The First-Year Application for the MIT Class of 2026 is now live by Chris Peterson SM '13

I’m writing to announce that the application for first-year undergraduate admission to MIT for the aspiring Class of 2026 is now live. You can access it here.

You can review the dates and deadlines for this year’s application cycle here. As you consider when and how you want to apply, please remember that, as I wrote last year, we do not give any kind of preferential “bump” to students who apply to MIT during Early Action. There is no reason to rush your application to us by November 1st, especially if you are still dealing with delays and disruptions from the ongoing pandemic, or anything else. The right time for you to apply to MIT is when the time is right for you to apply to MIT. 

Our application hasn’t changed much from last year, but we did make a few minor tweaks: 

• We modified⁠01 Thanks to the (for this blog post, anonymous) applicant from last year who made the recommendation. We've always encouraged students to only provide information they're comfortable sharing, but now we've made it more explicit. our “challenge essay” to read “Tell us about a significant challenge you’ve faced or something that didn’t go according to plan that you feel comfortable sharing”  
• We’ve added a question to the activities section where you can indicate if you are a certified tutor through schoolhouse.world
• We’ve added new and more prominent links to relevant FAQs throughout the application, to help proactively answer questions about what we’re asking, and why we’re asking it, to help you get the information you need as quickly as possible 

Something that is the same as last year, but a change from our long-run practices, is that we are continuing to suspend our SAT/ACT requirement for the 2021–2022 application cycle as well.  

I asked members of our customer service and application support teams for practical advice on what applicants could do to help themselves with the application. They gave me a few tips to pass along, which turn out to mostly have to do with email: 

• To the extent you can, you should try to use one email address consistently across your application, your testing, transcripts, and other external records, and when you email us. It helps us match everything in your record much more quickly
• You should configure your email provider to never send emails with an @mit.edu domain to spam, and instead to store it safely in your inbox. How you do this will depend on your email provider; in GMail, for example, you can write a filter rule for any @mit.edu domain that says “never send to spam” 
• We have an extremely dedicated customer service team answering hundreds of phone calls + emails daily. They do respond to every email and call, but sometimes, the backlog can get pretty big. Please be patient. If you send a followup to your followup to your followup, then it just increases the volume for the team, and reduces our ability to help you and other people
• About two weeks after the application deadline, we’ll add a checklist to your status portal to let you know what we’ve received, and items you may need to follow up on. This is to allow us to get completely caught up on processing the thousands of documents we receive. Please rest assured that if you’ve sent something, we have it in our queue and we’re working on it. During the time when your checklist is not available, please don’t call or email to check in on your documents – we won’t be able to verify until we have completed the processing of all received documents
• If and when you get stressed out over the next few months — just remember to breathe, and remember there’s lots of humans on the other end for whom this is more than a job, and we do not expect you to be perfect, we expect you to be yourself

I’d also suggest that you read the summer before senior year by Abby H. and What We Did In High School by Danny & Allan, and remember that there was a long time before your college applications, and there will be a long time after, and to approach these next few months with the mindset that they are in service of the rest of your life, and not the point of it. 

Good luck to all of our applicants!