<p>@vivian_
The rates are dismal at best; usually less than 10%. They have to accept someone, though :)</p>
<p>@Green15
Thanks! That’s pretty awesome about the competition where you launched stuff into space. I’m also into engineering, but I’ve never been able to join a club or team due to limited opportunities. So I’ve just happily stayed within the realm of independent DIY projects, researching and building things on my own. I’m actually planning on sending a camera and a freezer thermometer into the upper atmosphere on a weather balloon this summer. The upper atmosphere fascinates me, and I’d like to see how its temperature varies with altitude.</p>
<p>MIT is only a single place, a single school, with a set of opportunities that may at first seem unique, but are in fact attainable to any student who works hard enough for them. Great students don’t need MIT to be awesome–MIT needs awesome students to be great. That’s why I’m just excited to go somewhere with an engineering department in the first place. No matter what happens, we’ll still be the same people with the same drive to use our talents to advance science.</p>
<p>@mathbro Hi! I can tell you are a math major from your name haha</p>
<p>@jiajiahhhh</p>
<p>We can only hope, although mathbro didn’t post the most recent year, which saw 25 admits out of 517 applicants I think? Still a generally increasing trend, though. You can do various data fits in Excel to try to predict how many admits there will be this year, but of course it doesn’t really work that way.</p>
<p>@atari1994</p>
<p>Have you ever thought about building a rocket with mounted cameras and launching it into the upper atmosphere? Despite my main passion being computer science, this is something I’ve always wanted to do just for fun…</p>
<p>@joey
I’ve thought about that, but I decided on a high altitude balloon because it will be cheaper to build and can gain a greater height than a rocket. I’m predominantly interested in observing the temperature gradient as the balloon rises to ~100,000 feet. I have a small styrofoam box to hold the payload (it previously held frozen antibody–my neuro lab was going to throw it out). It has thick walls and should help insulate the instruments and cushion them during impact, and keep them dry and afloat in case it accidentally lands in water. All I need to do now is go ebay hunting for a small portable GPS, a mountable camera and a military surplus weather balloon. And contact the FAA about my project, so I don’t go to prison…thankfully I landed an awesome summer internship, so I have a way of paying for this stuff :)</p>
<p>For those of you who have been looking through the links posted by @mathbro and find it a pain to keep calculating the Percent Admitted over and over…</p>
<p>I wrote a small bookmarklet that adds a “Percent Admitted” column to the tables on the MIT website above.</p>
<p>Here its:
javascript: a=function(){table = document.getElementsByTagName(‘table’)[1].children[0].children; table[0].innerHTML += ‘Percent Admitted’; for(var i=1; i</p>
<p>@mortlogik
That’s pretty l33t.</p>
<p>Sigh… I wish everyone in this thread would get in…</p>
<p>@joey
Thanks! It looks interesting, but I’ve found a mini spy camera for $20 that can hold two hours of footage on a micro SD card, and a pocket GPS for $40. But the built-in altitude tracker on the Contour might be worth the extra $40 alone, so I’ll have to think about it. I haven’t found an altimeter remotely within my price range yet. It certainly beats calculating the height myself from the balloon’s buoyancy in an increasingly thinning atmosphere.</p>
<p>@atari
The altitude tracker on the Contour wouldn’t be worth it, in that case. It just gets the altitude via GPS, which your GPS would do anyway. The plus side to using GPS for your altimeter is that you won’t lose precision as you gain altitude, which a normal altimeter will. The downside is that it won’t be very precise to begin with (+/- 15 meters). If you added a vertical speed indicator, you could program a sensor fusion algorithm that would give you better precision, but it all depends on how precise you’re trying to be I suppose.</p>
<p>I think it’s a bad thing because the freshman ALSO overenrolled last year, meaning they have less space for us transfers, and definitely not many waitlists. :(</p>
<p>Guys, this wait is getting pretty long. I really expected today to be the day MIT released the official decision date! Oh well…Let’s keep on waiting and hoping. :)</p>
<p>@Green15,
Maybe it’s because they have so many acceptance letters to write? :)</p>
<p>I did receive notification of the official decision dates from Penn and Columbia today… I hope that’s a sign that MIT is coming soon!</p>
<p>@joeycalifornia I love your thinking! 
@mortlogik This is good! When did Columbia and Penn say they are releasing decisions? That could give us some indication. :)</p>
<p>FWIW, Amherst’s decisions are coming out this week.</p>
<p>@Green15 Columbia is today Penn is Monday.</p>
<p>[Transfer</a> Decisions to be Released Today | MIT Admissions](<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/transfer-decisions-to-be-released-today]Transfer”>Transfer Decisions to be Released Today | MIT Admissions)</p>
<p>OMG!</p>
<p>They admitted 20 students!</p>
<p>Time to get my rejection letter. :)</p>
<p>Wow 4%… Thats kinda rough. Fingers crossed for the next half hour or so!!
I really hope it’s all of us on this thread.
GOOD LUCK EVERYONE!</p>
<p>Exactly. I’ve really gotten to like everyone on this forum. You’re all so awesome in your own special ways. I wish we could all make it…</p>
<p>If it’s only 20… I can already see my rejection on the way… Wowwww I know this is pointless but I should have applied to transfer last year :/</p>