<p>Did you know any professors before you went? What did your grades look like? How much undergrad research did you do? Did you have internships? How many? Where? What did your GRE scores look like?</p>
<p>^Your answers may be different depending on major, or type of major (lab science vs. theoretical physics/math vs. engineering.) </p>
<p>What discipline are you thinking about?
Are you an undergrad now? If so, where do you go? If you don’t want to give the exact institution, then giving the type of school and approximate graduate school ranking in your area of interest will help.</p>
<p>1) I knew some professors, yes. </p>
<p>2) My grades were awful freshman year and then stellar my last three. </p>
<p>3) I did a fair amount of undergrad research (and it was definitely a big point in my favor). </p>
<p>4) I had no internships in college (I worked the usual crap summer jobs). I did have work experience after grad school before college. </p>
<p>5) They were high, but it doesn’t matter that much.</p>
<p>I was an MIT undergrad, but I knew a number of people who got into or went to graduate school at MIT who were not undergrads.</p>
<p>The number one piece of advice I can give you is that if you have experience doing research for a professor for a summer, it is a lot easier to get into that university. I believe there are summer research programs where you can work at MIT for a summer and then get a recommendation. Being a known quantity helps a lot, because grades and scores don’t always predict performance in lab very well. </p>
<p>I knew people from major research institutions who got in the neighborhood of 3.3/4.0 and got into MIT; that was the low end. But these were smart people who underperformed in class, so their recs may have been better. Also, they typically had sky-high general GREs and competitive subject GREs. For general GREs, the rule-of-thumb is that you want to get high on the math portion (750+ for grad school in most lab sciences, 800 for engineering grad school or physics/math). For the critical reading, just try not to bomb it (get above 550.) I don’t think engineering requests GREs anymore; not sure about the sciences. However, you can find out the average subject GRE for admitted students in the sciences. One point is that MIT undergrads generally find it tougher to get admitted to grad school in math or science, because in those fields staying at your undergraduate institution is discouraged.</p>
<p>I would think if you have a 3.6 or above in you science classes from a respected university and have good scores, then you are in good shape. By “respected”, I mean that the grad school is ranked highly. Some schools with good rankings for grad schools are pretty easy to get in and their classes aren’t that difficult either. It’s important because the grad school rankings are determined by the quality of the professors, and recommendations from big shots carry more weight.</p>
<p>It seems like in engineering, math, physics, you’d be well-advised to have extremely high grades (3.9+). In these disciplines, classwork is more important. (However, having a high GPA in other fields will help too.)</p>
<p>Incidentally, you may need a very high GPA to get into one of those summer research programs I talked about. </p>
<p>I would talk to people from your undergrad university and find out the profile and numbers of people who got into MIT or similar schools from you undergrad school. Sometimes, small schools have good track records with producing good grad students, so your stats don’t need to be as perfect. </p>
<p>As far as internships, people typically do undergrad research starting junior year, or at least starting the summer of junior year. Ideally, you would get secondary authorship on a paper.</p>
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They’ve changed the scale just within the past year or so – each section is now out of 160 or something ridiculous like that. But of course your point stands: get an outstanding math score; your reading score doesn’t matter much as long as it’s decent.</p>
<p>^I am guessing this is only true for people applying to grad school in technical subjects? If you are going to be a grad student in Courses like 4, 11, 14, 17, 24 (I know grad linguistics doesn’t take the GRE, but does philosophy?), I would assume that your CR score is also important.</p>
<p>I plan on applying to aero/astro. I’m currently an undergrad at a top 5 ranked school. So far I’ve done an engineering internship at NASA and a semester of research during the school year. Haven’t done GREs yet. I think my gpa is 3.8ish.</p>
<p>^In Aero/astro, classroom performance is very important. What is your technical GPA? Do you think you are the top person in your major? Also, in your recs from class, it would be nice if they said that you were the top person in class rather than just that you got an “A”.</p>
<p>It looks like you have a very good record and a decent shot at MIT. The best bet is to see how many MIT typically takes from your university and get their profile. If they typically only take the top person, you had better be that person. Since you’ve said they are a top 5 school, maybe they take more than that. But check it out.</p>
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Definitely, yes. The overall point holds: the GRE is not that important. But it is also not that hard, so most students who are competitive for admission to a graduate program at MIT will score very, very well.</p>
<p>@Millancad: </p>
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<p>Honestly, I’m not sure. As mollie said, it’s likely the case that competitive applicants will also have good scores, but I don’t think CMS cares that much about CR, in part because they ask you to submit an analytical writing paper as a supplement to judge your writing anyway.</p>