MIT Essays, Prompt by Prompt

Alongside the four main essays, MIT asks four short response questions, with space for only 40 to 50 words each. Small canvas, big opportunity. Here’s how to attack each one, starting with the one that should be the most fun to write.

What do you do just for fun? (40 to 50 words)

Only a few of you will have the natural instinct to be 100% honest here and let loose. The REST of you are likely going to ask yourselves some version of the following: “what can I say here that will impress the admissions committee the most”? Dear, dear applicant… this is your opportunity to unclench, and let loose. If your answer here is boring, guess what that says about you. If your answer here feels overly manufactured, guess what that says about you.

MIT has the luxury of picking out, from among the smartest candidates on planet Earth, the individuals who ALSO have a vibrant personality that will synergize well with other geniuses. So they get to take 100 over-qualified candidates, and find the 5 or so that light it up for them the most. Don’t blow these opportunities to be cool and likable. The way to be likable is to make honest admissions here, and prove that you’re unafraid to do so.

So, what stuff actually gives you pleasure? What stuff lessens stress? What stuff makes you smile? What stuff makes you giddy? What stuff makes you feel alive? Make a list. Aim for ten items. Ten things that no one around you necessarily knows about. Maybe they do, but maybe they don’t. Maybe these things you do just for fun are private or hidden escapes that don’t appear on any bulletin boards in your school. Doesn’t matter. Make a list of ten.

Okay, phew. Hopefully, that was fun. In fact, hopefully, it became MORE fun once you started to get into the groove a bit. But now, you have a list of ten things. Which of these things do you think someone else MIGHT write about? Cross it out.

How many items are left? (If you have zero items left, we have another plan for you which we’ll get to in a minute.) Of these remaining items, which one feels the most unusual, or the one that is most “you”? Which one has a unique story behind it? Which one CONTRASTS with your profile the most? Let’s say your resume is chock full of science awards… imagine how boring it would be to learn that in your spare time, you like to experiment with growing plants. Good lord. It would be much cooler if instead you talked about how you are obsessed with costumes. Costumes in movies, theatre, Halloween… anything involving a costume, you’re all over it. (Weird! And cool!) Or, that you are determined to make a new flavor of soft drink, and in your spare time, you combine different fruit juices and vegetable extracts and other ingredients. Or, you’re extremely obsessed with Asian pop music, and you’re a blond-haired blue-eyed Alabaman with an uncomfortable history of not-so-open-minded grandparents.

Conflict is interesting. Clashes are interesting. Surprises are interesting. Think about what your “resume” says. And then see if anything on your list of genuine hobbies or interests somehow draws a contrast to it or “adds dimensionality.” It’s boring when everything you do feels predictable. Think about the best books or movies. Did any of them lack conflict?

Oh, and as promised, for those of you who lined-out all ten possibilities, fret not. Either you can take another swing with an additional five. Or, you “un-cross-out” those ten and look at them another way. Instead of asking whether someone else may talk about these, ask yourself if your particular relationship with any item on your list is somehow unique. For example, yes, I’m a Marvel comic book geek just like a million others, but… not in the same way. My obsession is with … {insert unusual twist that dismantles the possibility that someone else will write about the same thing}. This way, you can write about something someone else might, but in a completely different (and surprising) way.

Once you lock the thing you’re gonna write about, remember you’ve got 40 to 50 words, so two or three sentences, tops. Here’s a way to structure it:

1. Tell us about the thing straight away: What it is, what you do, how you got into it, why you like it. Pick the one or two details that make it vivid. [25-30 words]
2. For Part II, you’ll wanna make mention of how this activity fits into your overall picture. Does this fill a void? Does it counterbalance something else? One sentence that tells us what it does for you. [15-20 words]

Who is someone you admire, whether you know them personally or look up to them from afar? Tell us why. (40 to 50 words)

The trap here: picking someone EVERYONE admires (Einstein, Marie Curie, your favorite Nobel laureate) and then saying what everyone says. Forty words of that and the reader learns nothing about you.

The person matters less than the why. And the why is really a mirror: what you admire in someone tells MIT what you value, and maybe who you’re trying to become. So go for specificity. A grandmother who rebuilt her life twice. The custodian who fixes everything in your school without anyone noticing. A YouTuber who explains topology like it’s gossip. Then nail the one quality you admire, and give us a flash of evidence for it.

If it’s someone famous, fine, but find the angle nobody else will. Admire a famous scientist? Cool. Admire the five years they spent being wrong before they were right? Now we’re learning something.

What’s a topic, academic or non-academic, that you could talk about for hours? (40 to 50 words)

This is the nerd-out question, and MIT means it. “Academic or non-academic” is your permission slip: the history of fonts, competitive Rubik’s cubing, why bread rises, the economics of Pokémon cards. Anything goes, as long as it’s genuinely yours.

The test: could you actually talk about it for hours? Then prove it in 40 words by skipping the general and going straight to the deep end. Show us the specific, weird, delightful thing that only someone who’s spent hours on this topic would know. That detail does all the work.

Bonus points if it’s different from your field of study answer. You’ve already told them what you want to study. This is a chance to show them another room in the house.

MIT values both “generalists” with varied interests and “specialists” who focus deeply on one or a few passions. Which do you think best describes you, and why? (40 to 50 words)

First, relax: there’s no right answer. MIT says so right in the prompt: it values BOTH. So don’t try to guess which one they want, and definitely don’t try to be both at once (“I’m a specialist generalist!”). Pick one and own it.

Then prove it with your actual life. If you’re a generalist, show us the range: three wildly different things you’ve gone deep enough on to be dangerous. If you’re a specialist, show us the depth: the one thing you’ve chased so deep that you can see the bottom. Either way, the “why” should say something about how your mind works.

And make sure it squares with the rest of your application. If your activities list screams specialist, a generalist answer had better come with a good explanation.

Learn more and explore each step of MIT’s undergraduate application process here.

How have your personal and academic experiences influenced the types of problems you would want to tackle with an MIT education and the impact you aim to make on your community? (approximately 100-200 words)

Two halves to this one, welded together: the problems you want to tackle, and the impact you aim to make on your community. And MIT wants to know where both came from: your personal experiences AND your academic ones.

Here’s the trap. Plenty of applicants will grab the biggest problem they can find (climate change! world hunger! curing cancer!) and announce they’re going to solve it. Nobody believes that. Worse, it says nothing about you, because a thousand other kids typed the same sentence. The interesting part is the line that connects a problem to YOUR life.

So start small and specific. What have you seen up close that bugged you? A broken process at school, a gap in your town, a frustration in your family’s life, a question from a class that wouldn’t leave you alone. Make a list. Next to each item, write down what you’ve already done about it, even if it was tiny. Tiny is great. Tiny is credible.

Then find the academic thread. Which class, project or late-night obsession gave you the tools (or the vocabulary) to see that problem differently? That’s the “academic experiences” half of the prompt, and it’s where MIT gets a peek at how you think.

Last, the “community” part. Your community can be your neighborhood, your school, your family’s hometown halfway across the world, or a group of people who share a problem. Define it however makes sense for you. Just make it real.

Here’s a simple structure to get you started:

1. Open with the experience: the moment you noticed the problem, up close and personal. [40-60 words]
2. Bring in the academic side: what you learned (in class or out) that changed how you see it, and anything you’ve already tried. [40-60 words]
3. Look forward: the kind of problem you’d want to tackle with an MIT education, and the impact you aim to make on your community. Make it concrete enough that we can picture it. [30-60 words]

100-200 words goes fast. Spend them on the connection between your story and your problem. That’s the part only you can write.

Learn more and explore each step of MIT’s undergraduate application process here.

While some reach their goals following well-trodden paths, others blaze their own trails achieving the unexpected. In what ways have you done something different than what was expected in your educational journey? (approximately 100-200 words)

This is a neat question.

Before we get into it, one high-level piece of advice. Resist telling a story about an unexpected thing you did, where the focus is on how cool or interesting or brave the unexpected thing was. When applicants do this, it almost always backfires. Applicant does ‘an unexpected thing.’ But then the tone and implication of the essay is ‘Check out how amazing this unexpected thing is, and therefore what that says about me!’ And then here’s what happens: the reader thinks, “You think that’s unexpected? Well well well. Let me show you ten examples from just today of students who did more exciting, bolder, more interesting unexpected things!” To focus on the coolness of the ‘different thing’ you did is to invite a defensive posture in your reader.

Instead, make the story about why you chose to do something unexpected, what that was like for you, and how it went. Was it easy? Was it difficult? What was going through your mind before, during, and after? If you focus everything on that aspect, you’re sure to make it less about ‘compare my version to someone else’ and more about ‘compare my self-awareness, introspection, and thoughtfulness’ to anyone in the arena. That is the contest you very much want to enter!

Okay so, now that we have a strong orienting or approach principle, you can start leafing through your experiences, searching for an instance where something was expected, but you went a different way. Being different for its own sake isn’t all that cool, and also not that hard. The cool versions are ones that come with both purpose, and risk. When you were told to do something, or deliver something, or execute something, and you instead opted to do something different, what was it that made you consider a different path? What were you hoping to gain? By not doing what was expected, what might the consequences have been? Btw, nowhere is it said that this needs to be a ‘success’ story. In fact, you can locate ‘success’ here in the approach. To have dared to do something unexpected IS to have succeeded, outcome notwithstanding. The key lies in the thought process and boldness that went into the decision itself. Take us through the rationale, your weighing of outcomes, the whole thing. What did you learn from the daring itself, from the choice to try something different, whatever the result?

Here’s a simple structure to get you on the right track:

1. Establish the original expectation, straightforwardly, without judgment. It should seem perfectly reasonable, and clear.
2. Now explain the light bulb (or knot in your stomach, whatever your reaction was!) that went off in you when presented this choice. What wasn’t sitting right? Or what new idea did it inspire? What gave you pause, propelled you to think differently, resist, whatever your response was? Take us through the conflict and reasoning you went through at the time.
3. Mentioning the outcome briefly if you want, assess the process of choosing an unexpected route, the risk you took, how it all felt. 

(If you have more than one example, you can use this general structure to sort through your stories, before writing them.) This will get you a credible first draft and then we can dig deep from there!

Learn more and explore each step of MIT’s undergraduate application process here.

How did you manage a situation or challenge that you didn’t expect? What did you learn from it? (approximately 100-200 words)

One key word to consider here: vulnerability. We need to hear about a time when you were knocked off balance. A time when you were absolutely uncertain of the outcome. When you doubted yourself. Maybe even when you lost faith in yourself. Certainly, a time when you felt like you didn’t know the answer. Or a time when you “did” know the answer… and you were wrong. The more willing you are to admit any of these, the more likely you are to seem like someone who has the ability to grow, and to play in the big leagues.

Your first challenge is to pick one example of when you made the biggest miscalculation of your life, or felt the most unsure of yourself… list a few examples that come to mind, and then focus on the one that represented the biggest “belly-flop.” The biggest blunder. The worst mistake. The most vulnerable moment, etc. Extremes are our friend here.

1. Take us quickly through your initial sense of things. The time ‘before the unexpected thing happened.’ Tell it to us in real time as though you were recording your thought process while it was happening; in other words, back when you believed you knew what was coming next. This is key.
2. Then explain the twist, what went wrong, the unexpected thing. Don’t dwell on the details much, just give us the gist. 
3. Now, and most importantly, take us through how you processed this twist. This is the part where you talk about feeling weightless, disappointed, angry, no longer confident, whatever the cocktail of emotions was… we want to know it all. Take your time, be honest and admit to it all, fully. The ‘admitting of it’ is most of the point here. “Can you be comfortable admitting that”? Because those who can… are the strongest amongst us.
4. Now, walk us through the lessons learned. See, it’s less about whether or how you ‘solved’ the twist, or even if you did, and more about learning how you deal with the unexpected. This is what MIT wants to gamble on. They care about the kid who learned something they’ll take forward and apply to future uncertainty. The outcome of this story? Secondary. What did you learn?

This essay is all about “can this kid handle major curveballs”? And beyond handling em, maybe… have you learned from enough curveballs in the past that now you CRAVE them because that’s how you grow and develop the best? We hope you’re familiar with curveballs and know how to hit em, because your first year MIT (or any college, frankly) is going to be a barrage of one curveball after the next.

Learn more and explore each step of MIT’s undergraduate application process here.

There is also one final, open-ended, additional-information text box where you can tell us anything else you think we really ought to know.

The only thing that should go here is a FACET to your overall profile that’s utterly MISSING from your application. Or, a red flag in your profile that needs addressing (bad test scores, a blip in your grades, something that you believe doesn’t represent you properly). Other than those two things, don’t just flesh out something that they’ve either “gotten” already, or worse, doesn’t advance their understanding of you in any way.

If your application is ridiculously lop-sided in ANY direction, and there’s MORE dimensionality to you that absolutely MUST be conveyed, find a coooooool way to convey it. This is gonna vary from candidate to candidate, but this extra thing MIGHT be the kind of thing you can just state outright and it’ll work beautifully. Or, you’ll need to package it ever-so-carefully (like in a humorous or creative way, or something), to make it WORK. Impossible to give examples because it’s all part of a complex, holistic assessment of what the REST of the application sums to say about you, and what’s missing, and therefore… what to include and how to include it.

Learn more and explore each step of MIT’s undergraduate application process here.