As a Chinese American woman I experienced this all the time. When I was little, my parents pushed me to study math and the sciences. I happened to be good at and enjoyed the attention that I got from being good in the STEM fields. As I grew older though, I grew tired of how people who did not even know me assumed that I was good at STEM. I started to realize people were categorizing me, my interests and career goals before even getting to know me.

My first year of high school, I joined the Service-Learning Team, a group that spent Tuesday afternoons at local elementary schools leading enrichment activities and spent Thursday afternoons discussing the socio-political components of our relationship with the students: underfunding of private schools, the cycle of poverty, and so on. I strongly believed in the mission of the group, but the work itself wasn’t for me—I wasn’t very good at arts and crafts or soccer, and I didn’t have a natural rapport with young children. So I made a decision that would ultimately come to occupy the majority of my free time in the next four years: I met with the director of the program, our school’s ethics teacher, and suggested we expand our outreach. In other words, I saw a missing piece, and I suggested how to fix it.

There is for sure one thing in common you hold with a lot of the top students in your high school (amongst the other obvious ones like you are all human go to the same high school, and other small obvious things), you all probably want to go to a good college!

Human beings are storytellers. Look around and you’ll see stories everywhere. Game of Thrones? A story. Call of Duty? A story. That huge billboard you drive by every day? The conversations you have with your friends? The warnings you tell your children? Stories. We make sense of the world and our own lives through narrative. Every experience that we have as human beings becomes integrated into our personal stories. The ones that we remember well, or that led to something significant, become part of our life story.

Holistic admissions: What does that really mean?

Community service is a great way to help others and improve your local community. It can be an avenue to build on or develop new skills, feel great about your contributions, and develop interests and passions into tangible results. From a college-admissions perspective, admissions officers want to see that you take deep dives into your interests (that relevantly have a community service aspect) and are able to create an impact in your community and even beyond. Today, we’ll talk about how you should go about thinking about your community service.

In most top colleges’ supplemental essay portion, the first prompt is usually the “why us?” question. Although it sounds like a question that colleges use to flatter themselves, what are college admissions committees actually trying to know about students through this question?

My journey to MIT began at age 16 while in high school in Jamaica, where I was born and raised. Through random circumstances, I had discovered MIT online and the school immediately captivated me. At that moment I decided “I’m going to get into MIT.”