If you’re applying to MIT, odds are high that you’re a pretty exceptional student (and human). Your GPA sparkles, your test scores soar, and your activity list practically sings with meaningful accomplishments. This is great for you, and great for the 20,000+ other people applying annually. In a sea of highly successful seniors, your responses to MIT’s essay prompts will help distinguish you from the pack (or pod if we’re sticking with our aquatic metaphor). The best news: MIT gives you many chances to make an impression. To this end, we’ve put together the following set of examples, tips, and ideas for each of MIT’s 7 supplemental essays.
What are MIT's supplemental essay prompts?
A note from MIT’s website: "Depending on the question, we’re looking for responses of approximately 100–200 words each."
Prompt #1:
What field of study appeals to you the most right now? (Note: Applicants select from a drop-down list.) Tell us more about why this field of study at MIT appeals to you. (100 words or fewer)
Prompt #2
We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do simply for the pleasure of it. (225 words or fewer)
Prompt #3
How has the world you come from—including your opportunities, experiences, and challenges—shaped your dreams and aspirations? (225 words or fewer)
Prompt #4
MIT brings people with diverse backgrounds together to collaborate, from tackling the world’s biggest challenges to lending a helping hand. Describe one way you have collaborated with others to learn from them, with them, or contribute to your community together. (225 words or fewer)
Prompt #5
How did you manage a situation or challenge that you didn’t expect? What did you learn from it? (225 word or fewer)
Prompt #6
Please list up to four activities—if you have more than four, choose the ones that are most important to you. (40 words or less per activity description)
Prompt #7
Optional: No application can meet the needs of every individual. If there is significant information that you were not able to include elsewhere in the application, you may include it here. (Many students will leave this section blank—and that’s okay.)
Please note, we may not be able to access all links you share. If you have supplemental materials you would like to submit, please refer to our optional creative portfolios. (350 words or fewer)
How to Write Each Supplemental Essay Prompt for MIT
How to Write MIT Supplemental Essay prompt #1
What field of study appeals to you the most right now? (Note: Applicants select from a drop-down list.) Tell us more about why this field of study at MIT appeals to you. (100 words or fewer)
This is a super short “Why major?” essay, but since MIT goes out of its way to specify “why this field of study at MIT appeals to you,” you can ideally weave in some “Why us?” details. Because it’s so short, the key will be to briefly share the origin story for the major you’re considering. Here’s a guide to the “Why major” essay.
Example:
Why Electrical Engineering?
My decision to major in Electrical Engineering was inspired by my desire to improve security through technology. When I lived in Mexico, my father’s restaurant security system lacked the ability to protect our property from robbers, who would break in multiple times a year. Thanks to the influence of my cousin, who now studies Autonomous Systems, I developed an interest in electrical engineering. I am inspired to not only improve my father’s security system, but contributing to security innovations for larger companies and perhaps, one day, national security. (89 words)
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Here’s a simple outline for this essay:
Why Electrical Engineering?
Thesis: I want to improve security through technology
Robbers broke into dad’s restaurant
Cousin taught me about Autonomous Systems
In the future: work with large companies or on national security
Note that your thesis statement should probably be clear and it could come either at the beginning, middle, or end.
How to Write MIT Supplemental Essay prompt #2
We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do simply for the pleasure of it.
(225 words or fewer)
Picking a Topic:
Ideally, your topic will be something that is actually fun. (Not something that, for example, is actually academic that you’re trying to justify as also being fun.) Take a look at your brainstorming work and see if there are any random/odd/fun parts of you that haven’t yet made their way into your application. Past students have written about geocaching, doing impersonations, and “Jedi Juggling Club,” among others.
Here’s an example we love, though since MIT dropped the word count this year, you’d have a bit less space to work with.
Example:
One activity which I simply do for the pleasure of it is playing cricket–not on a proper team or league, but casually along with friends and family.
Though I have enjoyed competitively participating in soccer, ultimate frisbee, and table tennis in the past, the lack of competitive nature in cricket is refreshing, especially because I am not that great of a player. The whole playing experience with other casual cricket players is more enjoyable: Though the goal is to win, we can learn and grow without the stress of losing an “important” match.
The connectivity with others is another reason I enjoy being a casual cricket player. I usually play with my family, and have taught many friends with non-cricketing backgrounds how to play. One time, my friends and I were playing at a local park, and a family of three generations joined us: representative of how casual cricket is welcoming to all.
The accessibility of the sport in my backyard, where I can pick up the bat and hit a tennis ball around during an evening walk, and sometimes having my parents bowl at me/me bowl at them, shows the spontaneous fun that I can have at any time.
As someone who likes to watch cricket, Indian cricket specifically, it is enjoyable to be able to casually play a sport that many in the US have never properly experienced. It also connects to my identity as an Indian who grew up with stories of “gully cricket.” (248 words)
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Tips & Analysis:
Showcase something new about your personality. Use this prompt as a way to showcase a part of your personality that you haven’t been able to express elsewhere in your MIT application. For example, we love how this essay is about an activity that likely didn’t make the student’s activities list (since he only plays cricket for fun), but also how he’s able to find joy in playing cricket, even if he’s not “great” at it (#vulnerability).
Give specific examples to show why you like the activity. These details allow admission officials to learn about your way of viewing the world. So, don’t hold back on that color and specificity. Share details about how you became interested in the activity, what keeps you interested, and how the activity influences your connection to other aspects of your life. In this example, notice how the author weaves multiple stories together with specific examples that give the essay a nice flow from start to finish.
Connect it to your intellectual curiosity. MIT is looking for intellectually curious students. So, even though this prompt asks about an activity you do purely for pleasure, it helps if you can at least hint at how the experience of it also sparks your mind to think deeply in other ways—like how this student ties his cricket play to the benefit of not always being competitive and finding connection with others.
Here are two more great examples we encourage you to read for inspiration (though, again, the second one is a little over the current word count).
Examples:
I love collecting, whether it be playing cards or arrowheads, my most significant collection. I first started my arrowhead collection after a trip to an ancient adobe village in Sonoma, California. I was fascinated by the idea that ancient peoples had walked where I walked and had a life where I was standing. When I arrived, I realized how the stories behind the bricks of the buildings tell of the past and can predict the future, as trends repeat themselves.
This principle of trends repeating themselves is important to me, and I strive to apply it through volunteering with the Smithsonian, transcribing and editing historical documents to preserve them digitally for future generations. By securing a moment in time, I can help protect future communities from mistakes of the past.
Now I seek out other places and stories that document moments in time, like a Boomtown from the gold-rush era in Jamestown, California. Arrowheads are often difficult to source; my collection of 13 represent my strategy of remembrance and preservation. (170 words)
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Beyond my busy life at school, I compose and perform music as a way to channel my creativity to escape the rigidity of my course curriculum through improvisation.
When I was eight years old — after years of school-mandated recorder classes — I begged my mum to let me graduate to the clarinet. I spent hours each day practising scales and climbing the grade ladder in Classical music.
But I found myself gravitating towards the sounds of jazz — and the opportunities for improvisation that the genre provided. Through secondary school, I continued practising my favourite jazz short pieces, eventually performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue which I played for my mother’s birthday.
Entering GCSE Music, I found a perfect opportunity to combine my talents as a musician with my passion for creating new things as a programmer. Specifically, I spent two years developing a piano-clarinet jazz duo that I premiered for the class at the end of the course.
More recently, then, I have moved beyond the clarinet to begin composing music myself — not only jazz, but also electronic music that I can bring to life on my computer. Combining Icelandic vocals and California drum solos, I aim to create music that stretches across genre and geography.
Whether I actually release anything, of course, a different story. But as I prepare to ship off to college, I look forward to the chance to find new collaborators that can both teach me new skills as a composer and play alongside me in the ensemble. (250 words)
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How to Write MIT Supplemental Essay prompt #3
How has the world you come from—including your opportunities, experiences, and challenges—shaped your dreams and aspirations? (225 words or fewer)
One approach here is to treat this essentially as a “community essay,” with some focus going to how your community/ies have shaped your dreams and aspirations. Or uou can write about an extracurricular activity, a volunteer experience, your family—or something else entirely. The possibilities are pretty vast in terms of potential topics. That can feel empowering, or overwhelming. If you want to try the community approach and need help brainstorming a topic, check out our full guide on how to write the community essay for an in-depth explanation of how to approach this type of essay, and some quick tips you can follow after reading this great example essay.
Example:
My world is at once expansively big and recognisably small. Coming from a multiethnic European family, I’ve spent my childhood encountering an array of rich cultures across the continent and beyond. I learned about the Jewish holiday of love “Tu B'Av” to bring me closer to my extended family living in Tel Aviv. Further north, I joined my relatives in Ukraine to celebrate the Orthodox new year two weeks after all of my friends back home.
Even in London, my world feels stretched across neighbourhoods, zones, and ethnic traditions. Whether it is making sense of the Islamic conception of peace on a school trip to our local mosque or losing myself in Caribbean music at the Notting Hill Carnival, I have learned to see the world through my city and the 300 languages spoken in it.
Yet my world is also one of close-knit communities. As a volunteer, I have developed close relationships with a range of students who see me as a mentor in their ambitions to become a video game developer. Among my school friends, I have built a family of bandmates and co-conspirators that come together every week to make new music, work on joint programming projects, and train in Jiu-Jitsu. And in my actual family, I spend my nights playing geography games and attending cooking schools where we learn new cuisines that we can incorporate into our meals at home.
Together, the big and the small combine to make my world one of exploration and intimacy. (250 words)
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Tips + Analysis
Show what makes your place in this “world” unique. Many students may come from the same “world” as you. So your goal here is to show the reader how your place in it is different. Notice, for example, how this author weaves together multiple parts of her identity to show her unique perspective within her family, city, and the world at large.
Give examples of how you give and receive from your community. The community essay is important in helping admission officials see how you may fit in on their campus community. So think of this as an opportunity to show how you not only learn from your community but also contribute to it. In this example, we learn that the author is not only an active member of her communities through volunteer work and group activities, but she’s also curious about learning from the people whose identities are different from her own.
Don’t forget to show how the community “has shaped your dreams and aspirations.” That’s an important part of the prompt, so be intentional in not only showing what you’ve learned from your community and how it’s helped you grow as a person and leader, but also how it’s shaped your vision of your future. This student, for example, ends with that insight—showing how the interactions and experiences she’s had “combine” to shape her world into one of “exploration and intimacy.”
Here are two more great examples of essays we encourage you to read for inspiration (though—this feels like a trend—they’re both slightly over word count).
Examples:
As I have had a knack for fixing errors on computers for friends and family, building a computer was a valuable experience that has reaffirmed lessons and my values.
I started with the motherboard, following unvaried instructions, which compares to how I’ve bettered my understanding of the strictness of Hindi grammar. I have learned all the endless grammar rules in Hindi in a monotonous but necessary process, which has taught me patience.
Working on the heat sink has taught me to maintain calmness and patience during the mentally challenging troubleshooting phase of programming.
The graphics card reminds me of my clarity of my thought process in life–-my long-standing ambition for a degree in computer science and clarity in my desire to contribute to non-profit organizations, such as Gurukul.
The Wi-Fi adapter, and network connectivity, connects to how I have built a strong connection to my Indian heritage through learning about festivals such as Diwali, experiencing the rich cultural diversity, and learning the history of India’s fight for independence.
RAM, the working memory of a computer, functions efficiently like how I process information and retain the most important, and overall have developed effective learning techniques–such as making sure to understand the derivation of an equation rather than mindlessly memorizing an equation.
I have an understanding of hardware–having built a computer–but have reaffirmed my zest for a future in software in computer science through my various experiences. (235 words)
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I come from a world of knowledge, expertise, and wonder. My dad is a software engineer who has spent his life building code. A devout mathematician, he has inspired my love of math and analytical thinking, helping me think beyond the material at hand to the underlying concepts. My mom, on the other hand, teaches me to follow my dreams. So when I took an enlightening summer course on engineering at Vanderbilt, she immediately began to support me in my aspirations and helped me identify programs and resources in the engineering realm. In a world where new crises seem to arise without warning, I see engineering as a way to help protect society using intricate processes.
Of the many college-level courses I have taken, my favorite has been a course on Materials Engineering. I particularly appreciated the applications of math and the state-of-the-art lab tour. I got to observe some real-life research projects and equipment, which included touring a military helicopter. I also participated in a final lab project, which tasked me with discovering the reason behind the catastrophic failure of a bolt and determining how much stress or strain it would have taken for the failure to occur, helping me to apply my math knowledge in the real world.
Engineering has numerous possibilities. Driven by the values instilled by my parents, I hope to further the field and find innovative ways to help and protect people as a materials or nuclear engineer. (243 words)
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How to Write MIT Supplemental Essay prompt #4
MIT brings people with diverse backgrounds together to collaborate, from tackling the world’s biggest challenges to lending a helping hand. Describe one way you have collaborated with others to learn from them, with them, or contribute to your community together. (225 words or fewer)
This prompt can be a great chance to talk about whichever extracurricular activity or community service project you’ve been most involved in, but notice that the prompt specifies things like “diverse backgrounds” and “collaboration.” Because of that, you’ll want to make sure whatever experiences/actions you discuss allow you to directly discuss collaboration (ideally with people from diverse backgrounds) and how that collaboration allowed you to directly contribute to your community, while also expanding your understanding.
To help you brainstorm ideas for this prompt, here’s a step-by-step guide we put together for this one based on two strategies we recommend: the uncommon connections technique and the Powerwall structure.
Give it a read and see if you can:
a) Come up with 1-2 ideas that may work (making sure to look for community contributions that involved collaborating with others, ideally from diverse backgrounds).
b) Pick which structure might work better.
Bonus points: Spend 10-15 minutes mapping out a basic outline based on either the uncommon connections technique or the Powerwall structure.
We don’t have an example that hits all the elements above, but check out this example, and the tips and analyses below for how it could be tweaked to fit.
Example:
From a young age, teaching has been my way to give back to my community, whether it’s my immediate family or neighbours on the opposite edge of London.
My first teaching experience took place when I was 10. My five-year-old sister took a principled moral stand against homework by getting under the table and refusing to do her maths additions tables. After almost an hour of negotiations, our mother admitted defeat, so I jumped in to assist her. My sister and I worked patiently through the tables, finding new tricks to help her master the relationship between the numbers. And I found myself genuinely thrilled to have helped her — and my mother — in that difficult moment.
I have been teaching regularly ever since. At Imperial College’s programming club, I volunteered to help show young people the creative side of coding through graphical programming. At people’s homes, I have adapted to people’s needs, from teaching Computer GCSE to helping a group of four girls make a moving Raspberry Pi robot. And during lockdown, I offered free Python coding classes to kids of essential workers. In each, I not only provided support to students to complete their stated assignments. I also found myself learning from the students along the way, helping me to find novel solutions to my own challenges as a programmer. It is this two-way exchange between teacher and student that I find so rewarding in this contribution to my community. (241 words)
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Tips + Analysis
Demonstrate a different set of values. MIT is giving you lots of opportunities to show different sides of yourself. That also means multiple chances to show the diversity of your values. Since this prompt is narrowly asking for a specific way you’ve impacted your community, you may not have a ton of options for topics. But you can look for ways to expand on the values you’ve already shared. How? Check out this Values Exercise and scan your essays for the values that are already coming through, making a list as you go. Are some missing, even important ones? If so, look for ways to demonstrate those here. For example, this student was able to inject some humor in their description of their little sister taking “a principled, moral stand against homework” by planting herself under the table and refusing to come out—maybe they weren’t able to smuggle that value in elsewhere?
Explain how your collaboration partner(s) was(were) different from you. Were you working with peers of the same age but vastly different backgrounds? Did you find opportunities to collaborate with unusual partners, like special-needs students or adults in a different country? Make sure the reader will understand the differences involved, and if they’re not obvious, make the space to explain what made your partners different, and what you gained from working with them. For example, if this student were writing to this prompt, they may have expounded on the “two-way exchange between teacher and student,” using that as the basis of their collaboration and showing how these students’ input and involvement led to “novel solutions to [the student’s] own challenges as a programmer.]”
Show the opportunities and obstacles of the collaboration. MIT admission officials want to see your collaboration skills in action. And when you’re collaborating with someone with a different point of view or background, things don’t always go smoothly. But it’s the friction that can create new solutions while also leading to personal growth. Your goal in this essay is to show both sides—so make sure to note your contributions to the collaboration, but also ways you grew from learning from others. If this student were to tweak this essay to fit the prompt, they may have, say, shared details on a challenging yet beneficial collaboration with a fellow programming tutor or an improvisation that arose from ongoing conversations with an argumentative student.
How to Write MIT Supplemental Essay prompt #5
How did you manage a situation or challenge that you didn’t expect? What did you learn from it? (225 word or fewer)
Picking a Topic:
Essentially, MIT wants to see how you solve problems. Brainstorm a list of challenges you’ve overcome and times things didn’t go according to plan.
Consider the following:
The “Powerwall structure” can work really well for this essay, since you don’t have to have solved the problem in order to write about it.
This is a chance to show a side of yourself the admissions counselors haven’t seen yet. Read through the rest of your application and see if any activity or experience is missing. In most cases, something went wrong at some point, and that can be your topic.
Finally: Most students write about something going wrong in a robotics competition (“Our robot broke!”), so we recommend thinking of other options.
Now, create a basic outline that answers:
What was the problem?
Why was it a big deal?
What did you do about it?
How were you crucial to helping solve it or what gifts or talents were you able to bring to the situation?
How did it turn out? Were there any larger impacts or lessons learned?
Let’s check out an example of this structure coming to life (though, since MIT dropped its word count slightly this year from 250 to 225 words, you’d have a bit less room to work with).
Example:
Off the crack of the bat I tracked the first two hops, but when I looked down, all I saw was a crooked finger.
It was the game before CIF, our year to take the championship that had eluded us the year prior. I had received Honorable Mention All-League and Rookie of the Year awards my sophomore year, and this year was my time to help break school history.
But a misplaced pebble guaranteed I wouldn’t have the opportunity to live my decade long goal of winning CIF. During the first playoff game, I simply watched from the dugout, restricted by my cast. I felt useless.
In the next game, I completely altered my gameplan; I talked to our coach about my helping to manage the team. I traded my glove and bat for a clipboard and pencil, keeping score and tracking pitch counts; I used the data to alter defensive formations based on opponents’ batting tendencies and advise on pitching strategy, allowing us to conserve our ace for the championship. I applied my problem solving skills and led my team from the dugout.
Our team broke school history for the second year in a row, making it to the CIF championship, but fell two runs short of victory. While I could think “What if I had been playing?”I don’t have to, because I know I played a valuable role and was just as much of a threat at left bench as I was making diving stops at second.
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Tips + Analysis
Let’s take a look at how this student used the structure outlined above.
What was the problem? Although the crooked- finger image is a bit graphic, it makes it easy to see this student’s problem. Using a quick descriptive anecdote like this student did can be an effective way to set the scene and get to the juicier parts of this prompt: your actions. Right before you get there, though, let us know:
Why was it a big deal? Raise the stakes. In the example above, the author mentioned a championship and school history. Providing context for your challenge (what you had done to build up to this moment, the investments other people made in getting to this moment, etc.) will help the reader care.
What did you do about it? Specifics, specifics, specifics. This student shares high-impact actions (tracking pitch counts, using data to alter defensive formations) and does the work for the reader, naming the higher-level skills required (problem solving and leadership).
How were you crucial to helping solve it? This student doesn’t answer the question directly, but it’s clear that his unique circumstance—a player thrust into a different role—gave him the opportunity to leverage his skills (analyzing data on baseball strategy). If your prior experience (maybe taking a summer course on using Excel) helped you adapt on the fly or overcome a challenge (maybe by creating a spreadsheet to analyze how time of day impacted student conflict during class change time), share it!
How did it turn out? Were there any larger impacts or lessons learned? Leave the reader with a satisfying conclusion, even if you haven’t fully resolved the challenge. If you’re still working to overcome that challenge, tell us how. And if you learned something valuable along the way, like this student’s new comfort with having a positive impact regardless of his role, don’t hesitate to share it explicitly.
How to Write MIT Supplemental Essay prompt #6
Please list up to four activities—if you have more than four, choose the ones that are most important to you. (40 words or less per activity description)
Simple.
Pick your top four activities (from your Common App list).
Write 40-word descriptions. Our tips for the Activities List live here, and apply them to this writing as well.
Examples:
Citizen Scientist Marine Protected Area Watch
Monitor local Marine Protected beaches for illegal activity; coordinate with Park Rangers and fellow Citizen Scientists to deter visitors from abusing the beach habitats and creatures; complete surveys on activity at the beaches: published data 15 times for academic studies (40 words)
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2019 Captain; starter MHS Varsity Baseball
Starter at 2nd or 3rd base; bat 2nd in lineup; made school history by making 2017 CIF semi-finals, 2018 CIF finals; 2017 Rookie of the Year Award, 2017 All-Frontier League Honorable Mention; to be Captain in 2019 Season (38 words)
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Educator Heal the Bay’s Pier Aquarium
Teach and engage in discussion with guests at touch tanks, shark tanks, and whale exhibit; coordinate whale watching events, encourage ocean respect and environmentalism; received Dolphin Pin for 150 hours of service (32 words)
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Starting Driver MHS Water Polo
Starter, sprinter; 2018 Conejo Classic Tournament Champions, 2018 Oxnard Tournament Champions; 2nd Team All-Frontier League 2017 Award, 2016 MVP of JV team, Frontier League Champions 2015-2018; club season: start for S&S Bruin Water Polo - driver, compete in local tournaments (40 words)
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Tips + Analysis
For a comprehensive list of tips and ideas, head over to our full activities list writing guide.
Most importantly:
Emphasize tangible, measurable impact.
Use active verbs.
Use lists and incomplete sentences
Cut extra words by using more specific words (i.e., “told people about” → advertised, “came up with” → brainstormed).
How to Write MIT Supplemental Essay prompt #7
Optional:
No application can meet the needs of every individual. If there is significant information that you were not able to include elsewhere in the application, you may include it here. (Many students will leave this section blank—and that’s okay.)
Please note, we may not be able to access all links you share. If you have supplemental materials you would like to submit, please refer to our optional creative portfolios. (350 words or fewer)
This is basically the Additional Info section of your Common App. You can find a complete guide for that section here.
Special thanks to Ameer for his contributions to this blog post.
Ameer is a freelance writer who specializes in writing about college admissions and career development. Prior to freelancing, Ameer worked for three years as a college admissions consultant at a Hong Kong-based education center, helping local high school students prepare and apply for top colleges and universities in the US. He has a B.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Chicago and an M.A. in Spanish Linguistics from UCLA. When he’s not working, Ameer loves traveling, weight lifting, writing, reading, and learning foreign languages. He currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand.
Top values: Growth / Diversity / Empathy
