Chance Me - MITES/MOSTEC/other prestigious summer programs

Pre-College Issues Summer Programs
1

Hi! I’m a junior this year, and I’m interested in applying to MITES/MOSTEC/other summer programs. Here’s my info. I have really good stats and classes, but I lack in awards.

GPA: 4 unweighted, 4.75 weighted

ACT Score: 36 total, 36 science, 36 reading, 35 math, 35 writing

I don’t have SAT IIs - I was planning to take them soon but COVID

Class Rank: I’m either 2nd or 3rd of 400 something

Past AP classes:
AP Calc BC (5), AP Chemistry (5), AP stats (5), AP English language (5), AP US History (4)

Past Dual Enrollment classes:
A lot of CS related classes at a local technical college, C# certificate and Java certificate

Current classes:
IB Bio HL (yr 1)
IB Phys HL (yr 1)
IB Spanish HL (yr 1)
IBWH HL (yr 1)
IB Lang/Lit SL (yr 1)
Linear Algebra at Georgia Tech (pretty good public college, I think they’re up there for best engineering public school)
Latin 3

I’m also taking the IB diploma

ECs:

  • Debate (I’m one of 6 kids on my debate team who participates in national tournaments), I’m not a leader in it cause there aren’t any
  • Academic Bowl - I’m not the captain because I’m not the oldest kid
  • Math Club - I’m not anything prestigious here, I just really like math
  • Robotics (FRC) - I don’t have an official role but I was one of 2 people who did all the programming for the robot (I did about half) this year, and one of the 2 people last year too
  • Contract Programming Work for a local clinic, I’ve donated over 75% of wages to charity, and had them matched
  • Soon to be a member of NHS hopefully - our school only allows juniors and up to join (as far as I know)

Awards:
Here’s a serious place I’m lacking. I don’t have any recent awards in stem - mainly cause our school doesn’t have any sort of individual teams or anything - we don’t have a competitive math team, or programming team, etc.

  • Honor Roll (lol)
  • Java and C# certificate from technical college
  • Robotics team made it to quarter finals of our division in FRC while I was one of the 2 programming people
  • Academic team made it to nationals in 9th grade - I was a major player on the team considering I was in 9th grade (yeah I know this is a stretch) and I was ranked 619/1602 individually at nationals (also a stretch)
  • My debate partner and I won a regional debate tournament in sophomore year
  • 5th speaker at a regional debate tournament (different won)
  • 4th speaker at the debate tournament I won at

Volunteer work:

  • Donating almost all proceeds of programming work to charity
  • 20 or 30 hours of volunteering at debate tournaments, and coaching middle school debaters

Research internship:
I don’t have one, and I literally have no clue where these programs are. I live in atlanta, and the only one I know nearby is for URMs. Anyone have a way to get these? Cause I literally don’t know if they’re available where I am

Projects:
By the time I apply, I’ll have finished a really large machine learning project where I make a generative adversarial network to generate beat saber maps (assuming it actually works lol)

Summer programs done:
Last summer I took a debate camp (not prestigious) and the HSSP program online with MIT. The summer before, I went back to Iran to see my family

Gender: Man
Ethnicity: Both of my parents are Iranian immigrants, neither applied to college (in the usual sense) or did high school in the US, so neither understand how the US college system works.

I also have a few questions I hope you all can answer - sorry if they’re off topic but they’re somewhat related:

  1. How can I find research internships? I literally just have to idea where to even start - it seems so opaque
  2. Is there any way to get better awards before application time? All the awarded stuff just seems super far away, and like you have to start at like middle school to even have a chance of being successful
  3. Is there a way I can talk about lack of opportunity to go with this? I go to a “good” school, in that we do well on stats and stuff, but I go to a liberal arts public school basically, with basically 0 stem. My mom makes a lot of money, sure, but she’s also paying crazy student loans.
  4. On a side note, how does this look for top colleges (MIT and Stanford and stuff). Can my stats and large out of school project compensate for lackluster awards and no research internship?

Thanks,
Mark

2

Just wanted to add something I forgot about - my AP chemistry class, and some of my programming classes at my local technical school, were taken at home IN ADDITION to school work, because my school didn’t offer them. I also took precalculus over the summer while in another country (Iran) with minimal internet cause I really wanted to take calculus early, so as to take diffeq and combinatorics in high school. Could I relate that to a passion for stem?

3

And I forgot to mention - for the regional debates, both were junior varisty and “regional” in this case, basically means state wide, because our region is the biggest city in the state and the only region in the state with any high level debate squads. I also didn’t get to go to the state tournament cause covid

4

MITES is for minority l/first gen type students. Are you within that demographic?

5

Hm - I doubt it. I’m not sure if Iranian counts as a minority since the USFG (wrongly) considers us white. My parents, however, haven’t ever gone through the US college system. So they can’t help me with how the US college system works, which is often what happens to first gen students.

Anyways, what about other programs? I was considering SAMS, MOSTEC, TASP, and maybe RSI (unlikely to get in) but I think my lack of awards is really bad there.

6

Have you looked at the PreCollege forums? There are a ton of threads about this and some very helpful discussions about prestige. I highly recommend perusing those.

7

lemme tell u i was admitted to mostec (mites was cancelled f) with stats not as good as those. for math i had only done up to mvc and i had no formal programming experience. 35 act and 4.00 uw / 4.84 w GPA. i had done a bunch of music stuff on my own like helping out/directing the middle school jazz bands and composing and all that. 200ish volunteer hours from that and also from summer camps.

i’m asian/hispanic btw. the only thing may have been that i did an engineering camp/program at mit the summer before so that may have been something. honestly just send it, don’t worry too much about awards, you stand a pretty good chance of getting in.