Everyone (on this site and elsewhere) seems to think that MIT requires one STEM rec and one Humanities rec. However, on their website it says that it is not a hard requirement. Any thoughts on submitting 2 STEM recs to MIT?
Consider it a hard requirement.
I am at a loss why any applicant to a college with a single digit acceptance rate would not want to put together as strong an application as possible, including anything “recommended.” I would imagine the vast majority of MIT applicants would be very happy to send 2 STEM recs if allowed. But admissions still wants to see a non-STEM side of the applicant. Plus MIT does have some fairly extensive HASS graduation requirements.
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Agreeing with @skieurope and adding that at least one of the reasons that it is not a "hard requirement is that some applicants may not have the option of a humanities LoR (in some countries you are streamed at 15 or 16; for ex, in the UK many STEM-bound students stop taking humanities subjects after the GCSE exams).
Moreover, for MIT in particular there is an explicit value on humanities. If humanities are so unhappy for you that you don’t have a good option for somebody to write an LOR, you might not be as happy at MIT as you think.
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Thanks. Are there any other top schools that have this requirement besides MIT and Caltech?
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MIT has had the requirement of one STEM recommendation and one non-STEM recommendation for a very, very long time.
In addition, MIT has (as far as I know) recently become one of the most difficult academically in terms of the incoming freshman class: the latest Common Data Set reports 100% are now top 10% of their class (if reported), 100% have SAT Math > 700 (although usually the median and mode is 800), the 25th/75th percentiles for SAT are now 1510/1570 (730 ERW+780 Math is 25th percentile, 780 ERW+800 Math is 75th percentile).
Not only do student have to do extremely well in STEM, they have be excellent students.
I like to say elsewhere, “One trick ponies do horribly with regard to MIT Admissions” – so the breadth (and of course quality) of recommendations should reflect that MIT takes all academics seriously.
If you want to submit recommendations beyond the one STEM and one non-STEM, you may submit supplemental recommendations (which MIT allows – providing they say something different than what other recommendations say).
Truth be told, when I was applying to MIT, while I “officially” asked only my Physics teacher (with whom I had a really good relationship and he named me to captain the Physics Olympics team and was the sponsor for my club a few years before, plus he was directing my self-studying of college-level physics) and my French/German teacher (who was the language department head and oversaw the school’s tutoring program), when other teachers found out I was applying to MIT, my Math/Calculus teacher and Caltech trained Chemistry teacher wrote supplemental recommendations on their own initiative.
Just wanted to post an update on this in case anyone was interested. Kiddo applied RD to MIT with one STEM rec and one humanities rec. Accepted and attending. Good luck to all future aspirants of MIT. Great school with even greater people.
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Congratulations.
Congratulations!
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