Hi,
I’m currently pondering on whether to apply to MIT. Certainly, my academic profile is on par with that of what they expect (in terms of GPA, course difficulty and standardized tests). But, my extracurricular profile is noticeably thinner than my academic one, including captain of our Academic Challenge team, AMC, and volunteer tutoring for NHS.
Rather than pursuing the conventional extracurriculars, I’ve elected to self-study economics to the point of statistics for economists / intro to econometrics, as well as advanced level micro & macro. This past year, I did take AP Macro and separately self-studied for AP Micro. Also, I regularly do Pimsleur listens to work toward a beginner level for languages such as Portuguese and Mandarin.
To give you a rationale for my choices, I aspire to become an economics professor. I realize that PhD programs for economics ultimately emphasize research over coursework. So, I intend to have a working knowledge in introductory economics before college: I could then gain research experience as an undergraduate when many are learning that material. As for languages, I have a gifted ability to learn languages, so I thought optimizing that would only come to benefit me later in the economics arena.
Finally, one last main detail relating to my study of economics:
I wrote a research paper sophomore year that argued why the minimum wage should be raised. One of my main arguments was that empirical studies have shown modest increases in minimum wage yield little to no adverse effects on employment. Since raising the minimum wage directly increases labor costs, there had to be something offsetting those higher costs since empirical results showed negligible impacts on use of labor. I initially cited gains in productivity (since intuitively workers were getting paid more) in the version I submitted in the class.
But, the summer before my junior year, I revised the essay before submitting for the Scholastic Art / Writing contest that next school year. I found, using LaGrangian method for cost minimization, that increases in productivity would only encourage the decreased use of labor (since less units of labor could then produce a constant level of output), thus productivity gains in workers couldn’t be attributed for the results of little to no adverse effects on employment. Although the paper ended up winning a national medal, it was more notable that I had done all of this, having only taken a semester-long economics course (that basically only teaches supply and demand) freshman year, through my self-study of economics that came from MIT OpenCourseWare.
So, in conclusion, is it reasonable to include the self-study of economics and languages in the group of (five maximum) activities on the MIT application? Or, does the list of those activities exclusively apply to school-related activities?
Finally, what overall effect does this substitution of normal extracurriculars for self-study have on my chances of admission into MIT?