so look just a year ago I was a kid with no coding experience and no projects so how is it possible that I got into MIT in today's video I'm going to be breaking down everything I did to get into MIT advice from current students and free resources that I used and many others have used to also get into MIT with that out of the way let's get into everything I did to get into MIT in 2024 so to get into MIT I follow three simple lessons that I'm going to outline in my own story so first I began learning a lot one of the biggest things that got me into MIT and something that they really look for is that you're a very action oriented and a very passionate person so that means that if you have an idea you won't just think about this idea for years and years you'll actually act on it and try to achieve it so I had a dream of learning how to code and I actually went ahead and achieved that so the way that I achieved that is first I went on YouTube and literally search up how to code and of course I got stuck in something called tutorial hell which is when you go to tutorials and you try to copy what they do but you're not actually learning anything so when I went into a project and actually tried doing something on my own for the first time I just had no idea what to do luckily I across my first real coding course which was Harvard cs50 Harvard cs50 is 100% free it's the only coding course that I recommend to anyone because it's so good and will get you so into coding that you just won't be able to stop it covers all the basics and it teaches you how to code in Python how to code in C how to code all the basics of web devel of web development and even a little bit of AI so if you're really really interested this is the one course I highly recommend even you try just try out the first just try out the first week and you'll really see just how good of the course is so the next course that I took was of course the secondary course in cs50 which was cs50 Ai and this is just a very simple introduction to Ai and what exactly can do today's world some of the problem sets and did take me a little while to do successfully but if you're planning to get more into AI then this is the one course that I completely recommend so another path you can take after cs50 is taking cs50's web development course and this is a course that I've gone back to a few times I've never taking it fully but some of the notes are extremely helpful another course that I took was Andrew new's machine learning course in specialization course just because they're both extremely effective in teaching a little bit more about machine learning and deep learning and if you haven't wanted to do any sort of research then I would highly recommend looking over both of these courses they are a little bit outdated but once you sort of get the general gist of everything that's going on then you can sort of read more current papers being really really so after I did all these courses actually spent a few months publishing personally a paper in the student Journal which was honestly not that impressive but later on I did end up publishing paper in i e the paper was done almost 6 months before it finally got published itle e it's just that the publishing process takes a very very long time and can take upwards of 6 months to a year so after taking these courses I learned a very important lesson which is that nothing is Out Of Reach when I started taking harbin's course a lot of people came up to me and just said that this was too difficult or that I was just wasting my time because I would learn it again in college but I really pushed through because I knew this was something I was very passionate about and I really wanted to learn how to code as fast as possible and and eventually when I started working on my research paper again people said that it was impossible and that it was only really possible if you work with a faculty or had very very very extensive connections but I pushed through all the criticism and I still came out with two very very impressive papers and the reason why I got this is because I really wanted it and I got it and nothing anyone can say could have stopped anything I will say however that a big regret I had was not working with fault te even though a lot of people told me this I did sort of ignore them and I could and I wish I could go back and actually listen to their advice and work with faculty um even though I did sort of get my dream of getting a paper published um it would have been a lot more impactful if I worked alongside someone knew what they were doing so if you're interested in doing this yourself I would highly recommend firstly trying to see if you have any sort of connection to any faculty so even if it's like a friend of a friend of a friend I would still try to try to reach out to them because a warm connection is better than no connection at all so if you are desperate and have no sort of connections whatsoever I would highly recommend you try to C email professors to see if they have any sort of research opportunities open um but you do have to do it a very particular way because if you just em if you just do a copy and paste email to a Harvard Professor asking for a research project you're just going to left you're just going to be left on open so something I would highly recommend is to firstly Target smaller schools maybe don't Target the Harvard or the mits of the world at first but Target smaller State schools and make sure to really go in and really personalize your email personalize your email to each and every single faculty go into the faculty's work and see what exactly they do and in that outline make sure that you've actually read through their work outline what you're interested in their work and what you could contribute in their lab so that includes hard skills soft skills and anything else that makes you unique that could potentially be helpful to their life so after my first publication I moved on to building businesses because I realized that research was not really my thing and I would not really want to P pursue it long term I built literally dozens of projects that failed and I just kept reiterating and learning from my mistakes and slowly making my projects better and better and better until I finally stumbled across Navaro and Navaro was my first truly successful project and Navaro was almost a yearlong Endeavor where I learned a lot and I had many many mistakes also doing Navaro and Navaro took the mistakes that I made for my previous projects and capitalize them by becoming an incubator that would go on to help thousands of students and create a small community of students trying to create their own projects and later on we even partnered with our local school system to bring our to bring our course and actually teach inside the classrooms and we got to teach inside of some Middle School classrooms and we built a whole lot of projects and it was a really really cool experience so if you have any more questions about that make sure to leave them in the comment and I could even make a full video talking just about Navaro sometime in the future and from Navaro I learned that a small passionate team is the best way to build anything because having an overinflated or sort of bored out of their mind team just won't get absolutely anything done and this brings me over to my second lesson which is learn from your mistakes and I know this seems very very obvious but there's a reason why people say this over and over again and the only way that you can make mistakes is by putting yourself out there and doing things that are very hard and that people don't want to do so go out there and make your own make your own nonprofit or startup and you will fail many many times but that's the only way that you can actually Le and and just please listen to this piece of advice this is the biggest piece of advice from the entire video just go out there make mistakes and that's the best way that you'll be able to learn so after I developed Navaro and some other smaller projects that just didn't do as well I decided to really talk to a lot of Founders and people who had a lot more experience than me and from these small simple talks I learned so much and so many new opportunities opened up just from talking to this to these people and they had no idea who I was before and a lot of them decided to take time out of their days to just talk to a random high school and even though I was not very experienced at at the time they still gave amazing advice on startups which I wish I would have known a year earlier um they put me um they put me in a lot of great opportunities which in turn gave me a lot of new connections and often times they're very open to giving feedback on college applications or whatever start up your building and there just a very gen and very generally it's just fun to talk to people and sort of see their experience in the world and how you can sort of learn from them and this takes me to my final lesson which is to talk to people more experienced than you and I wish I did this earlier where I wish I talked to faculty I wish I talked to Founders earlier on and instead of just telling you how amazing this piece of advice is they show you how much you can learn by talking to MIT students and listening to their advice just talk about like how you got into MIT and like any advice you have for people I think MIT like really looks for case that are like really focus like in one area and show like intellectual curiosity in a like particular field so for me that was like computer science machine learning and just showing like demonstrated interest by exploring inside and outside the classroom I think is what got mean to okay so I did a couple things I think the really important part was that I did a lot of software projects during my free time uh the way I started my software projects was out of genuine passion so I integrated my application really well showing my my genuine passion for the things I did software robotics I showed I went the extra mile and everything I did I transferred schools for robotics which is my top activity and it wasn't anything big like World Cham software but it was like Minecraft and I used the Creator portfolio that's what it I used the creat portfolio to show them exactly what I did um I had really good grades sat was 1530 so I met those basic criteria and 800 math so everything for that was met so I was like I was being considered as an applicant of course like you have to have those requirements yeah you have to also show that you're really unique okay so like for anyone trying to get into MIT like what advice would you give to them number one utilize like the maker portfolio thing I think a lot of people don't utilize that enough and when you're doing it make sure like you're presenting like your best work but also like tell the story behind the work and like kind of narrate the entire uh kind of Engineering Process or whatever you made I think that's a really good tool to show that um you going to fit like divid my te it's kind of like they're looking for people that can create people that can fly what they learn to like more tangible um area um and also uh just do stuff you're passionate about like don't do stuff just for the college application because that like one that burns you out and two like college is can see it's not like cohesive with the rest of the narrative of your application to just get into MIT I think you have to be really stem oriented and just do everything that you're passionated but it has to be like stem stem stem uh so do math competitions write software during your free time do research um you just have to focus on one thing do it really well and then once you're really well at that one thing pick up another thing and become really good at that too that's the only way you can't be mediocre academically what was your biggest regret as like a high schooler I don't think I have any regrets I I like took the most rigorous course that I could take four years and I mean I played soccer throughout High School too so sometimes you get H the gate again pretty late and you'd have to like stay up um for like to study for test the next day or go early prop hours and next say whatever but working hard is kind of rewarding in the long run and you just feel accomplished afterward I don't think I have any academic regrets I think my biggest regret was taking uh AB when I could have taken BC um my my friends convinced me not to take BC and like AB the math for kill him after that but was really easy for me but it never really challenged me but I wish I took that but also um I never planned my classes out ever I know a lot of people like throughout beginning of high school planed out their classes so that they could get the maximum GPA I never did the only time I ever picked my classes was when I was filling out the application for to pick out your classes yeah so I wish I took the time ahead of time to see which classes would accumulate me in having the best EPA which was worth my effort cuz at the end of like at the end of like junior year senior year I just started taking all the AP credits I can and that's how I got my GPA up to like 20th Place but if I did that beforehand I think I think I could have been like Solly Doria yeah so now that we have the main pieces of advice out of the way I'm going to cover the main resources that I use to get into MIT and that I've recommended many many times over so again the only coding tutorial that actually works is Harvard CSP there's nothing that comes even close to it and it's the only thing that that's going to get you out of tutorial hell and into building actual working products want to dive deeper into AI I highly recommend Andrew news courses on AI which are all free on YouTube and there are some notes online which are which are also free and if you have literally anything else you want to learn I highly recommend looking at mit's open course Weare um they have very very extensive um courses on just about any topic that you can think of I've actually used some of their courses Beyond just coding they're very useful for math chemistry biology almost any topic you can think of they have they have at least some sort of free course that you can use to sort of get started in that field and lastly when it comes to writing supplementals for MIT I highly highly recommend looking at mit's blogs because they post blogs very frequently and they have a lot of golden tin bits of information so if you want to have an application that really stands out to spend an hour going through their blog so you can really understand what makes MIT unique and some of their and some of their unique offerings that you can talk about in your supplementals and again this is going to make you really stand out from any other applicant so there you have it this video I covered how I got into MIT some advice from my friends on how they got into MIT and how you can get in as well and lastly some some free resources that I highly recommend you if you found this video helpful at all make sure to like comment any questions and subscribe for more college and coding advice