Unless itʻs part of a supplement donʻt send any more letters. They advise not to. Just do what you can so that the FUN form is merely a cherry on top of your application
If they offer a supplement of some kind for deferred students, by all means the OP and other deferred students should take advantage of that as far as possible. If you wind up waitlisted, they will accept additional letters–at least they did a few years ago.
In chancing a student with a superb academic and STEM EC profile, I believe that it is important to understand that MIT does not simply look for the 1500-2000 students with the best record so far. So then, I think it is important to understand why this is. I would like to offer some informed conjecture, and hope that it will not be regarded as “off topic” on a chances thread. For one thing, I think it would be useful to the OP and to future applicants to understand why they cannot sail in on the academic record alone. For another, I think it would be quite limiting to offer chances, but not to explain the reasoning behind the chances. So here is my take on it:
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Students in different regions of the country have different levels of access to opportunities for advanced education and participation in high level STEM ECs. While I recognize that students in some generally under-served communities do have these opportunities or make them for themselves, the access is variable, overall. It is reasonable for MIT to look for students who have maxed-out the opportunities that they had or could create, even if this does not yield as impressive a profile overall.
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MIT Admissions wants to create a community among the undergraduates. They have a vision as to the specific nature of the community. In my opinion, if MIT admitted only the applicants who looked most like proto-geniuses, taking item 1) into account, the students would still form a community. People tend to do that.
(Continued in a follow-up message.)
Then to understand why MIT does not just take the apparently smartest students available, and thus to understand the chances of a student who is very, very bright (like the OP), one needs to understand what bright undergrads offer to MIT as an institution (separately from what they offer to the student community).
a) Bright undergrads often participate in research. MIT especially encourages this. In some cases, they may contribute significantly to the output of a research lab. It is great when that happens; but it is comparatively rare, even given their very strong talents. More frequently, undergraduates appear as co-authors of publications, but their contribution is less significant than contributions from grad students or post-docs. They may serve as teaching fellows (or whatever the MIT designation is).
However, fundamentally, the stature of MIT as a research institution does not depend much on its undergraduates. Harvey Mudd and Williams have an undergraduate students body with a net intellectual strength that is not so very different from that of the undergraduate student body at MIT. But if you look at the rankings of the top N research institutions in the world, you will need to search well below MIT to find either of them. Obviously, they have different missions from MIT’s. But this is just to say that great undergrads will not propel an institution to the top within the research community, even though the great undergrads make for a great undergrad experience.
b) A few undergrads have helped the overall academic reputation of MIT. Richard Feynman comes to mind as an example. But if an applicant is not likely to become one of the top 10 American scientists ever, she/he is unlikely to make an impact like that.
c) MIT’s institutional interests are well served by having bright undergraduates, but they do not have to skim off the very brightest in the country to meet their goals in undergraduate admissions. The faculty will be very sharp and very involved in their work. They will appreciate having high-caliber undergrads, but good enough is good enough. Some faculty may derive some small benefit from having undergraduate researchers in their labs, because some of the funding agencies are invested in keeping the scientific pipeline open, by spending some of their funds on undergraduate research support. This might enable an MIT faculty member to move across the line from n research grants to n + 1; but that is probably a rare situation.
Since on CC one frequently sees MIT applicants who have wonderful academic and STEM EC profiles who are ultimately not admitted to MIT, I think that it is essential for “chancers” and “chances” threads to offer some explanation of the superficially inexplicable. As a scientist, I can’t just say “Yes, maybe, or no” in response to questions about chances, without also saying “why,” at a deeper level than simply saying “They don’t just take the top N applicants, on the established academic and EC record.” The above is my attempt at an explanation. I hope it will not be deemed off-topic.
I wish the OP and others all the best with their college applications. I hope and believe that they will wind up in a university that will serve them very well, whether it is MIT (fingers crossed) or another college.
Hey I have question regarding sending in extra material. I wonder how that is done because there is no option for that on the Mymit portal. Could you tell me the steps to take in order to send in extra material.
Where you deferred? What kind of extra material are you trying to send?
@iamed23 FUN form generally isn’t for submitting additional material if that’s what you meant, but if it’s something new and important you can always just email the admissions office. I emailed them about doing well at DECA a few weeks after applying EA and they said they added it to my file.
Curious to know where you landed
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
The OP is long gone, so I am closing the thread.