I love meeting random people
This is part of a series of MIT application essays submitted by students who were later admitted to the Institute. The following prompts are from the 2013-14 admissions season.
Dinner in a Japanese household
I only got to see Shoko and Kazuo twice while I was living in Yokohama, Japan, since I spent most of my weekends exploring other parts of the country. Still, those were two of the most memorable days of my summer.
Dancing after a double surgery
This is part of a series of MIT application essays submitted by students who were later admitted to the Institute. The following prompts are from the 2016-17 admissions season.
Making change in Paris
The morning after Bastille Day, the French national holiday, found me walking down the Rue Rambuteau in Paris. I was on the way to a boulangerie that boasted of having the best baguette in the city.
Pokémon and robots
After over a month of working at Yoshimoto Robotics in the heart of the great metropolis of Tokyo, my life had become a routine. Everything changed when Pokémon Go took Japan by storm.
Student evolved into adult
I settled into a routine: I’d wake up, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, eat dinner, shower, sleep, and repeat. I found it increasingly difficult to go out and experience the city. Enter Pokemon Go.
How to prevent street harassment
How many ukuleles did you have? Two? Why didn’t you limit yourself to just one? If you replace “ukulele” with “drink,” you get the usual slew of questions women are asked after sexual assault.
Freshman year reflections
If there’s one thing that MIT has taught me, it’s to not plan too much.
Eva Breitenbach
In the last week of November, I went out to dinner with my boyfriend. We got in a huge fight, and I woke up the next morning and couldn’t move half my face.
Reflections of a BSU Co-Chair
Every BSU Co-Chair had at least one major innovation during their tenure, and I had no idea what mine would be. Then came the wave of events across college campuses such as the University of Missouri, Yale University, and Ithaca College.
Haley Cope
I felt alone and ostracized. Not only did my social group fall apart, but my family fell apart, too. For the first time, I started feeling suicidal.
Anita Horn
I was fine until I was a teenager. That was when I first started feeling like I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t measuring up. I went to college and moved to Denver. I struggled with feeling unstable.
Seeking the culture in agriculture
Last semester, the freshmen in 12.000 (Solving Complex Problems) embarked on a mission to feed the entire world. Well, we didn’t quite accomplish that, but we did learn a lot about food security in the face of a changing climate.
Sathya Silva
In my youth, I was happy and outgoing. As an undergrad, I found my place in the world — as a pilot.
Rosalind Picard
I’ve had three episodes of depression that stand out in my life. One was toward the end of my undergraduate career. I was an electrical engineering major at Georgia Tech. When people would take their minor classes in easy topics, I took nuclear astrophysics and stellar evolution. I was taking six EE and physics classes and doing several extracurricular activities. It was insane. I managed to finish number two in my class.
Michael McClellan
Editor’s Note: Portraits of Resilience is a photography and interview series by Prof. Daniel Jackson. Each installment consists of a portrait and a story, told in the subject’s own words, of how they found resilience and meaning in their life.
A voice for those who cannot speak
My mom crossed the border illegally 22 years ago. She was waiting to give birth in a hospital in Mexico when her sister picked her up and smuggled her across the border. My mom made it 30 minutes north of there, in the midst of birth pains, to a small town by the flat Southern Californian lands. I was born there. I, a U.S. high school valedictorian and member of the MIT Class of 2014, was born there in California. But our home was in Mexico.
Grace Taylor
Editor’s Note: Portraits of Resilience is a photography and interview series by Prof. Daniel Jackson. Each installment consists of a portrait and a story, told in the subject’s own words, of how they found resilience and meaning in their life.
Therese Henderson
Editor’s Note: Portraits of Resilience is a photography and narrative series by Prof. Daniel Jackson. Each installment consists of a portrait and a story, told in the subject’s own words, of how they found resilience and meaning in their life.
Behind the scenes at Flour
You could get all the education you could possibly imagine — a B.S., an M.S., an M.D. or even a Ph.D — and it wouldn’t prepare you for working in the food industry. One task isn’t necessarily more difficult than the other, but a majority of the skills required for one simply don’t carry over to the other. At least, that’s what I’ve found throughout my experiences working at the Flour Bakery and Cafe these past few months.