don't have passion College admissions officers are going to know and it's going to show and beyond that you should just be working on things you really like and my second big piece of advice is to read Paul Graham's essays and specifically how to do great work and I'll link it somewhere in the description and when I read through it it completely changed my world viiew on how to do good work and how to find passion in the work that I do so if you're feeling kind of lost and you don't know what direction to go in I can't recommend reading his essay enough you can probably read through it in an hour and it'll completely change your life so yeah that pretty much sums up the video so going forward my channel is going to be taking a very uh different direction um I have some very very exciting videos planned which should hopefully be coming out in the next month or two and I'll probably just be doing one or two more videos sort of relating to MIT so if you have any more questions or curious about anything else be sure to leave them in the comments because I want to be sure to cover as much as I can before I go forward and start creating other content Beyond just m Focus content I'll see you on the next one and guys this is the man that inspired me to get into MIT hit up his socials no then you have to say subscribe subscribe to David Lin