CollegeVine College Essay Team September 12, 2024 18 Essay Guides 2024-25,MIT

How to Write the MIT Application Essays 2024-2025

This year, MIT has 5 required essays, and 4 optional essays. The 5 required essays cover a range of topics that you’ve likely already been thinking about throughout your college process: your intended major, a favorite hobby, an unexpected aspect of your educational journey, your collaboration skills, and managing a challenge.

The 4 optional essays concern extenuating circumstances in your school career. Although we typically advise you to respond to every prompt, even optional ones, these are truly optional–you should only write an essay if you actually have something to say.

Keep in mind that MIT does not use the Common Application, and instead uses its own system called MyMIT. So, in addition to the essays, make sure you leave yourself extra time to fill out your personal information and the other standard pieces of the application.

Read these MIT essay examples written by real students to inspire your writing!

MIT Application Essay Prompts

This prompt is the classic “Why This Major?” question, that asks you what you want to study and why you want to study it. Most importantly, it asks you why you want to study this major at MIT. Ultimately, the most compelling response to this essay prompt is one that:

1. Demonstrates your passion for the major that you have chosen.
2. Integrates your past and present studies and interests seamlessly with your future at MIT and your long-term academic and professional goals.
3. Addresses specifically why MIT―the campus, resources, faculty, programs, and opportunities―is the place where you need and want to study.

Before you start brainstorming and drafting a response to this prompt, spend ample time exploring the various majors, or “courses” as MIT calls them, on MIT’s website. You should pinpoint a few courses of study that appeal to you and then dive deeper into what the curricular emphasis is of each course of study, what resources and opportunities are available, and which faculty might you be interested in studying with or whose research you find compelling. 

The key phrase in this prompt is “right now,” which many schools don’t include in their “Why This Major” essay prompt, but which all schools imply. This key phrase means that if you matriculate at MIT, you will in no way be required to major in the field of study that you write about in response to this prompt. You are free to choose and change your major, and most students change their major at least once during their college career.

For anyone who has many interests, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to choose just one major to write about. It is completely fine, and even expected, that you may be undecided, but spend time condensing your list of potential majors to one or two that you are truly interested in pursuing further. 

This straightforward prompt requires a concise response since it has only a 100-word limit. While specificity is still important, there is less space for detail than in the other 200 word prompts that MIT asks you to write. 

Once you have introduced the field of study that most appeals to you, you will need to discuss why this field appeals to you. The reasons that you give need to be authentic reasons; they should be based on pure intellectual curiosity, personal goals, and strongly held values. Avoid listing prestige, post-graduation salary, or your parents’ desires as reasons for choosing your major or MIT. The admissions committee wants to know what you are genuinely passionate about and why. 

Here are some key questions to consider before writing: 

• What past experiences of yours have influenced your decision to study this field at MIT? 
• What coursework or independent study have you pursued in this field?
• What classes are you interested in taking at MIT?
• Who are the teachers that you have had, thought leaders in this field, or other role models that inspire you to pursue this course of study?
• Who are the professors or researchers at MIT that you would want to learn from or work with? 
• Who are the people that you wish to serve, or whose lives you hope to improve, through working or doing research in this field? 
• How did you first discover this field of study? 
• How do you engage with this field of study inside and outside of the classroom?
• How do you envision yourself using this field of study in your future career?
• Why is this field of study personally meaningful to you?

With these ideas in mind, you should be able to write a concise response about why you have picked your major of choice and why MIT will be the perfect fit for you.

First, remember that the prompt is asking for an activity that isn’t required of you. If you’re the captain of your school’s varsity basketball team, then don’t write about basketball (even if you do play for pleasure outside of school). MIT wants to know something about you that they can’t already find elsewhere in your application, something outside of your academic and extracurricular responsibilities. Essentially, MIT is asking you: “What do you do in your free time?”

A great way to approach this prompt is to construct a brief anecdote to illustrate your passions. Do you love reading because you enjoy imagining yourself in fictional worlds? Do you find peace in painting natural scenery? Now is a great time to describe these experiences.

Here are some examples:

• Photography – Sitting on the pier, you watch as the sky transitions from blue to yellow, and from yellow to orange. With your camera in hand, you capture the exact moment that the sun touches the horizon, the moment that the colors begin to fade into a gradient. Perhaps the sound of your camera’s shutter acts as an instant stress reliever. Or perhaps you love the ability to capture nature’s wonders from a different perspective. Either way, the vivid imagery here makes writing an anecdote a very powerful approach.

• Baking – Do you love the aroma of homemade baking? Do you love experimenting with new recipes and creations? Maybe you love the meticulousness of measuring out ingredients and combining them to form one cohesive unit. If this sounds like you, write an anecdote about how you use baking as an outlet for your creativity. Use sensory details to briefly go through the process of that new cupcake recipe you came up with, sharing with the reader your passion for innovative baking. You’ll definitely make the admissions officer drool a little bit with this one.

• Rubik’s Cube – You love the thrill of solving a challenging puzzle. Starting with no instructions, you figured out the secret behind solving the cube and how to move each square to the right place. After a few more tries, you can now solve it in just a few minutes, a reflection of your ability to quickly learn and master difficult puzzles. While this may be a “nerdier” example, don’t be afraid to let your inner nerd shine (this is MIT after all). 

What makes each of these examples strong is the employment of imagery and sensory details. Although the response must be brief, you want to make the admissions officer interested in what you love; appealing to the five senses is an excellent way to do so. Don’t tell them that you love photography, show them that you love it by transforming your answer into a story.

Be honest — don’t lie for the sake of sounding more impressive. While volunteering at the local homeless shelter may sound very humble, don’t write about that if it isn’t what you actually do in your free time. MIT can spot essays that try too hard and lying about humanitarian efforts is definitely one of those instances. 

While it’s important to be honest, make sure to also use good judgment when articulating your response. Generally, anything goes for this prompt and you can essentially write about anything you’re passionate about. But if your favorite activity is “looking at memes,” it might be better to choose something else.

This prompt asks you to reflect on a time when you deviated from the norm or went against expectations in your educational journey. MIT places a high value on creative thinking, so it’s no surprise that the admissions committee wants to see how you think independently, take initiative, or approach learning in a unique way. 

Understanding the Prompt

Taking a non-traditional approach to learning could involve a range of things, including:

• Pursuing a subject in an unconventional way.
• Going beyond your standard school curriculum to explore a passion.
• Challenging the expectations of teachers, peers, or even yourself.
• Finding an unexpected solution to an academic problem.
• Engaging in self-directed learning or projects that others wouldn’t have considered.

Brainstorming Questions

To help spark ideas, consider:

• Have you ever chosen a project or topic that was outside the scope of the assignment, simply because you were curious?
• Have you ever taken initiative in learning something independently (e.g., teaching yourself coding, designing experiments, or developing a new approach to a subject)?
• Did you ever step up to lead a class project or introduce a unique solution that others didn’t consider?
• Have you combined multiple disciplines or found new, unexpected applications for what you were learning?

What Makes a Good Response

A strong response will:

• Be specific: Focus on a single, clear example of how you did something different or unexpected.
• Highlight your initiative: Show that you took ownership of your learning and sought new ways to solve problems or explore your interests.
• Show broader growth or impact: Reflect on how this experience helped you grow intellectually, creatively, or personally.
• Avoid clichés: Focus on what makes your experience unique and how you broke away from the conventional path.

Example Response

This response works because it tells a specific, tangible, detailed personal story of how the student went beyond expectations. The essay also connects to the student’s growth more generally, by highlighting their curiosity, willingness to learn independently, and problem-solving skills—all qualities that align with MIT’s values.

For this prompt, MIT wants to see your selfless side by looking at the strategies you take to help those around you. Don’t panic if you haven’t saved hundreds of lives or discovered the cure for cancer; as the prompt suggests, helping your community can be as simple as lending a shoulder for your friend to cry on. Your community can be practically any group from family, neighbors, classmates, sports team, etc.

Whether big or small, think of a time that you made a positive impact on one or more people. Maybe you have experience volunteering at the Red Cross or at your local retirement home. Or maybe you founded a club at your school with the goal of bringing education to children in need. No matter what the cause is, show the admissions officers your generosity and willingness to make a difference in your community.

Here are a few more examples:

• Tutoring a Teammate – One of your cross country teammates said that she was struggling in her Algebra 2 class, and was worried about failing. She didn’t see the point of math and thought she was just “bad” at it. You volunteered to tutor her for free on a weekly basis. After just a month of your tutoring sessions, your teammate got her first A on a test. This sparked your interest in teaching math, as you were able to get your teammate to not only understand math concepts, but also appreciate them.

• Food Waste Campaign – You noticed your school cafeteria was generating tons of daily food waste, so you created a campaign to implement a compositing system and encourage students to reduce their waste. You gathered a team to research different composting services, contact your principal and the school board, and create educational materials on how to compost correctly. The program was successful at your school and diverted several tons of food from the landfill weekly. You’re currently working on getting the system implemented across the district.

What both of these examples succeed at doing is describing the impact that an action has on others. Whether it be putting a smile on someone’s face or preventing a child from contracting a deadly disease, remember to show the reader what the outcome of your efforts were. Tying in your personal development is another great way to heighten the magnitude of your contribution, as it gives your actions more significant personal meaning. Ask yourself: How did you grow from this experience? What changes did you see?

The idea of this prompt is similar to the archetypal “Overcoming a Challenge” prompt. Whether it is a personal situation or a challenge, MIT wants to know how you handle difficult situations that suddenly arise and what you learn from such experiences.

You want to construct an anecdote that goes through both the situation and/or challenge and your thought process. When crafting your response, start by briefly describing the situation or challenge, making sure to answer the question, “What was so significant about this event?” Next, go into detail about the steps you took to approach the unexpected event and how you went about this process.

Make sure to discuss the outcome of the situation and show the admissions officer how you matured from this experience, specifically identifying what you have learned from this experience. The most common mistake students make is to focus too much on the situation or challenge, rather than their thought process, emotions, and their growth.

As you brainstorm and begin drafting your response, here are some guided questions to get you thinking:

1. Why was this challenge so important to you? What is the significance?
2. At that moment, what was your reaction to the situation? How did it affect you (thoughts, emotions)?
3. Were the steps you took to manage the situation successful? Why or why not?
4. How did this challenge allow you to grow and mature as an individual?

Try to avoid “challenges” that are too trivial; although you may be upset that you got a B on that one calculus test, this is not a significant enough challenge to analyze. For this prompt, it’s important to demonstrate personal growth and maturity, as this shows your capacity to adapt to difficult environments.

You should also try to avoid challenges that are cliché, such as:

• A sports injury
• Working hard in a difficult class
• Adjusting to a new culture or school
• Facing tragedy (death, illness, abuse)
• Romantic relationships and breakups

These tend to be very common experiences that have a predictable outcome, often focus too much on the challenge instead of your growth, or are simply inappropriate topics for your essay. Of course, you can still choose to write on a common topic if you feel that you can write something especially meaningful, but it’s better to find a more original experience to share.

You can, however, “spin” a cliche topic. For example, the “sports injury” essay tends to go: you get injured, can’t play, have to go through rehab, and you eventually get back on the field and succeed. A more unique approach would be to talk about how your injury led you to start a blog while you were recovering, and that became a big passion. Or, how your injury made you realize that you actually liked the strategy of the sport more than the actual sport, which led to your interest in competitive chess.

Here are some good examples:

• You had to switch positions last-minute on your Model UN simulation of the Nuremberg Trials. You’d researched and prepared your arguments for months, but a delegate showed up late, so you needed to represent the opposite side you’d prepared for. Instead of panicking, you gather as much info as you can in a short time to argue the other perspective. When it’s your turn to speak, you blank out, however, and the Committee Director says they’ll come back to you. You take a deep breath, refocus, and re-outline your notes. When it’s time to speak again, you present a confident and articulate argument. The experience teaches you the importance of both preparation and adaptability.

• You are passionate about robotics and wanted to start a competitive robotics club at your school. You gathered a group of interested students and began the process of getting the club approved by the administration. To your disappointment, your club was rejected. Instead of accepting defeat, you and your peers petitioned the school in hopes of having the board members reconsider their decision. While you didn’t ultimately win over the school board, you discovered your talent for persuasive speaking in the process, and decided to join the Debate Team. You’ve since won several awards and even got to give a local TED Talk.

This is your typical “Additional Information” prompt, and while we usually recommend that you fill out all optional prompts, this is an exception. As MIT says themselves, many students won’t need this space to complete their application.

However, if you have unusual circumstances or a significant experience you weren’t able to address, you should write about it here. Some potential topics include:

• Illness
• Financial hardships
• Death of a loved one
• Divorce
• Unique extracurricular that can’t be fully explained in the Activities section

While your other essays should have a more narrative quality, your response here can be more straightforward, and you also don’t need to take up the full 300 words. 

Just avoid using this space for topics that may be deemed trivial, such as explaining that B on your transcript when you otherwise have straight A’s. Significant dips in grades for reasons out of your control are certainly fine to explain, but make sure that anything you cover here is actually a major part of your high school experience and development.

Additionally, note that MIT also has three additional optional “additional information” prompts, which are more focused. If you have some context to add about, say, your family life, you should include it in your response to Prompt 7 (although you can provide additional detail here if you aren’t able to fit everything there).

It’s important to note that in light of the Supreme Court striking down the use of affirmative action in college admissions, many colleges have added open-ended prompts that give students the opportunity to discuss their racial background. Because the ruling allows colleges to consider race on an individual basis, essays are the prime place for you to reveal your racial background and its effect on you. If you feel that your racial background has impacted you significantly, this is the place to discuss that.

This prompt is a chance to share any important context about your family that might have impacted your personal or academic life. It’s optional, so only respond if there are circumstances that significantly impacted your high school experience–most applicants will leave this section blank.

What to Include:

• Challenges or hardships: Financial struggles, health issues, or responsibilities (like caring for siblings or working to support your family).
• Cultural background: Unique traditions or family dynamics that provide context for your upbringing.
• Support or inspiration: Family values or influences that have played a significant role in your development.

What Not to Include:

• “Fun facts” about your background that you just didn’t have room for elsewhere: Going to baseball games every Sunday during the summer is a nice tradition, but that’s not the kind of thing MIT is looking for here.
• Details that aren’t relevant to understanding your candidacy for MIT: If your great-uncle is a world-renowned physicist, but you have no relationship with him, mentioning that will just come across as name-droppy.

Example Response:

Note that this response doesn’t just list what happened, but also highlights skills the student learned that will help them succeed at MIT. Overall, your response should be more factual than a typical supplement, but you should still give admissions officers some sense of why this story matters for understanding what kind of MIT student you’d be.

This prompt is an opportunity to provide any relevant context about your high school’s curriculum or grading system, or any challenges you’ve faced that might have impacted your academic performance. The admissions committee wants to understand your academic journey within the context of what was available or possible at your school.

Like the prompt above, only respond here if there’s something genuinely unique about your academic background. Admissions officers know that no two high schools are exactly the same, and that every high schooler hits a bump here or there. You should only use this space if something has significantly impacted your education.

Finally, do remember that your guidance counselor will be sending MIT a school report, which contains general information about your school’s academic offerings, grading system, and so on. You don’t want to waste admissions officers’ time by making them read the same thing twice, so you might want to ask your counselor to see a copy of the school report, so that you can provide them with meaningful elaboration rather than being redundant.

What to Include:

• Limited course offerings: If your school doesn’t offer AP/IB classes, honors courses, or electives in your area of interest.
• Extenuating circumstances: If health issues, personal challenges, or unexpected events affected your ability to take certain courses or perform your best.
• Grading system details: If your school uses a unique grading scale (e.g., no letter grades, or non-traditional GPA calculations), this is the place to explain.

What Not to Include:

• Standard “quirks”: Not using weighted GPA or assigning class rank are both very common, and thus don’t require additional explanation.
• Circumstances that are typical for high schoolers: Juggling extracurriculars and coursework is something most high schoolers do, so you don’t want to discuss that, unless there is additional detail that is truly unique to your circumstances–for example, your basketball coach being fired due to mistreating players, and the stress that placed on you impacting your performance in school, would be worth writing about.

Example Response:

Note that, like in the sample response for Prompt 7, there is also a positive element to this response. Resilience is one of the qualities admissions officers prize most, so any time you discuss an obstacle you’ve faced, you ideally want to also mention how you hurdled that obstacle, to highlight positive attributes that speak to your potential for success at MIT.

Since MIT requires all applicants to submit standardized test scores, unlike the many schools which have remained test-optional, they are giving you an opportunity to explain any extenuating circumstances that affected your ability to take or perform well on the SAT or ACT. 

Again, don’t put something here just for the sake of it, and if you do have something to share, be clear and concise in describing the situation–focus on the facts.

What to Include:

• Exam cancellations: If test dates were canceled due to natural disasters or other events.
• Health-related issues: If illness or another medical situation impacted your performance on the exam day.
• Personal or family circumstances: If significant personal or family challenges interfered with your ability to prepare for or take the tests.

What Not to Include:

• Challenges many students face: Nearly everyone has trouble carving out time to study while also completing their schoolwork.
• Excuses for a poor performance: You don’t want to say things like “I would have done better, but….” Take ownership of your score, and if there are legitimate, concrete reasons you didn’t do as well as you think you’re capable of, share them, but don’t aimlessly speculate.

Example Response:

Unlike with the prior optional prompts, you don’t necessarily need to have a positive spin here. Just list the facts that impacted your ability to do as well as you would have liked on the SAT or ACT.

Where to Get Your MIT Essays Edited For Free

Do you want feedback on your MIT essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool, where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

Need feedback faster? Get a free, nearly-instantaneous essay review from Sage, our AI tutor and advisor. Sage will rate your essay, give you suggestions for improvement, and summarize what admissions officers would take away from your writing. Use these tools to improve your chances of acceptance to your dream school!