why i chose mit by Rona W. '23
the paths not traveled
I first arrived at MIT as a tourist, a thirteen-year-old with glasses that didn’t flatter my face and blunt bangs I cut myself. It was spring break of eighth grade, and my family was on a vacation visiting the East Coast—of course, as was typical for my academically-serious parents, such a trip had to include visits to prestigious college campuses.
It’s been a decade, and only brief snippets of that MIT still remain in my memory. Walls papered with activities posters, that’s the main image I recall. I suppose some things don’t change.
Throughout high school, I would visit MIT several more times for the Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament and Math Prize for Girls. It would be easy to editorialize, to imbue these experiences with the overbearing hand of hindsight, to claim that these events were all stepping stones to an inevitable destiny where I would be writing this blog post to you. But that isn’t how life works, right? It would be just as simple to tell a story about any other number of colleges, had I decided to attend those instead.
Here’s a secret: MIT wasn’t my top choice. My top choice was Stanford, which I was not admitted to. And if I hadn’t chosen MIT, I probably would have chosen the University of Pennsylvania, which had recruited me for their creative writing program.
I adore MIT now, and I always say that I’m so glad I came here, that it was absolutely the correct decision. But who knows? Maybe I would be saying that too if I had gone to Stanford, or UPenn, or anywhere else. Truthfully, I started college when I was young and impressionable, and wherever I had attended would’ve irrevocably changed me. Was MIT perfect for me, or did I become someone who was perfect for MIT? And honestly, does the distinction even matter?
When I was in my late teens, people would ask, Rona, why did you choose MIT if you’re interested in the humanities? I wasn’t quite sure of the answer myself, so I would respond with some lifted-from-the-admissions-brochure sentence about how MIT has a stellar humanities program (which, by the way, it does) or a vague gesture at my interests in mathematics.
But I’m not a teenager anymore, and I don’t feel any need to defend myself. If I think back to the decision I made as a high school senior, it seems obvious, and I’m sure I would make the same decision again.
I was the rare person who didn’t love Campus Preview Weekend, MIT’s famously extravagant and wild weekend for admitted students. I found the schedule demanding and confusing; I didn’t know anybody else who had gotten into MIT and struggled to meet other kids. In contrast, UPenn’s visiting session felt much more normal and easy to understand. But I suspect, deep down, during that entire stretch of April, I always knew I was going to choose MIT.
Bluntly put, it was the most selective school I was admitted to, and I was a stressed-out seventeen-year-old, so of course that social perception mattered to me. From speaking to UPenn students, it also sounded like UPenn’s mathematics and computer science programs were not as strong (please note that I am not commenting on the actual rigor or quality of these departments, this is simply what I heard from the kids there), and while I liked the humanities a lot and knew UPenn’s creative writing program was incredible, I had some inkling of the job prospects (or lack thereof) for an English major. And if I was going to study STEM, well, MIT it was.
When I was younger, I didn’t know how to confess these reasons, because they seemed so shallow. I wanted to impress people around me and I wanted to get a job? And even now, while I think those are important considerations, I certainly hope I wouldn’t carry out the rest of my career in the same manner. I want to work at moonshot start-ups doing exciting stuff, even if they don’t look as shiny on my LinkedIn as McKinsey or Google or Jane Street would, and they don’t offer the financial stability of an established company.
But even though my reasons for choosing MIT were probably not that deep or thoughtful, they still led me to the right place. It turns out that those reasons were decent signals for what actually matters. Like, I went here because I wanted others to think I was smart for going here, but hey, MIT does admit a lot of really smart, hard-working kids, and thus I’m fortunate to have befriended so many amazing, brilliant people.
Petey suggests looking at a school’s alumni to decide if you want to become “that type of person.” During the beginning of my time at MIT, I struggled with this, because I didn’t want to become the “stereotypical MIT alum”: that is, an engineer without interests in the wider world, working a cushy job at a big company. Of course, the truth is that MIT has so many alumni—each graduating class is over a thousand people—that it isn’t easy to generalize, and my perception of an “MIT alum” was rooted in broad, unflattering strokes colored by teen angst.
It only struck me much later that I may be different, but that means I could be a different type of MIT alum. I could be someone that incoming MIT first-years could look at and say, hey, I could also grow into becoming someone like her. MIT’s identity is ever-shifting; while I was only thinking about how it might change me, I failed to consider how I could change MIT, too.
Also posted on Substack here.