<p>Ok… a few more questions, guys, in addition to the ones above ^ (do they ever stop?).</p>
<p>Would MIT want me to attach to my application my results for my end of year examinations at high school. Here in the state of Victoria every single student must sit the Victorian Certificate of Education exams; so is it recommended that I attach my results for these exams?</p>
<p>Another exam I sat this year is the Undergraduate Medicine and Health Sciences Admissions Test (UMAT). The UMAT is a test sat by all students in Australia and New Zealand who wish to study medicine or health sciences at Australian or New Zealand universities and it assesses three things: logical reasoning, non-verbal reasoning and emotional intelligence. Would it be helpful if I sent MIT my results for this test as well?</p>
<p>Does MIT require that you send them the UMAT results?<br>
No</p>
<p>Will they look at them if you send them in, particularly if there is enough information to effectively interpret the results?
Yes.</p>
<p>Will sending them in help you?
Well that is entirely up to you. If you have the highest recorded score in the history of Australasia, then you would be foolish not to send them along. If your score demonstrates little beyond the ability to sign your name, then I would omit them. Anything in the middle is your judgment call. MIT will see a variety of standardized test scores that they know how to interpret. You have to ask yourself whether and how this score will improve on their understanding of you as a parson.</p>
<p>It seems that the interview is an important part of the application, but if I can’t get an interview, would it hurt my application, seeing that I feel that there would be an extra part of my character that I can show only through an interview?</p>
<p>I’d be curious if you cannot get an interview.
The EC directory lists interviewers in every state excepting Tassie. I do not know where you are based, but there is a good chance that there is an interviewer near you. If however, you do happen to live in say Hobart, then there are a couple of possibilities. The Regional Coordinator for Australia can arrange for a telephone interview, but for obvious reasons these are inferior to the face to face variety. Alternatively, the RC can request that your interview be waived, at which point the lack of an interview should not hurt you in the slightest.</p>
<p>If you have any other questions about the interview, please do not hesitate to ask.</p>
<p>To the best of my knowledge you can’t. It is not a public list.</p>
<p>For obvious reasons, applicants are not allowed to pick their EC. When you apply, you will be assigned an EC via your my MIT account. Simply contact your EC and have the interview.</p>
<p>Should MIT’s assignment software screw up, simply contact the admissions office, and explain why you need to change your EC. I should note that the assignment software makes mistakes very rarely but far more often for international applicants than for domestic applicants. For example, I am personally aware of one case last year where a southeast asian applicant who was attending a boarding school in Europe, who was assigned a southeast asian EC rather than a European one.</p>
<p>Don’t worry. Enjoy the interview.
-Mikalye (an international RC)</p>
<p>Well, now that the application’s out, I have a few extra questions!</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=MIT Application Section Four]
List Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or A-level or O-Level courses taken or under way. (If you have taken the test, please list date and score.)
[/QUOTE]
</p>
<p>Should I list subjects I’m currently studying in my high school course (Victorian Certificate of Education) or are the spaces strictly for AP, IB and A or O-levels?</p>
<p>
[QUOTE=MIT Application Section Two]
Summer Activities (reading, relaxing, camp, travel, summer school, volunteer work, research, etc.). List your most recent summer activity first.
[/QUOTE]
</p>
<p>I’m not quite sure what happens in the US, but at my school we have an outdoor education program that runs camps in Autumn and Spring holidays. Do American schools have school camps as well or should I list my school camps in the spaces offered?</p>
<p>Finally, self-reported coursework on the application is to be completed by students in the US or US school systems, but must the pdf file containing the secondary school report be filled out by my guidance counselor? If so, how should he fill out the form, as at my school I don’t believe we have GPAs or class rankings?</p>
<p>OK, to respond to a number of points brought up, from the perspective of another Australian.
Guidance counselor should fill out the documentation and supply relevant details appropriate to your high school, as well as some sort of explanation of the system. Many top schools will have generic forms that cover all the required details for understanding the results.
List your High School subjects as relevant.
Are those camps compulsory for your school? If they are then do not list them, but if they are of your own initiative/hard-to-get-into, they definitely put them down.</p>
<p>As an aside, MIT accepts probably 1-2 Australians a year. SATs do matter - I haven’t heard of an Australian getting into MIT without something like 2350+ in recent years, although obviously if you have fantastic extracurriculars that will not matter as much. Of course, that means if there are stronger candidates from your school who are also Australian, then it becomes very difficult to gain admission. On the flip-side, because of there being so few aussies getting in, financial aid is entirely sufficient. </p>
<p>Supplemental recs are permissible, but rarely helpful unless they come from a very special source and shed light of some particularly important aspects of your character. All recs are important (teacher recs in particular are important, and to a lesser extent counselor rec), but do not get more recs for the sake of getting them…</p>
<p>Also of note, “MVP of the worst soccer team in the school and a house cooking award” while unconventional, are not necessarily things you want to be talking about (particularly the ‘worst soccer team’ part) as they make come across as trivial and token.</p>
<p>In any case, what sort of SAT scores do you have, and what other colleges will you be applying to?</p>
<p>I got 2270 on the SAT I, but yet to do the SAT II.</p>
<p>The other schools I’m applying to are only those that offer engineering and financial aid for internationals.
ie, Stanford, Caltech, Cornell, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Penn, Yale</p>
<p>I’m considering my safeties to be the universities here in Australia.</p>
<p>Why not also Harvard; they offer engineering and generous fin-aid for internationals.</p>
<p>Also, you would be aware that aid for internationals at all of the institutions you listed, bar MIT/Princeton/Yale is limited, and thus your application will be read need-sensitive (if you need quite a bit of financial aid, your chances of getting in unfortunately decrease substantially, especially if there are others applying without need). Stanford and Caltech are particularly tight regarding funding for non-Americans. (Further, if you apply ED/EA somewhere then it’d be very likely that your application is deferred to the RD pool, as they will want to consider your finances against that of all other international applicants)</p>
<p>i disagree with aussie flux
i got a fairly average sat score and i got in.
sats are only worthy if u get a perfect score or near perfect…otherwise they are usually overlooked if u get over 2250.</p>
<p>It matters, but as every applications is treated in a holistic fashion, it would matter more/less in some cases. For example (and this is 100% true) a Puerto Rican friend of mine got into MIT Sloan with a 700 in Math II and 550 in Chem. Of course, they took in consideration the level of her country’s education, her actual high school grades, essays and recs.
It really depends on the country. This might sound racist to some, but my country’s education is nowhere near Asia’s or Europe’s level. In fact, for international students of those areas the SAT my weight more than my area.</p>