Official SIMR 2014 Thread

<p>Hey… I filled my application meaning every field is showing “Submitted” except for my recommender’s status… which is “Not Started”… so should i tell my parents to pay the fees? i dont think they view any part of the application b4 the payment is done…
and another thing… i;m not sure if i willl get in… and even i do… go for the program… and at a couple of places they’ve written by giving the following information you agree to come at our given place at agreed time and date… it kinda freaked me out when my mom showed me its written in the parent portal… so just for confirmation… nothing happens like if u dont go… ofc informing them prior that you will be not be attending…?</p>

<p>For #4: “List the top five activities of greatest importance to you (excluding academic commitments) along with your year in school. Please also indicate if you had a leadership position. Separate activities with new lines. For example, Newspaper (9th, 10th, 11th); Sports Editor (11th)”</p>

<p>What qualifies as 'academic commitments"? What should you and shouldn’t you put down? For example, is science club something that you can write about? Because academic commitments to me sounds like getting good grades and studying for tests…I think I’ll write about that anyways but what do you suppose they are asking for?</p>

<p>I think that is what they are saying: no grades and studying for test,etc</p>

<p>What I do not know is if we can describe the activities we have done or just list them out as they did in the instructions “Sports Editor (11)”. They do give 500 characters in the box so I am not quite sure.</p>

<p>@PaintTheTears Can you describe how you wrote your essays? I don’t really know what they are looking for. Does it have to be creative or unique? For the first essay “Reasons for applying to SIMR”, what did you write? Thanks!!</p>

<p>@fairyfantasy I wrote about my background, how I’ve had a passion for medicine and science since as long as I can remember, and talked about how my past experiences/activities have driven my interests to where they are today and influenced what I hope to do in the future. I started my essay with a story about how when I was little, instead of watching say, Disney channel, I would watch live surgeries on Discovery Health, and described how that showed my fascination with the human body and general curiosity about the way things work, which led to my desire to do research. I would say in general, show your passion/enthusiasm, talk about why being a part of this program would be meaningful to you, and be as specific as possible (examples, etc.) If you have any more questions, feel free to message me, and I would be happy to look at your essay if you’d like.</p>

<p>@PaintTheTears Thanks for your reply! I have another question, do we have to write our grade as letters or can we write them as numbers? On the website it said to list grade for each course and gave a example using letter grade such as Calculus (A). o.o And is it really OK for me to send my essays for you to review? I feel like that would be too troublesome for you. </p>

<p>hey guys, for the activities and community service section, it says "along with your year in school ". does that mean i am not able to use any volunteer experiences during the summer?</p>

<p>So for grades, do we also include the semester grade that we have now?</p>

<p>I put “IP” for all of my second semester grades (In progress) - is this necessary or should I just leave my first semester grades</p>

<p>@purified I don’t have any experience with these, but <a href=“http://web.mit.edu/mites/Enrichment_Programs.html”>MITES – MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science; seems to be a pretty good list of summer programs relating to science/math. The program that is often compared to SIMR is called RSI (unfortunately I believe that the application deadline has passed) </p>

<p>@fairyfantasy not sure about the grades thing, but I imagine if you can’t submit letter grades, just make the number grades as clear as possible? For instance, explain the grading scale/maybe what would be comparable to an A or a B? </p>

<p>I’ve had a couple people message me asking to see my essay and I’m happy to both share what I wrote last year and look over your essay for you! Send me a PM (: </p>

<p>As the application deadline is approaching, good luck all! SIMR was one of the best times of my life and I hope you guys get the chance to experience it too. </p>

<p>Has anyone hit the 3500 character count?</p>

<p>@jelly765 My 2nd essay used 3486/3500. </p>

<p>My second essay was a direct copy from common app essay, minus a few words for 3.5k char limit :D</p>

<p>Do you guys think that what stanford said about turning in essays on Sunday is true.</p>

<p>Gatsby, are you applying to college AND simr?</p>

<p>@purified What do you mean? What did Stanford say? Isn’t the application due on Sunday?</p>

<p>they said turn it in before sunday because there are a lot of people sending them in on that day</p>

<p>Yeah so I was unsure whether or not our application may not go through because so many people will be turning it in </p>

<p>Just turned it in! GL everyone :3</p>

<p>I was about to turn in my application this morning via chrome but slideroom said that the program was currently offline so nothing could be submitted.
I then switched to internet explorer and it worked. Anyone had this problem?</p>