Contents. Preface Top universities 3

How to get into MIT as an international student

By MBA Crystal Ball on May 28, 2018

How to get into MIT as an international student

“It’s a living lab.” That’s what the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to its very own proud students. When Barack Obama visited MIT in October 2009, he used a few more words to describe the institute’s awe-inspiring culture of innovation, and entrepreneurship: “It is the legacy of daring young men and women . . . willing to take risks on an idea that might fail, but might also change the world.”

The reason for MIT’s is simple: it is the world’s best educational institution on several counts, a fact attested by reputed educational surveys time and again, including those of QS, Times Higher Education, and US News. The QS Top Universities List 2018 put MIT at the very summit in a comparison of over 950 institutions from 84 countries. Stanford came second, Harvard third, Caltech fourth, and the UK’s University of Cambridge fifth. The criteria were academic reputation (40 percent weight), employer reputation (10 percent), faculty-student ratio (20 percent), citations per faculty (20 percent), international faculty ratio (5 percent), and international student ratio (5 percent).

Founded in 1861, MIT admitted its first batch of freshmen in 1865, as part of an effort by reputed natural scientist William Barton Rogers to establish a university that would help industrialize the US. The quality of academics, student selection, professors and students, and research and labs, and the academic flexibility offered to students, make its campus, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a dream educational destination.

Popular culture tributes to MIT include films, TV series, books, and comic strips, which have motifs inspired by the institute or references to its culture of meritocracy. The films include Good Will Hunting (winner of two Oscars) and Blown Away, TV series Arrested Development and The Big Bang Theory, books include those by Kurt Vonnegut and Isaac Asimov, and comic strips include Doonesbury and Dilbert.

But MIT’s USP is its tradition of transforming ideas born in its labs into hugely successful businesses. MIT students have launched so many companies that Bill Clinton described it as “the best technology transfer program in the country.” The revenues of companies founded by MIT put together would make up the 11th biggest economy in the world. And it is a growing economy: students continue to launch start-ups by the dozen after entering an MIT competition and winning $100,000 seed money.

In 2011 alone, 694 inventions were born at MIT. Over the years, the inventions out of MIT have included microchips, ethernet, email, GPS, computer games, OpenCourseWare, transistor radio, fax machines, solar power, spread sheet, refined oil, nuclear fission, artificial skin, and disposal razor, to name only a few. About 20 research centers on the campus explore topics from cancer research to ocean engineering and nanotechnology.

Many of MIT’s professors alumni are legends in their fields: Tim Berners-Lee, the man behind the World Wide Web, was once a professor at MIT. Alumni include Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and Paul Krugman, GM CEO Alfred Sloan, and Amar Bose of Bose Corporation. As of 2017, 88 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with MIT.