<p>I'm about to leave for a week's vacation Sunday, so I won't be around posting much. But before I go, I thought I'd create an open thread asking folks what we could do to make the MIT Admissions process clearer / more accessible / more understandable / etc. </p>
<p>We're in the process of revamping some parts of the website and our communications, and any feedback from y'all would be super useful. Feel free to post specific advice ("put this on your website", "explain this more in a blog post") or to blue-sky completely new and different ideas. If you ran the MIT Admissions web stuff, and you had the opportunity to make the whole thing better for prospective students...what would you do?</p>
<p>I would love to see more concrete guidelines on the site with respect to teacher evaluations. Every year, people ask whether an -ology teacher counts as the humanities recommendation, etc., and I have a quote that I got from Matt, but it would be great for it to be spelled out more explicitly. It would also be useful to note that junior/senior teachers are not required, as that’s also a frequently-asked question. </p>
<p>There are also people each year who try to get in touch with their assigned EC, and for whatever reason(s), the EC doesn’t respond. It would be great to have a procedure outlined on the site for necessary actions in that case – should the student email the admissions office, or call? Would the regional EC coordinator be a better contact? </p>
<p>If I can piggyback on this thread, I’m happy to have people suggest improvements to the MIT CC forum, as well. Are there new sticky threads you’d like to see, either those with more advice/facts/information or those with more discussion? Am I moderating the discussion too strongly? Not strongly enough? I will take any and all suggestions on how to make the forum a more useful, more welcoming place.</p>
<p>i think that the application should be opened a lot sooner, maybe in early august. a lot of applicants (including myself) would like to get a head start on our essays before school starts because we will be very busy with senior homework/other senior duties. since the application opens when i start school (and for some people, it opens a month into school) we will have to add the task of writing 4 (?) amazing essays in a short amount of time (provided we are applying EA. even if applying RD, it would still be nice to get a head start before school starts)</p>
<p>*A full page or even a section of the website dedicated to ECs.</p>
<p>Exactly when do they get appointed? What are their responsibilities? Who to contact or what to do if there is an issue with the EC? etc…
I know most of this info is already on the mitadmissions.org but they are scattered thru the website. They should to be collected all together, cleared up and explained in detail.</p>
<p>*Provide a way to submit documents electronically preferably via e-mail or MyMIT.</p>
<p>There is nothing worse than faxing documents such as teacher evaluations or supplemental materials for students outside US. If we could just scan and submit the documents with email or upload them by using MyMIT, it would be just perfect. I’m not saying remove the fax option but add this as an alternative.</p>
<p>@molliebatmit, new stickies with information on application procedure(what to do first? where to submit files etc?) and financial aid would be great but not necessary. As for the discussion stickies, I think there is no need for an official discussion thread since people can start topics themselves, which would be more direct to the point And no, you aren’t moderating discussions too strongly nor too soft, I think I can say this after more than 1 year in CC
I’d like to ask one thing from you, a thread where current and past MIT students share their experiences in UROP and research at MIT, preferably with some introduction and explanation on research procedures(when do students apply for projects, can they form their own project, what are the requirements, how are they financed…).</p>
<p>well…the online application does, by virtue of needing to complete everything before you can hit submit. the revised website will also send you step-by-step through the process, which is pretty rad.</p>
<p>I definitely agree about having more information regarding how to/issues with contacting EC’s. I personally didn’t have trouble reaching mine, but friends of mine definitely stressed over not being able to contact an EC easily.</p>
<p>Though I am virtually certain you would never, ever do this, Ill throw it out anyway:</p>
<p>Make available the (anonymized) MIT admissions dataset, and publish the formulae used to calculate the NI and NNI. It already exists (I have read papers published based on the data) and true openness about the decision process would make applicants feel much less anxious about the entire process. You’re not likely to scare off people from applying, except perhaps for the handful that truly have no chance whatsoever to be admitted. For those people knowledge that they should probably look elsewhere would save them from quite a bit of sadness.</p>
<p>It would also provide some fun practice for us prospective statistics majors :)</p>
<p>I completely agree with Phoestre about submitting documents electronically via e-mail or MyMit. MIT should strongly consider this as a lot of internatioal students apply each year.</p>
<p>FWIW we have been looking for ways to do that, and we do accept Naviance etc. There are some logistical issues we need to solve. </p>
<p>However, if you fax stuff to us - which is a form of electronic messaging! - that works great for us. Phoestre, why is faxing so bad? (other than…well, I mean it’s faxing)</p>
<p>New to this forum as my son is considering applying to MIT and will be (hopefully) attending the WISE program in September. We’re just beginning to get to know MIT.</p>
<p>For those of us that don’t own fax machines, it’s kind of expensive to fax.</p>
<p>sbjdorlo, could you get your school to fax it for you? that’s what i do.</p>
<p>to MITChris, a big gripe: on the homepage, it shows like 10 most current posts, but you can’t click some sort of “see all posts” like on most blogs to see more recent posts in reverse chronological order. And then, once you click a post regarding, say, Student Organizations, i’d like to see the sidebar on the left display more posts about Student Organizations instead of once again, the “5 most recent posts”… which I already saw on the homepage. It’d really make navigating the site easier, imo.
Also maybe there should be a link on the homepage that says “Are you panicking/worried/sad? Click here!” and lists all the inspirational, it’s okay blog posts. heh.</p>
<p>It isn’t about faxing, it is about “international” faxing. Which is a form of self-torture (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t… etc.)
The problem with faxing overseas is that it costs a lot of money compared to domestic faxing.
In Turkey, it isn’t that expensive. However in other parts of the world, especially in under-developed countries, let alone domestic fax, international faxing is pretty expensive. I have heard of cases where people got charged about $20 per page.</p>
<p>Luckily, int’l faxing isn’t that expensive in Turkey. Also for emergencies, I have a fax at my home in US, so I can just scan it in Turkey, send it to my fax overseas via internet, and have the machine fax it for me :D</p>
<p>I’m not saying remove the faxing option. But provide an alternative way to upload files, like a file host. I understand there might be security concerns, but at the end, I’m sure you guys have more than enough engineers to solve the issue :D</p>
And no, you aren’t moderating discussions too strongly nor too soft, I think I can say this after more than 1 year in CC 