The Time When I Applied to MIT Media Lab
MIT Media Lab. Undoubtedly it is one of the most famous research laboratories in the world. I applied to the Media Lab and unfortunately got rejected, but I really hope that more people will consider applying to this school (and studying in the United States in general) so I’d like to share my story of applying here. Especially for Media Lab, once you get accepted all students get funding (tuition + stipend), so I honestly think people should take more chance and apply here. I should have challenged myself and done this years ago.
MIT Media Lab is not only an uncommon research institution but an uncommon graduate school to apply to as a student. To begin with, you don’t need any GRE scores. For international students, simply showing your IELTS score, letter of recommendations, statement of purpose, and a portfolio will enable you to apply for this school. For that matter, you don’t even need to be a college graduate.
Applying to Research Groups
When someone is applying to the Media Lab, you don’t apply to the Media Lab as a whole, but rather, you apply directly to the individual research groups within the Media Lab. Applicants can designate 3 up to research groups they are interested in applying. On a side note, although you pick 3 groups to apply, based on the applications, it seems that there is a situation which you get invited for an interview from other groups. (This happened to me)
Personal Statement
As someone who went through the admission process, I feel this is the first thing they look into. When I started preparing for the application, I wrote up my honest feelings and it ended up becoming a 10-page essay. I asked a friend of mine in the Media Lab to review it, and was told that it was too long, so managed to shrink it down to 3 pages. After that, I asked for some help from others to revise the document so that it will be more convincing. One of the major goals of this document, in my opinion, is to draw the attention of the PIs. To be honest, I feel I should have spent more time on this and crafted the document.
Personal Statement
For most of the research groups, they will ask you to submit a portfolio. For my case, I obtained a domain and added 9 projects. I added few projects to prove my technical proficiency and projects that show my unique background as someone coming from an advertising agency which demonstrates my creativity.
Letter of Recommendation
For MIT Media Lab, you need at least 3 and the maximum is 5. In my opinion, if circumstances allow, I think you should submit 5. For my case, I asked 1 letter from a professor who was my mentor while I was in undergrad and 2 from my bosses in my office, and finally 2 more from someone I closely worked with during my projects.
IELTS
I was exempt from this requirement since I graduated from a US institution for undergrad.
Interview
Going through the admission process, this was the most challenging part for me. After submitting my application, I was invited for an interview from 2 research groups. By taking a look at gradcafe, you can see that so many people are being rejected after going through the interview, and being invited to an interview is not any kind of guarantee of admission at this point. In fact, nothing is secure and it is still dangerous. The admission process isn’t even halfway through.
With that said, when I first got an email for an interview, I thought I need to “stand out” from the other applicants. So, I decided to focus on the fact that my background is in advertising, and decided to pitch 100 ideas during my interview. It was almost certain that people will ask me what I would be interested in doing at Media Lab, so I wanted to respond to this question by saying I came up with 100 things I’m interested in doing there.
Thanks to the 100 ideas I presented, the interview was actually a lot of fun. The interviewers liked it a lot and we had a great time discussing the idea. The interview was about an hour but I felt I could go on more.
After talking with the PI of the group, you will be assigned to talk with other members from that research group to see the “fit.” I ended up interviewing the students, engineers, and research scientists in each group. I think I ended up talking 1 hour each with 9 people. Cambridge and Tokyo is approximately in the opposite time zone so there were times where I had 2 interviews a day, one in early morning and another one in midnight. Despite the tough interview schedule, all of the interviews were fun.
Result
After finishing all of the interviews, I abruptly received an email from the admission office of Media Lab. It said that I was waitlisted. After a long wait, my hopes were shattered and I got a rejection email on May first notifying that I wasn’t able to move up the waitlist. During the interview, one of the PI told me that there is only 1 spot among 200 applicants, so it was a highly competitive situation, to begin with. After going through all of these interviews, the fact that I wasn’t accepted shows that I wasn’t what they were looking for. From what I heard, many people apply to the Media Lab number of times before getting accepted. The two friends at Media Lab whom I was in contact during the admission process were accepted to Media Lab after applying for 2 to 3 times. Unfortunately, my circumstances didn’t allow me to do this, so I decided to go to Harvard instead. When I emailed the PI that I will be going to Harvard, she told me that I should come take her class so that I can work together with her. One great thing about studying at Harvard is that they allow students to take classes at both Harvard and MIT. In that sense, by being able to study at Media Lab, my wishes were fulfilled by being accepted to Harvard.
I didn’t have the chance to get accepted, but I hope someone reading this will apply here and get accepted.
