How I applied to 18 US universities

Hi all. My name is Daniel, and in this article I want to share with you my story of getting into undergraduate studies at 18 US universities. There are a lot of stories on the Internet about how you can study at a master's or graduate school for free, but few people know that bachelor students also have the opportunity to receive full funding. Despite the fact that the events described here took place a long time ago, most of the information is relevant to this day.

The main purpose of writing this article was not at all to provide a full-fledged guide to enrolling in some of the best universities in the world, but to share my own experience with all the discoveries, impressions, experiences and other not very useful things. However, I have tried to describe in as much detail as possible each step that anyone who decides to choose this difficult and risky path will have to face. It turned out quite a lot and meaningfully, so stock up on tea in advance and sit down comfortably - my year-long story begins.

small noteThe names of some characters have been deliberately changed. Chapter 1 is an introduction and talks about how I got to this life. You have little to lose if you miss it.

Chapter 1 Prologue

December, 2016

Day three

It was a typical winter morning in India. The sun had not really risen above the horizon yet, and I and a bunch of other people with the same type of backpacks were already loading onto buses at the exit from the National Institute of Science, Education and Research (NISER). Here, near the city of Bhubaneshwar in the state of Orissa, the 10th International Olympiad in Astronomy and Astrophysics was held. 

It was the third day without the Internet and gadgets. According to the rules of the competition, they were forbidden to use during all ten days of the Olympiad in order to avoid leakage of tasks from the organizers. However, practically no one felt this lack on themselves: we were entertained in every possible way with events and excursions, one of which we were all going together now.

There were a lot of people, and they came from all over the world. When we looked at another Buddhist monument (Dhauli Shanti Stupa), built a long time ago by King Ashoka, I was approached by the Mexicans Geraldine and Valeria, who collected the phrase “I love you” in all possible languages ​​​​in a notebook (at that time there were already about twenty). I decided to make my contribution and wrote our "I love you" along with a transcription, which Valeria immediately delivered in a funny Spanish accent.

“This is not how I imagined the first time I heard these words from a girl,” I thought, laughed and returned to the tour.

The December International Olympiad looked more like a protracted prank: all the members of our team had been studying to be programmers for several months, were puzzled by the upcoming session and generally forgot about astronomy. As a rule, such events take place in the summer, but due to the annual rainy season, it was decided to postpone the competition to the beginning of winter.

The first round started only tomorrow, but almost all the teams were here from the very first day. All but one - Ukraine. Ian (my teammate) and I, as representatives of the CIS, were most concerned about their fate and therefore immediately noticed a new face among the crowd of participants. The Ukrainian team turned out to be a girl named Anya - the rest of her partners could not get there due to the sudden transfer of the flight, and they could not or did not want to spend even more money. Having taken her and the Pole with us, we went together in search of a guitar. At that moment, I could not imagine how fateful this chance meeting would turn out to be.

Day four. 

I would never have thought that it is cold in India. The clock showed late evening, but the observation tour was in full swing. We were given leaflets with tasks (there were three of them, but the first one was canceled due to the weather) and were given five minutes to read, after which we amicably proceeded into an open field and stopped not far from the telescopes. We were given another 5 minutes before the start in order for our eyes to get used to the night sky. The first task was to aim at the Pleiades and arrange the brightness of 7 stars, missed or marked with a cross. 

As soon as we went outside, everyone immediately began to look for the treasured point in the starry sky. What was our surprise when almost in the same place in the sky was ... the full moon! Enraptured by the foresight of the organizers, a guy from Kyrgyzstan and I (their whole team shook hands with me at absolutely every meeting several times a day) together tried to see at least something. Through pain and suffering, we managed to find the same M45, after which we dispersed through telescopes.

Everyone had their own personal verifier, for one task - five minutes. There was a penalty for extra minutes, so there was clearly no time to linger. Thanks to the equipment of Belarusian astronomy, I have looked through a telescope as many as 2 times in my life (the first of them was on someone's balcony), so I immediately, with the air of an expert, asked to note the time and set to work. The moon and the object were almost at their zenith, so I had to dodge and crouch to aim at the coveted cluster. It ran away from me three times, constantly hiding from view, but with the help of an additional two minutes, I managed and mentally patted myself on the shoulder. The second task was to use a stopwatch and a lunar filter to measure the diameter of the Moon and one of its seas, timing the passage through the telescope lens. 

Having coped with everything, I boarded the bus with a sense of accomplishment. It was late, everyone was tired, and by a lucky chance I ended up in a place next to a 15-year-old American. There was a Portuguese in the back seats of the bus with a guitar (I'm not a big fan of stereotypes, but all the Portuguese there knew how to play guitars, were distinguished by charisma and sang just fine). Immersed in the music and the magic of the atmosphere, I decided that I needed to socialize and initiated a conversation:

- "What is the next like in Texas?" my English said.
- "Sorry?"
“The wether…” I repeated less confidently, realizing that I had landed in a puddle.
— "Ohhh, the weather! You know, it's kinda…”

It was my first experience with a real American, and I screwed up almost instantly. The 15-year-old's name was Hagan, and the Texan accent made him speak a little offbeat. From Hagan, I learned that, despite his young age, this was not the first time he had participated in such events and that their team had been trained at MIT. At that time, I had little idea what it was - I heard the name of the university several times in TV shows or films, but that was where my meager knowledge ended. From the stories of my fellow traveler, I learned more about what kind of place this is and why he plans to enter there (it seemed that the question of whether he would enter did not bother him at all). My mental list of “cool American universities”, which included only Harvard and Caltech, was replenished with one more name. 

After a couple of threads, we fell silent. It was pitch dark outside the window, the melodic sounds of a guitar were heard from the back seats, and your humble servant, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes, went into a stream of incoherent thoughts.

The sixth day. 

From morning to afternoon, the most merciless part of the Olympiad took place - the theoretical round. I flunked it, it seems, a little less than completely. The tasks were solvable, but there was a catastrophic lack of time and, to be honest, brains. However, I didn't get too upset or ruin my appetite for the lunch that came right after the end of the stage. Filling the buffet tray with another portion of spicy Indian food, I landed in an empty seat. I don’t remember what exactly happened next - either Anya and I were sitting at the same table, or I was just passing by, but out of the corner of my ear I heard that she was going to enter the USA. 

And here it triggered me. Even before entering the university, I often found myself thinking that I would like to live in another country, and from afar I was interested in education abroad. To enroll in a master's program somewhere in the US or Europe seemed to me the most logical step, and I heard from many of my acquaintances that you can get a grant and study there for free. An additional interest in me aroused the fact that Anya clearly did not look like a person who entered the magistracy after school. At that moment she was in the 11th grade, and I realized that I could learn a lot of interesting things from her. Also, as a master of social interactions, I always needed an ironclad reason to talk to people or call them somewhere, and I decided that this was my chance.

Gathering my strength and gaining self-confidence, I decided to catch her after dinner alone (did not work) and invite her for a walk. It was awkward, but she agreed. 

In the late afternoon, we went up the hill to the meditation center, which had a beautiful view of the campus and the mountains in the distance. When you look back at these events after so many years, you understand that anything can become a turning point in a person’s life, even if it is an overheard conversation in the dining room. If I had chosen another place then, had I not dared to speak, this article would never have been published.

From Anya, I learned that she was a member of the Ukraine Global Scholars organization, founded by a Harvard graduate and preparing talented Ukrainians for admission to the best American schools (grades 10-12) and universities (4 years of undergraduate studies). The mentors of the organization, who themselves went through this path, helped with the collection of documents, passing tests (which they themselves paid for), and writing an essay. In return, a contract was signed with the program participants, which obliged them to return to Ukraine after receiving their education and work in it for 5 years. Of course, not everyone was taken there, but most of those who reached the finals successfully entered one or more universities / schools.

The main revelation for me was that it is quite possible to enter US schools and universities and study for free, even if it is a bachelor's degree. 

The first reaction on my part: “What, it was possible like that?”

It turned out it was possible. Moreover, in front of me sat a man who had already collected all the necessary documents and was well versed in the matter. The only difference was that Anya went to school (this is often used as a preparatory stage before the university), but from her I learned about the success stories of many people who made their way to several Ivy League universities at once. I realized that a huge number of talented guys from the CIS did not enter the US, not because they were not smart enough, but simply because they did not even suspect that this was possible.

We sat on the hill at the meditation center and watched the sunset. The red disk of the sun, slightly obscured by the passing clouds, quickly descended behind the mountain. Officially, this sunset was the most beautiful sunset in my memory and marked the beginning of a new, completely different stage of my life.

Chapter 2 Where's the money, Lebowski?

At this wonderful moment, I stop torturing you with stories from my Olympiad diary, and we move on to the more quivering side of the issue. If you live in the USA or have been interested in this topic for a long time, then most of the information in this chapter will not surprise you. However, for a simple guy from the provinces like me, this was quite news.

Let's dig a little deeper into the financial aspect of state education. For example, let's take the well-known Harvard. The cost of a year of study at the time of writing is $ 73,800- $ 78,200. I note right away that I am from a simple peasant family with an average income, so this amount is unbearable for me, as well as for most readers.

Many Americans, by the way, cannot afford such a cost of education either, and there are several main ways to cover the costs:

1. Student loan aka student loan or education loan. There are public and private. This option is quite popular among Americans, but we are not satisfied with it, if only for the reason that it is not available to most international students.
2. Scholarship aka scholarship - a certain amount paid by a private or public organization to a student all at once or in installments based on his achievements.
3. Grant - unlike scholarships, which in most cases are merit-based, paid on a need-based basis - you will be given exactly as much money as you lack to the full amount.
4. Personal Resource and Student Work - the money of the student, his family and the amount that he can potentially cover by working for some time on campus. A fairly popular topic for PhD applicants and US citizens in general, but you and I should not count on this option.

Scholarships and grants are often used interchangeably and are the main way international students and US citizens receive funding.

Although the funding system is unique for each university, there is approximately the same list of frequently asked questions, which I will try to answer below.

Even if I get paid for my studies, how will I live in America?

This is the reason why I applied to the universities of California. Local laws are quite loyal to the homeless, and the cost of a tent and a sleeping bag…

Okay, I'm kidding. This was a ridiculous lead to the fact that American universities are divided into two types according to the completeness of the funding provided:

• Meet full demonstration need (full funding)
• Do not meet full demonstrated need (partial funding)

Universities themselves determine what “full funding” means to them. There is no single American standard, but in most cases you will be covered for tuition, accommodation, meals, money for textbooks and relocation - everything you need to live and study comfortably.

If you look at the statistics of the same Harvard, it turns out that the average cost of education (for you), taking into account all types of financial aid, is already $11.650:

The amount of the grant for each student is calculated based on his own income and the income of his family. In short: to each according to his needs. There are usually special calculators on the website of universities that allow you to estimate the size of the financial package that you will receive if you are enrolled.
The following question arises:

How can you make sure you don't pay at all?

The policy (regulating?) of which of the applicants can count on full funding is determined by each university independently and is posted on the website.

In the case of Harvard, everything is very simple:

“If your family income is less than $65.000 a year, you pay nothing.”

Somewhere on this line there is a break in the pattern for most people from the CIS. If someone thinks that I took this figure out of my head, here is a screenshot from the official Harvard website:

Particular attention should be paid to the last line - not all universities are, in principle, ready to provide such generous funding to international students.

Again, I repeat: there is no single standard for what a full demonstrated need includes, but in most cases this is exactly what you think.

And now we smoothly approached the most interesting question ...

Won't universities enroll only those who have money to study?

Perhaps this is not entirely true. We'll look at the reasons for this in a little more detail at the end of the chapter, but for now, it's time for you and me to introduce one more term.

Need-blind admission - a policy in which the financial situation of an applicant is not taken into account when making a decision on his enrollment.

As Anya once explained to me, need-blind universities have two hands: the first decides whether you should be enrolled based on your academic performance and personal qualities, and only then the second hand reaches into your pocket and decides how much money to allocate to you.

In the case of need-sensitive or need-aware universities, your ability to pay for tuition will directly affect whether you get accepted or not. It is worth noting a few possible misconceptions right away:

• Need-blind does not mean that the university will fully cover your tuition costs.
• Even if the need-blind applies to foreign students, this does not mean that you have the same chances as Americans: by definition, fewer places will be allocated for you, and competition for them will be huge.

Now that we have figured out what universities are, let's form a list of criteria that our dream university should meet:

1. Must provide full funding (meet full demonstration need)
2. Should not take into account the financial situation when making a decision on enrollment (need blind)
3. Both of these policies apply to international students.

Perhaps now you are thinking: “It would be nice to have a list in which you could search for universities in these categories.”

Fortunately, such a list is already Yes.

It is unlikely that this will greatly surprise you, but only seven fall into the number of “ideal” candidates from the entire US:

It is worth remembering that, in addition to funding, when choosing a university, one should not forget about many other factors that also play a role. In Chapter 4, I will give a detailed list of the places I applied to and explain why I chose them.

At the end of the chapter, I would like to speculate a little on one quite often raised topic ...

Despite official information and all other arguments, many (especially in connection with Dasha Navalnaya's admission to Stanford) have a reaction:

All this is a lie! Free cheese only happens in a mousetrap. Do you seriously believe that someone will bring you for free from abroad, if only you would study?

Miracles don't really happen. Most American universities really won't pay for you, but that doesn't mean there aren't any.. Let's look again at the example of Harvard and MIT:

• The Harvard University Foundation, collected as a single entity from 13,000 individual funds for 2017, was $37 billion. Some of this budget is earmarked annually for operating expenses, including professors' salaries and student grants. Most of the money is invested under the management of Harvard Management Company (HMC) with an average return on investment of over 11%. Following him are the Princeton and Yale funds, each of which has its own investment company. As of this writing, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Investment Management Company released its 3 report 2019 hours ago, with a fund of $17.4 billion and a roi of 8.8%.
• Much of the funds' money is donated by wealthy alumni and philanthropists.
• According to MIT statistics, student tuition fees account for only 10% of the university's profits.
• Money is made, including on private research commissioned by large companies.

The chart below shows what MIT's profits consist of:

I’m all for this - with a special desire, universities, in principle, can afford to make education free of charge, although this will not be a sustainable development strategy. As one of the investment firms quotes:

Spending from the fund must be large enough to ensure that the university allocates adequate resources to its human and physical capital, but not to the detriment of the ability of future generations to do the same.

They can and will invest in you if they see potential. The numbers above confirm this.

It is easy to guess that the competition in such places is serious: the best universities want the best students and attract them with all their might. Of course, no one canceled admission for a bribe: if the father of an applicant decides to donate a couple of million dollars to the university fund, this will certainly redistribute the chances in an unfair way. On the other hand, these few millions can fully cover the education of a dozen geniuses who will build your future, so who is the loser from this - decide for yourself.

Summing up, most people for some reason sincerely believe that the main barrier between them and the best universities in the United States is the prohibitive cost of education. And the truth is simple: you do it first, and money is not a problem.

Chapter 3

March, 2017

Spring semester is in full swing and I'm in the hospital with pneumonia. I don’t know how it happened - I walked along the street, didn’t touch anyone, and then suddenly fell ill for several weeks. Shortly before reaching my adulthood, I found myself in the children's ward, where, in addition to the ban on laptops, there was an atmosphere of stagnation and unbearable anguish.

Trying to somehow distract myself from the constant drips and oppressive walls of the ward, I decided to immerse myself in the world of fiction and began to read the “Rat Trilogy” by Haruki Murakami. It was a mistake. Even though I forced myself to finish the first book, I didn't have enough mental health for the other two. Never try to escape reality into a world that is even more depressing than yours. I caught myself thinking that since the beginning of the year I have not read anything except my diary from the time of the Olympiad.

Speaking of the Olympics. Unfortunately, I did not bring any medals, but I did bring a treasure trove of valuable information that I urgently needed to share with someone. Almost immediately after my arrival, I wrote to a couple of my fellow Olympiad students who, by coincidence, were also interested in studying abroad. After a short meeting in a cafe on the eve of the new year, we began to investigate the issue in more depth. We even had a conversation “MIT Applicants”, in which communication was only in English, although out of the three, in the end, only I entered.

Armed with Google, I began my search. I came across a lot of videos and articles about master's and postgraduate studies, but I quickly discovered that there is practically no normal information about admission to a bachelor's degree from the CIS. All that was found then was terribly superficial “guides” listing tests and zero mention of the fact that you can actually get a grant.

After a while, I caught my eye article by Oleg from Ufawho shared his experience of getting into MIT.

Although there was no happy ending in it, the most important thing was the real story of a living person who went through it all from beginning to end. Such articles on the Runet were rare, and during my receipt, I scanned it about five times. Oleg, if you are reading this, hello to you and thank you so much for the motivation!

Despite the initial enthusiasm, during the semester, thoughts about my adventure under the pressure of the lab and social life lost their significance and receded into the background. All that I did then to fulfill my dream was to sign up for English three times a week, because of which I often slept for several hours and ended up in the hospital where we are now.

March XNUMXth was on the calendar. My unlimited Internet was unbearably slow, but somehow coped with social networks, and for some reason I decided to send one of the free VKontakte gifts to Anya, even though we had not communicated with her since January.

Word by word, we talked about life and I learned that in a few days she should receive answers regarding her admission. Although there are no strict rules on this, most American schools and universities publish decisions around the same time.
Every year, Americans look forward to mid-March, and many write down their reactions to letters from universities, which can be either congratulations or rejections. If you are wondering what it looks like, then I advise you to search youtube for the query “College Decision Reactions” - be sure to check it out to feel the atmosphere. Especially for you, I even picked up a particularly striking example:

With Anya that day we talked until the very night. I again clarified what things I would have to hand over and whether I imagined the whole process correctly. Asking a bunch of stupid questions, weighing everything and just trying to figure out if I even have a chance. In the end, she went to bed, and I lay for a long time and could not sleep. Night is the only time in this hell when you can get rid of the endless screaming of children and gather your thoughts about the important. And there were many thoughts:

What will I do next? Do I need all this? Will I succeed?

Probably, such words sounded in the head of absolutely every healthy person who has ever decided on such an adventure.

It is worth once again paying attention to the current situation. I am an ordinary first-year student at a Belarusian university who is getting through the second semester and is somehow trying to improve his English. I have a sky-high goal - to enter the first year at a good American university. I did not consider the option of transferring somewhere: there is practically no funding for transfer students, there are much fewer places and in general you need to persuade your university, so the chances in my case tended to zero. I understood very well that if I did, it would be only for the first year in the fall of next year. Why do I need all this?

Everyone answers this question in their own way, but I saw the following advantages for myself:

1. The conditional diploma from Harvard was clearly better than the diploma of the place where I studied.
2. Education too.
3. An invaluable experience of living in another country and finally free English.
4. Connections. According to Anya, this is almost the main reason why everyone does it - the smartest people from all over the world will study with you, many of whom will later become millionaires, presidents and blah blah blah.
5. A great opportunity to once again be in that multicultural atmosphere of smart and purposeful people from all over the world, which I plunged into at the international Olympiad and which I sometimes yearned for.

And here, when drooling joyfully begins to flow onto the pillow from the anticipation of happy student everyday life, another sarcastic question creeps up: Do I have any chance at all?

Well, everything is not so clear-cut here. It's worth bearing in mind that the top American universities don't have any "passing points" system or list of points for which you're guaranteed to be accepted. Moreover, the admission committee never comments on the decisions it makes, which makes it impossible to understand what exactly led to the refusal or enrollment. Keep this in mind when you stumble upon the services of “people who know exactly what to do and will help you for a modest amount.”
There are too few success stories to unequivocally judge who will be hired and who will not. Of course, if you are a loser with no hobbies and poor English, then your chances tend to be zero, but what if you? gold medalist of the International Olympiad in Physics, then the universities themselves will start contacting you. Arguments like “I know a guy who has a *achievement list* and they didn't get him! That means they won’t hire you either” don’t work either. If only because there are much more criteria in addition to academic performance and achievements:

• How much money is allocated for scholarships for international students this year.
• What competition this year.
• The way you write your essays and be able to “p(r)dress yourself” is a point many people ignore, but it is extremely important for the admissions committee (which is what literally everyone talks about).
• Your nationality. It's no secret that universities are actively trying to support diversity among their students and are more willing to take people from underrepresented countries (for this reason, it will be easier for African applicants to enter than for Chinese or Indians, who are already huge every year)
• Who exactly will be in the selection committee this year. Do not forget that they are also people and the same candidate can make a completely different impression on different university staff.
• What universities and what specialty are you applying to.
• And a million more.

As you can see, there are too many random factors in the admission process. In the end, they will judge “which candidate is more needed” there, and your task is to prove yourself to the maximum. What exactly made me believe in myself?

• I had no problems with grades in the certificate.
• In the 11th grade, I had an absolute first diploma at the Republican Olympiad in Astronomy. Probably, I bet most of all on this item, since it could be sold as “the best in its country”. I repeat once again: no one can unequivocally say that with merit X you will be taken or deployed. To some, your bronze at the international will seem something ordinary, but it will touch the heartbreaking story of how you won a chocolate medal at a matinee in kindergarten through blood and tears. I'm exaggerating, but the point is clear: how you present yourself, your achievements, and your history plays a key role in whether you can convince the person reading the form of your uniqueness.
• Unlike Oleg, I was going not to repeat his mistakes and apply to several (total 18) universities at once. This significantly increases the likelihood of success in at least one of them.
• Since the very idea of ​​entering the USA from Belarus seemed crazy to me, I was almost sure that I would not meet a lot of competition among my compatriots. It is not worth hoping for this, but the unspoken ethnic/national quotas could also play into my hands.

In addition to all this, I tried in every possible way to at least approximately compare myself with the acquaintances Ani or Oleg from the article who arrived. I didn't get much use out of it, but in the end I decided that based on my academic achievements and personal qualities, there was at least some non-zero probability of getting into something.

But this is not enough. All these ghostly chances could only appear on the condition that I perfectly pass all the tests that I still need to prepare for, write excellent essays, prepare all documents, including teachers' recommendations and grades translations, do not do something stupid and have time to deadlines on the eve of the winter session. And all for what - to leave your current university halfway through and again enroll in the first year? Since I am not a citizen of Ukraine, I will not be able to become a part of UGS, but I will compete with them. I will have to go all the way from beginning to end alone, hiding the very fact of my studies at the university and not understanding whether I am moving in the right direction. I have to kill a lot of time and effort, spend a lot of money - and all this just to get a chance to fulfill a dream that a couple of months ago was not in sight. Is it worth it, really?

I could not answer this question. However, in addition to dreams of a brighter future, a much stronger and more obsessive feeling arose in me, which I could not get rid of in any way - the fear that I would miss my chance and regret it.
No, the worst thing is me never even knowwhether I really had this opportunity to radically change my life. I was afraid that everything would be in vain, but even more afraid of chickening out in the face of the unknown and missing the moment.

That night, I made a promise to myself: no matter what it costs me, I will reach the end. Let absolutely every university I apply to refuse me, but I will achieve this refusal. Dementia and courage overwhelmed your faithful narrator at that hour, but in the end he calmed down and went to bed.

A couple of days later, I received this message. The game was on.

Chapter 4 Making Lists

August, 2017

Having returned from numerous travels and rested from the session, I decided that it was time to start doing something before the studies began. First of all, I had to decide on a list of places I was going to apply to.

The most recommended strategy, which is often found, including in master's guides, is to choose N universities for yourself, 25% of which will be “universities of your dreams” (like the same ivy league), half will be “average”, and the remaining 25 % will be safe options in case you fail to get into the first two groups. The N usually ranges from 8 to 10, depending on your budget (more on that later) and the time you're willing to spend preparing applications. In general, this is a good method, but in my case it had one fatal flaw ...

Most of the average and weak universities simply do not provide full funding for international students. Let's recap which universities from Chapter 2 are our ideal candidates:

1. need-blind.
2. Meet full demonstrated need.
3. International Students are eligible for #1 and #2.

Based on this list of, only 7 universities across America meet all three criteria. If I filter out those that do not fit my profile, only Harvard, MIT, Yale and Princeton will remain out of seven (I rejected Amherst College due to the fact that on Russian Wikipedia it was described as a “private liberal arts university”, although in fact there has everything I needed).

Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton… What connects all these places? Right! They are very, very hard to get into in general for everyone, including international students. According to one of the many statistics, the admission rate for MIT undergraduates is 6.7%. In the case of international students, this figure drops to 3.1% or 32 people per seat. Not bad, right? Even if we omit the first item from the search criteria, the harsh truth is still revealed to us: to qualify for full funding, you have no choice but to apply to the most prestigious universities. Of course, there are exceptions to all rules, but at the time of my admission, I did not find them.

When it becomes approximately clear where you want to go, the algorithm for further actions is as follows:

1. Go to the university website, which is usually Googled on the first request. In the case of MIT, this is www.mit.edu.
2. See if there is a program you are interested in (in my case it is computer science or physics / astronomy).
3. Look for the Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid sections either on the main page or by google search with the name of the university. They are EVERYWHERE.
4. Now your task is to understand from a set of keywords and FAQ whether they accept international students for full funding and how they identify themselves in accordance with Chapter #2. (WARNING! Here it is very important not to confuse undergraduate (bachelor's) and graduate (master's and PhD) admissions. Be careful what you read, because full funding for graduate students is much more popular).
5. If something remains unclear to you, do not be too lazy to write a letter to the university mail with your questions. In the case of MIT, this is [email protected] for questions about financial aid and [email protected] for questions about international admissions (you see, they even have a separate box specially for you).
6. Make sure you research well and read every possible FAQ before resorting to point 5. There is nothing wrong with asking, but it is very likely that most of your questions have already been answered.
7. Find out a list of everything you need to provide for admission from another country and in order to apply for fin. help. As you will soon understand, the requirements for almost all universities are the same, but this does not mean that they do not need to be read at all. Very often, representatives of the admissions committee themselves write that “a test called X is very undesirable, it’s better to take all Y”.

All I can advise at this stage is do not be lazy and do not be afraid to ask questions. Learning about your capabilities is the most important stage of admission, and with a high probability you will spend several days figuring everything out.

By the time of the deadline, I entered 18 universities:

1. Brown University
2. Columbia University
3. Cornell University
4. Dartmouth College
5. Harvard University
6. Princeton University
7. University of Pennsylvania
8. Yale University
9. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
10. California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
11. Stanford University
12. New York University (including NYU Shanghai)
13. Duke University (including Duke-NUS College in Singapore)
14. University of Chicago
15. Northwestern University
16. John Hopkins University
17. Vanderbilt University
18. Tufts University

The first 8 are Ivy League universities, and all 18 are in the top 30 US universities according to the National Universities rankings. So it goes.

The next thing was to figure out what tests and documents are needed to submit to each of the above places. After long wanderings on the websites of universities, it turned out that the list was something like this.

• Fully completed application form submitted electronically.
• Results of standardized tests (SAT, SAT Subject and ACT).
• English proficiency test result (TOEFL, IELTS and others).
• Transcript of school grades for the last 3 years in English, with signatures and seals.
• Documents on the financial status of your family, if you are applying for funding (CSS Profile)
• Letters of recommendation from teachers.
• Your essays on topics proposed by the university.

It's simple, isn't it? Now more about the first points.

Application Form

For all universities except MIT, this is a single form called the Common Application. Alternatives are available at some universities, but there is no point in using them. The entire MIT admissions process goes through their MyMIT portal.

The application fee for each university is $75.

SAT, SAT Subject and ACT

All of these are standardized American tests like the Russian Unified State Examination or the Belarusian CT. The SAT is something like the most general math and English test and is required all universities other than MIT.

SAT Subject test deeper knowledge in the subject area, for example, physics, mathematics, biology. Most universities list them as optional, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be taken.. It is critically important for you and me to confirm that we are smart, so taking the SAT Subjects is mandatory for everyone and everyone who is going to enter the USA. Usually everyone takes 2 tests, in my case they were physics and mathematics 2. But more on that later.

When applying to MIT, take the regular SAT need not (TOEFL instead), but 2 subject tests are required.

The ACT is such an alternative to the regular SAT. I did not take it, and I do not advise you.

TOEFL, IELTS and other English proficiency tests

If you have not studied in an English-speaking school for the past few years, absolutely everywhere you will be required to have a certificate of knowledge of the English language. It is worth noting that the English proficiency test is the only test where many universities have a mandatory minimum score that you need to score.

Which test should I choose?

TOEFL. If only for the reason that many universities do not accept IELTS and other analogues.

What is the minimum TOEFL score to be considered for my application?

Each university has its own requirements, but most of them asked for 100/120 at the time of my admission. The threshold score at MIT is 90, the recommended score is 100. Most likely, over time, the rules will change and you won’t even find any “passing score”, but I highly recommend not to fail this test.

Does it matter if I pass the 100 test or the 120 test?

With a very high probability, no. Any score from XNUMX will be good enough, so it doesn't make much sense to retake the test in order to get more scores.

Registration for tests

To summarize, I had to pass SAT, SAT Subjects (2 tests) and TOEFL. As subjects on subjects, I chose Physics and Mathematics 2.

Unfortunately, it will not be possible to make the admission process completely free. The tests cost money and there are no waivers for international students to take for free. So, how much does all this pleasure cost?:

1. SAT with Essay - $112. (65$ test + 47$ international fees).
2. SAT Subjects - $117 ($26 registration + $22 each test + $47 international fees).
3. TOEFL - $ 205 (this is when passing in Minsk, but in general the prices are the same)

The total is $434 for everything. Each test comes with 4 free submissions of your results directly to the locations you specify. If you have already explored the websites of universities, you may have noticed that in the section with the necessary tests they always give their TOEFL and SAT code.

Absolutely every university has such codes, and you need to specify 4 of them during registration. For sending to each additional university, oddly enough, you need to pay. One TOEFL Score Report will cost you $20, for SAT with Essay and SAT Subjects $12.

By the way, I just couldn't help but spoil it for you now: every CSS Profile that is needed to prove that you are poor and need financial assistance from the university also takes money! $25 for the first one and $16 for each subsequent one.

So, let's sum up another small financial result for admission to 18 universities:

1. Passing tests will cost 434$
2. Submission of applications - $ 75 each - in total 1350$
3. Send to each university CSS Profile, SAT & SAT Subject Reports, as well as TOEFL - ($20 + 2 * $12 + $16) = $60 - the total will be released somewhere 913$, if you subtract the first 4 free universities and take into account the cost of the first CSS Profile.

The total receipt will cost you 2697$. But do not rush to close the article!
Of course, I didn't pay that much. In total, my admission to 18 universities cost $ 750 (400 of which I once gave for tests, another 350 for sending results and CSS Profile). A nice bonus is that you do not need to give this money in one payment. My application process took half a year, I paid for the tests in the summer, and for submitting the CSS Profile in January.

If the amount of $2700 seems quite tangible to you, then you can absolutely legally ask universities to provide you with a Fee Waiver, which allows you not to pay $75 for sending an application. In my case, I received a waver to all 18 universities and did not pay anything. More on how to do this in the following chapters.

Wavers also exist for TOEFL and SAT, but they are no longer allocated by universities, but by the CollegeBoard and ETS organizations themselves, and, unfortunately, they are not available to us (international students). You can try to persuade them, but I did not.

As for sending Score Reports, here you will have to negotiate with each university separately. In short, you can ask them to accept unofficial test results on one sheet along with grades, and if accepted, confirm. About 90% of the universities agreed, so that for each additional university, on average, they had to pay only $ 16 (and even then, some universities like Princeton and MIT take other financial forms).

To summarize, the minimum cost of admission is the cost of passing the tests ($ 434 if you are not English and have not taken the SAT before). For each additional university, you will most likely have to pay $16.

More information about tests and registration here:

SAT & SAT Subject - www.collegeboard.org
TOEFL- www.ets.org/toefl

Chapter 5

August, 2017

Having decided on the list of universities (at that time there were 7-8 of them) and having understood which tests I needed to pass, I immediately decided to register for them. Since TOEFL is a rather popular thing, I easily found a test center in Minsk (based on the Streamline language school). The exam takes place somewhere several times a month, but it is better to register in advance - all places may be occupied.

With registration for the SAT, everything was more complicated. Outside the USA, the exam was held only a few times a year (I was very lucky that it was held at all in Belarus), and there were only two of the nearest dates: October 7 and December 2. I decided to take the TOEFL sometime in November, as the results usually take from 2 weeks to a month to reach universities. 

By the way, about the choice of dates: usually, when applying to American universities, there are two ways to apply:

1. Early Action - early submission of documents. The deadline for it is usually November 1, and you will receive the result in January. This option usually assumes that you already know exactly where you want, and therefore many universities oblige you to enroll in only one university for early action. I don't know how strictly enforced this rule is, but it's better not to cheat.
2. Regular Action - the usual deadline, as a rule, it is January 1 everywhere.

I wanted to apply for Early Action at MIT on the basis that when considering Early Action, most of the budget for international students has not yet been spent, and there will be a better chance of getting into it. But, again, these are rumors and guesses - the official statistics of the university are trying to convince you that it makes no difference which of the deadlines to enter, but who knows how it really is ...

In any case, by November 1, I couldn’t keep up with the deadlines, so I decided not to sweat it out and do like everyone else - according to Regular Action and until January 1.

Based on all this, I registered for the following dates:

• SAT Subjects (Physics & Math 2) - November 4th.
• TOEFL - 18 November.
• SAT with Essay - December 2nd

There were 3 months to prepare for everything, and 2 of them went in parallel with the semester.

After evaluating the approximate amount of work, I realized that you need to start preparing right now. There are quite a few stories on the Internet about Russian schoolchildren who, thanks to the greatest Soviet education system, smash American tests to smithereens with their eyes closed - well, I'm not one of them. Since I entered my Belarusian university with a diploma, I practically did not prepare for the Central College and forgot everything in two years. There were three main directions for development:

1. English (for TOEFL, SAT and essay writing)
2. Mathematics (for SAT and SAT Subject)
3. Physics (only for SAT Subject)

My English at that time was somewhere at B2 level. The spring courses went off with a bang, and I felt quite confident right up to the moment I started to prepare. 

SAT with Essay

What is special about this test? Now let's figure it out. I note that before 2016, the “old” version of the SAT was surrendered, which you can still stumble upon on training sites. Naturally, I handed over and will talk about the new one.

In total, the test consists of 3 parts:

1.Math, which in turn also consists of 2 sections. The tasks are quite simple, but the problem is that they too a lot of. The material itself is elementary, but it is very easy to make a mistake due to inattention or understand something wrong in a limited time, so I would not advise writing it without preparation. The first part - without a calculator, the second - with it. The calculations, again, are elementary, but tricky examples are rare. 

What annoyed me the most was text tasks. Americans like to give something like "Peter bought 4 apples, Jake bought 5, and the distance from the Earth to the Sun is 1 AU ... Count how many apples ...". There is nothing to solve in them, but you need to spend time and attention reading the terms in English to understand what they want from you (trust me, in a limited time it is not as easy as it seems!). In total, mathematical sections contain 55 questions, for which 80 minutes are allotted.

How to prepare: Khan Academy is your friend and teacher. There are quite a few practice tests that are made specifically for preparing for the SAT, as well as training videos on all the necessary mathematics. I always advise you to start with tests, and then finish learning what you didn’t know or forgot. The main thing you have to learn is to quickly solve simple problems.

2. Evidence-Based Reading & Writing. It is also divided into 2 sections: Reading and Writing. If I didn’t worry about the word at all about mathematics (although I knew that I would fail due to inattention), then this section at first sight drove me into depression.

In Reading you need to read a huge amount of texts and answer questions about them, and in Writing you do the same and insert the right words / swap sentences to make it logical and so on. The problem is that this section of the test is entirely designed for Americans who write, speak and read books in English all their lives. The fact that this is your second language does not bother anyone. You will have to take this test on an equal footing with them, although you will clearly be in an unequal position. To be honest, a fairly large proportion of Americans manage to write this section badly. For me, it still remains a mystery. 

Every fifth text is a historical document from the history of the formation of the United States, where the language used is especially elegant. There are also texts on near-scientific topics and passages straight from fiction, where you will sometimes curse the eloquence of the authors. You will be shown a word and asked to choose the most appropriate synonym from 4 options, while you do not know any of them. You will be forced to read huge texts with a bunch of rare words and answer non-obvious questions about the content in a time that is hardly enough to read. You are guaranteed to suffer, but over time you will get used to it.

For each of the sections (mathematics and English), you can score a maximum of 800 points. 

How to prepare: God help you. Again, Khan Academy has tests to solve. There are quite a few life hacks on the passage of Reading and how to quickly extract the essence from texts. There are tactics that suggest starting from questions, or reading the first sentence of each paragraph. You will find them on the Internet, as well as lists of rare words that are worth learning. The main thing here is to keep within the time limit and not get carried away. If you feel like you're spending too much on one text, move on to the next one. For each new text, you must have a clearly worked out mechanism of action. Practice.

 
3. Essay.  If you want to go to the USA, write an essay. You are given some text that you need to “analyze” and write a review / answer to the question posed. Again, on a par with the Americans. For an essay, you get 3 grades: Reading, Writing, and Analysis. There is not much to say here, there is enough time. The main thing is to understand the text and write a structured answer.

How to prepare: read on the Internet about what people usually want to hear from you. Practice writing on time and structure. 
Rejoiced at the easy math and discouraged by the Writing section, I realized that it makes no sense to start preparing for the SAT in mid-August. SAT with Essay was my last test (December 2), and I decided that I would prepare intensively for the last 2 weeks, and before that my preparation was closed by TOEFL and SAT Subjects Math 2.

I decided to start with SAT Subjects, and postponed TOEFL until later. As you already know, I chose the Physics and Math 2 subjects. The number 2 in mathematics means increased complexity, but this is not entirely true if you know some of the features of SAT Subjects.

Firstly, the maximum score for each of the exams is 800. Only in the case of Physics and Mathematics 2, there are so many questions that you can score 800 by making a couple of mistakes, and this will be exactly the same maximum score. It's nice to have such a reserve, and Math 1 (which, it would seem, is simpler) does not have it.

Secondly, Math 1 contains a lot more text problems, which I really disliked. Under the pressure of time, the language of formulas is much more pleasant than English, and indeed, to enter MIT and take Math 1 is somehow undignified (don't take it, cats).

Having learned the content of the tests, I decided to start by refreshing the material. This was especially true of physics, which had a good time to forget after school. In addition, I had to get used to the terminology in English, so as not to get confused at the most important points. For my purposes, courses in Mathematics and Physics at the same Khan Academy were perfect - it's nice when one resource covers all the necessary topics. As in school years, I wrote notes, only now in English and more or less accurately. 

At that time, my friend and I learned about polyphasic sleep and decided to experiment on ourselves. The main goal was to rearrange your sleep cycles in order to win as much free time as possible. 

My routine was:

• 21:00 - 00:30. The main (core) part of sleep (3,5 hours)
• 04:10 - 04:30. Short nap (nap) #1 (20 minutes)
• 08:10 - 08:30. Short nap (nap) #1 (20 minutes)
• 14:40 - 15:00. Short nap (nap) #1 (20 minutes)

So I didn't get 8 hours of sleep like most people, but 4,5, which gave me an extra 3,5 hours to get ready. Moreover, since the intervals of short dreams of 20 minutes were spaced throughout the day, and most of the night and morning I did not sleep, the days seemed especially long. We also hardly drank alcohol, tea or coffee so as not to disturb sleep, and called each other on the phone if someone suddenly decided to oversleep and get off schedule. 

In just a couple of days, my body fully adapted to the new regimen, all drowsiness was gone, and productivity increased several times due to the additional 3,5 hours of life. Since then, I have looked at most people who sleep 8 hours a day as losers, spending a third of their time in bed every night instead of studying physics.

Okay, I'm kidding. Naturally, no miracle happened, and already on the sixth day I passed out for the whole night and turned off absolutely all the alarm clocks in unconsciousness. And the rest of the days, if you look at the magazine, it was not much better.

I suspect that the reason for the failure of the experiment was that we were young and stupid. The recently published book “Why we sleep” by Matthew Walker, by the way, rather confirms this hypothesis and hints that it will not work out to outwit the system without destructive consequences for oneself. I advise all novice biohackers to familiarize themselves with it before trying something like this.

This is how the last month of my summer passed before the second year: preparing for passing tests for schoolchildren and methodically searching for places to enter.

Chapter 6

The semester started on schedule, and there was even less free time. To finish myself off completely, I signed up for a military department, which delighted me with morning formation every Monday, and for a theater goer, where I had to fulfill my potential and finally play a tree.

Along with the preparation for the subject, I tried not to forget about English and actively looked for opportunities to practice speaking. Since there are indecently few speaking clubs in Minsk (and the time in them is not the most convenient), I decided that it would be easiest to open one right in the hostel. Armed with the experience of my sensei from the spring courses, for each lesson I began to come up with different topics and interactive activities so that I could not only communicate in English, but also learn something new. In general, it turned out pretty well and for some time up to 10 people consistently came there.

A month later, a friend of mine sent me a link to the Duolingo incubator, in which Duolingo Events had just begun to actively develop. So I became the first and only Duolingo Ambassador in the Republic of Belarus! My “duties” included holding various language meetups in the city of Minsk, whatever that means. I had a database of email addresses of application users with a certain level in my city, and soon I organized my first event by agreeing with one of the local coworking spaces.

What was the surprise of the people who came there when, instead of the expected American and the representative of Duolingo, I came out to the audience.
At the second meetup, in addition to a couple of classmates I invited (then we watched a movie in English), only one guy came, who left after 10 minutes. As it turned out later, he came only in order to meet again with my pretty friend, but that evening, alas, she did not come. Realizing that the demand for Duolingo Events in Minsk, to put it mildly, is low, I decided to limit myself to a club in a hostel.

Probably not many people think about it, but when your goal is so far away and unattainable, it is very difficult to maintain high motivation all the time. In order not to forget about why I am doing all this, I decided to regularly motivate myself with at least something and got hooked on videos from students about their life at universities. This is not the most popular genre in the CIS, but there are enough such bloggers in America - just enter the query “A Day in life of% universityname% Student” on youtube, and you will receive not one, but several beautiful and pleasantly shot videos about student life for ocean. I was particularly drawn to the aesthetics and differences of the universities there, from the endless corridors of MIT to the ancient and majestic campuses of Princeton. When you decide on such a long and risky journey, dreaming is not only useful, it is vital.

It also helped that my parents reacted surprisingly positively to my adventure and supported me in every possible way, although in the realities of our country it is very easy to stumble upon the opposite. Many thanks to them for this.

November 4 was rapidly approaching, and every day I scored more and more on labs and gave myself to preparation. As you already know, I successfully scored on the SAT and there were three main goals: TOEFL, SAT Subject Math 2 and SAT Subject Physics.

I honestly don't understand people who hire tutors for all these tests. For my preparation for SAT Subjects, I used only two books: Barron's SAT Subject Math 2 and Barron's SAT Subject Physics. They contain all the necessary theory, the knowledge of which is tested on the test (briefly, but Khan Academy will help), many trial tests that are as close to reality as possible (Barron's SAT Math 2, by the way, is much more difficult than the real test, so if you are without any problems cope with all the tasks there, then this is a very good sign).

The first book I read was Math 2, and I can't say that it was too easy for me. There are 50 questions in the math test for 60 minutes. Unlike Math 1, there is already trigonometry and very, very many tasks for functions and their various analysis. Limits, complex numbers and matrices are also included, but generally at a very basic level so anyone can master it. You can use a calculator, including a graphical one - this can help you quickly solve many problems, and even in the book itself Barron's SAT Math 2 in the answer section you will often find something like this:

Or this:

Yes, yes, it is possible that some of the tasks are literally designed for you to use a fancy calculator. I am not saying that they cannot be solved analytically at all, but when you are given a little more than a minute for each of them, frustration is inevitable. You can read more about Math 2 and solve the probe here.

As for physics, the opposite is true here: you smoking use a calculator, the test is also given 60 minutes and it contains 75 questions - 48 seconds each. As you may have guessed, there are no cumbersome computational tasks here, and the knowledge of general concepts and principles is mainly tested throughout the course of school physics and not only. There are also questions from the category “what law was discovered by this scientist”. After Math 2, physics seemed too easy to me - partly due to the fact that Barron's SAT Math 2 book is an order of magnitude more difficult than a real test, and partly due to the fact that almost all questions in physics required you to remember a couple of formulas and substitute in them numbers to get the answer. This is very different from what is checked on our Belarusian DH. Although, as in the case of Math 2, be prepared for the fact that some questions are not covered by the CIS school curriculum. You can read more about the structure of the test and solve the probe here.

As is the case with all American tests, the most difficult thing about them is the time limit. It is for this reason that it is extremely important to solve probes in order to get used to the pace and not be stupid. As I said, Barron's books give you everything you need to prepare and write an excellent test: there is theory, practice tests, and answers to them. My preparation was very simple: I solved, looked at my mistakes and worked on them. All. There are enough life hacks in the books on how to properly allocate your time and approach problem solving.

One very important thing to keep in mind is that the SAT is not an exam, but a test. In most questions, you have 4 possible answers, and even if you do not know which one is correct, you can always try to guess it. The authors of the SAT Subject do their best to convince you not to do this, because for each wrong answer, unlike the missed one, a fine (-1/4 point) is due. For the answer you get (+1 point), and for the pass 0 (then these points are converted into your final score using a tricky formula, but this is not about that now). By simple reflections, we can come to the conclusion that in any situation it is better to try to guess the answer than to leave the field empty, because. by elimination, you are likely to be able to narrow the space of possible correct answers to two, and sometimes even to one. As a rule, in each question there is at least one absurd or too suspicious answer, so in general, random is on your side.

To summarize all of the above, the main tips are as follows:

• Make a guess, but an educated one. Never leave cells empty, but also guess wisely.
• Solve as much as possible, keep track of time and work on bugs.
• In no case do not use what you definitely do not need. It is not your knowledge of physics or mathematics that is being tested, but your ability to pass a specific test.

Chapter 7

There were 3 days left before the tests, and I was in a somewhat apathetic state. When the preparation drags on and mistakes become more random than systematic, you realize that you can hardly squeeze out anything else useful from yourself.

My math testers gave results in the 690-700 region, but I consoled myself with the fact that the real test should be easier. As a rule, I did not have enough time for some questions that were easily solved by graphing calculators. With physics, the situation was much more pleasant: on average, I scored all 800 and made mistakes only in a couple of tasks, most often due to inattention.

How many points do you need to score to enter the best US universities? For some reason, most people from the CIS countries like to think in terms of "passing scores" and believe that the likelihood of success is measured by the results of entrance tests. In contrast to this thinking, almost every self-respecting prestigious university repeats the same thing on its website: we do not consider candidates only as a set of numbers and pieces of paper, each case is individual, and an integrated approach is important.

Based on this, we can draw the following conclusions:

1. It doesn't matter how many points you get. It matters what you are personality.
2. You are a person only if you scored 740-800.

So it goes. The harsh reality is that an 800/800 in your pocket won't make you a strong candidate - it just ensures that you're as good as everyone else in that dimension. Remember that you are competing with the best minds around the world, so the argument “I have good scores!” the answer is simple: “who doesn’t have them?”. A nice little thing is that after a certain threshold, scores really do not matter much: no one will turn you around because you scored 790, not 800. Due to the fact that almost all applicants have high results, this indicator ceases to be informative and you have to read the questionnaires and figure out what they are like there as people. But there is a downside here: if you got 600, and 90% of applicants got 760+, then what is the point of the admissions committee to spend their time on you if they have a lot of talented guys who are worn out enough to pass the test well? Of course, no one explicitly talks about this, but I assume that in some cases your application may simply be filtered out due to poor performance and no one will even read your essays and figure out what kind of person is behind them.

What score, in this case, is competitive? There is no definite answer to this question, but the closer to 800, the better. According to the old statistics from MIT, 50% of applicants had a score in the 740-800 range, and I was aiming for the same.

November 4, 2017, Saturday

According to the regulations, the doors of the test center opened at 07:45, and the test itself began at 08:00. I had to take two pencils with me, a passport and a special Admission Ticket, which I printed out in advance and even in color.

Since the fate of my admission directly depended on this day, I was afraid to be late and woke up at about 6. I had to go to the other end of the city to a place called "QSI International School of Minsk" - as I understand it, this is the only school in Belarus, where only foreigners are taken and where education is conducted entirely in English. I arrived there about half an hour before the right time: all kinds of embassies and private low-rise buildings were located near the school, it was dark all around, and I decided not to turn circles and leaf through the notes again. In order not to do this outside with a flashlight (besides, it was quite cold in the morning), I wandered into a children's rehabilitation center nearby and sat in the waiting room. The guard was very surprised at such an early visitor, but I explained that I had an exam in the next building and began to read. They say you can't breathe before you die, but refreshing some of the formulas in my head seemed like a pretty good idea.

When the clock showed 7:45, I hesitantly approached the gates of the school and, at the invitation of another guard, proceeded inside. Besides me, only the organizers were inside, so I sat down in one of the empty seats and, with extreme curiosity, began to wait for the rest of the test participants. 

By the way, there were about ten of them. The funniest thing would be to meet one of your university acquaintances there, catch the surprise on their face and silently throw a sly smirk, as if saying: “Aha, I got you! I know what you're doing here!" but it didn't happen. All those who took the test turned out to be Russian speakers, but it was only me and another guy with a Belarusian passport. Nevertheless, the entire briefing was conducted entirely in English (by the same Russian-speaking school employees), apparently in order not to deviate from the rules. Since the SAT dates vary from country to country, some people came from Russia/Kazakhstan just to take the test, but many were students at the school (albeit Russian speakers) and knew the proctors personally.

After a small check of documents, we were taken to one of the spacious classrooms (visually, the school mowed down with all its might to look like an American one), handed out forms and carried out another result. You write the test itself in large books, which can also be used as a draft - they contain the conditions of several Subjects at once, so you will be told to open it on the page of the desired test (if I remember correctly, you can register for one test, but take it at all the other one is limited only to the number of tests per day).

The instructor wished us good luck, wrote down the current time on the board, and the test began.

I wrote mathematics first, and it really turned out to be much easier than in the book on which I was preparing. By the way, the Kazakh woman at the next desk had the legendary TI-84 (a graphing calculator with a bunch of bells and whistles), which was often written about in books and talked about in videos on YouTube. There are limitations on the functionality of calculators, and they were checked before the start of the test, but I had nothing to worry about - my old man did not know that much, although we went through more than one Olympiad together. In general, during the test, I did not feel an urgent need to use something more fancy and even finished ahead of time. It is recommended to fill out the form at the end, but I did it on the go so as not to linger, and then just returned to those answers that I was not sure about. 

During a break between tests, some students at that school were discussing how much they had on the regular SAT and who would go where. According to the prevailing feelings, these were far from the guys who were worried about the issue of funding.

Physics was next. Here everything turned out to be a little more complicated than on trial tests, but I was very pleased with the question about the detection of exoplanets. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was nice to apply knowledge from astronomy at least somewhere.

After two tense hours, I handed in my forms and left the classroom. For some reason, while on duty, I wanted to learn a little more about this place: after talking with the workers, I realized that most of the participants are the children of various diplomats, and for obvious reasons, many of them are not eager to enter local universities. Hence the demand for the SAT. Mentally thanking them for not having to go to Moscow, I left school and went home.

This was just the beginning of my month-long marathon. The tests came with an interval of 2 weeks, and the test results too. It turns out that no matter how badly I write SAT Subjects now, I still need to fully prepare for TOEFL, and no matter how badly I pass TOEFL, I will not know about it until the moment I pass the SAT with Essay. 

There was no time to rest, and, returning home that day, I immediately began intensive preparation for the TOEFL. I will not go into details of its structure here, since this test is very popular and is used not only for admission and not only in the USA. Let me just say that there are also Reading, Listening, Writing and Speaking sections. 

Reading still had to read a bunch of texts, and I didn't find a better way to prepare than to practice reading these texts, answering questions and learning words that might come in handy. There were quite a lot of word lists for this part, but I used the book "400 Must-have words for TOEFL" and applications from Magoosh. 

As with any test, it was crucial to familiarize yourself with the type of all possible questions and study the sections in detail. On the same Magoosh website and YouTube there is a fairly comprehensive amount of preparation materials, so finding them is not difficult. 

Most of all, I was afraid of Speaking: in this part, I had to either answer some relatively random question into the microphone, or listen / read an excerpt and talk about something. It's funny that often Americans do not pass TOEFL with 120 points precisely because of this section.

I especially remember the first part: you are asked a question, and in 15 seconds you have to come up with a detailed answer to it, almost a minute long. Then your answer is listened to and evaluated for coherence, correctness, and everything else. The problem is that very often you cannot give an adequate answer to these questions even in your own language, let alone in English. During the preparation, I especially remember the question: “What was the happiest moment that happened in your childhood?” - I realized that 15 seconds would not be enough for me even to remember something that I could talk about for a minute as a happy moment of childhood.

Every day for those two weeks, I took a dorm room for myself and ran endless circles around it, trying to learn how to answer these questions clearly and fit exactly in a minute. A very popular way to respond to them is to create a template in your head that you will build each of your answers. It usually contains an introduction, 2-3 arguments, and a conclusion. All this is glued together with a bunch of passing phrases and turns of speech, and, voila, you blurted out something for a minute, even if it looks strange and unnatural.

I even had ideas for a CollegeHumor video on the subject. Two students meet, one asks the other:

Hi, how are you doing?
— I think that I'm fine today for two reasons.
First, I ate my breakfast and slept quite well.
Second, I have finished all my assignments, therefore, I am free for the rest of the day.
To sum it up, for these two reasons I think that I'm fine today.

The irony is that you will have to give approximately such unnatural answers - I don’t know how a conversation with a living person goes when passing IELTS, but I hope that everything is not so bad.

My main preparation guide was the notorious book “Cracking the TOEFL iBT” - it has everything that can be useful, including a detailed test structure, various strategies and, of course, samplers. In addition to the book, I used various exam simulators that I could find on torrents for "TOEFL simulator". I advise everyone to take at least a couple of tests from there in order to better feel the time frame and get used to the interface of the program with which you will have to work.

I had no particular problems with the listening part, as everyone speaks relatively slowly, clearly and with a normal American accent. The only problem was not to miss words or details that could later become the subject of questions.

I didn’t really prepare for writing, except that I remembered another popular structure for building my essay: an introduction, a few paragraphs with arguments, and a conclusion. The main thing is to pour more water, otherwise you won’t get the right number of words for good scores. 

November 18, 2017, Saturday

The night before toefl, I woke up about 4 times. The first time was at 23:40 - I decided that it was already morning, and went to the kitchen to put the kettle on, although only later I realized that I had slept for only two hours. The last time I dreamed that I was late for it.

The excitement was understandable: after all, this is the only test that you will most likely not be “forgiven” if you write it for less than 100 points. I consoled myself with the fact that even if I scored 90, then I would still have a chance to enter MIT.

The test center turned out to be cunningly hidden somewhere in the center of Minsk, and again I was one of the first. Since this test is much more popular than the SAT, there were more people here. I even stumbled upon a guy I saw 2 weeks ago when I took my subjects.

In this cozy room in the Minsk office of Streamline, the whole crowd of us waited for registration (as I understood, many of those present knew each other and went there for TOEFL preparation courses). In one of the frames on the wall, I saw a portrait of my teacher from the spring English classes, which gave me confidence in myself - although this test requires very specific skills, it still tests knowledge of a language with which I had no particular problems.

After some time, we began to enter the audience one by one, take pictures on the webcam and sit down at the computers. The beginning of the test is not synchronous: as soon as you sit down, then you start. For this reason, many tried to go at the beginning, so as not to be distracted when everyone around starts talking, and they still have only Listening. 

The test began, and I immediately noticed that instead of 80 minutes, I had 100 minutes for Reading, and instead of four texts with questions, five. This happens when one of the texts is given as experimental and is not evaluated, although you never know which one. I just hoped that it would be the text in which I would make the most mistakes.

If you are not familiar with the order of the sections, then they go like this: Reading, Listening, Speaking, Writing. After the first two - a 10-minute break, where you can leave the audience and warm up. Since I was not the first to go, by the time I finished listening (but there was still time for the section), someone nearby began to answer the first questions from Speaking. Moreover, several people began to answer at once, and from their answers I could understand that they were talking about children and why they love them.

By the way, I didn’t really like children, but I decided that it would be much easier to take and argue the opposite position to myself. Often in the TOEFL guidelines you are advised not to lie and answer honestly, but this is utter nonsense. In my opinion, you need to choose the position that is easiest for you to reveal and justify, even if it is completely opposite to your personal beliefs. This is a decision you must make in your head at the time the question is raised. TOEFL forces you to give detailed answers even when there is nothing to say, and therefore I am sure that people lie and make up things when they pass it every day. The question eventually turned out to be something like a choice of three activities for a summer student part-time job:

1. Counselor in a summer children's camp
2. A computer scientist in some library
3. Something else

Without hesitation, I began to rub in a detailed answer about my love for children, how interested I am with them and how we always get along. It was a blatant lie, but I'm sure I got the maximum score for it.

The rest of the test went without much incident, and after 4 hours I still broke free. Feelings were controversial: I knew that everything did not go as smoothly as I wanted, but I did everything I could. By the way, in the morning of the same day I received the results of SAT Subjects, but I decided not to open them until the test, so as not to get upset.

Having previously gone to the store for a Heineken for a promotion, in order to immediately celebrate / commemorate the result, I followed the link in the letter and saw this:

I was so happy that I even took a screenshot without waiting for the “Press F11 to exit full screen” to disappear. These were not ideal scores, but with them I turned out to be no worse than most of the strongest candidates. It was up to the SAT with Essay.

Since the TOEFL scores would not be known until the day before the next test, the tension did not subside. The very next day, I went to Khan Academy and began to intensively solve tests. With mathematics, everything was quite simple, but doing it perfectly did not work out both because of my own inattention and because of the abundance of word problems in which I sometimes got confused. In addition, every mistake you make is counted in the regular SAT, so for 800 points you had to score everything perfectly. 

Evidence-based Reading & Writing, as always, panicked me. As I already said, there were too many texts, they were designed for native speakers, and in total I could hardly get 700 in this section. It felt like it was the second TOEFL Reading, only more difficult - probably, there are people who think the opposite. As for the essay, there was practically no strength left for it at the end of the marathon: I looked at the general recommendations and decided that I would come up with something on the spot.

On the night of November 29, I received a notification in the mail that the results of my toefla were ready. Without hesitation, I immediately opened the ETS website and clicked View Scores:

Unexpectedly for myself, I received 112/120 and even got the maximum score for Reading. In order to apply to any of my universities, it was enough to get 100+ in total and score 25+ in each section. My chances of getting in were skyrocketing.

December 2, 2017, Saturday

Having printed out the Admission Ticket and grabbed a couple of pencils, I once again got to QSI International School Minsk, where this time there were much more people. This time, after a briefing, of course, in English, we were taken not to the office, but to the gym, where we had previously set up our desks.

I hoped to the last that the Reading & Writing section would be easier, but a miracle did not happen - as in preparation, I rushed through the text through pain and suffering, trying to meet the allotted time, and eventually answered something. The math turned out pretty well, but as for the essay...

I was surprised to find that you need to write it not on a computer, but with a pencil on paper. Or rather, I knew about it, but somehow I forgot and did not attach much importance. Since I did not want to erase entire paragraphs later, I had to think in advance what idea and in what part I would express. The text that I had to analyze seemed very strange to me, and at the end of my marathon of tests with breaks for preparation, I was notably so tired, so I wrote this essay on from ... in general, I wrote as best I could.

When I finally got out of there, I was as happy as if I had already done it. Not because I wrote well - but because all these exams are finally over. There was still a lot of work ahead, but it was no longer necessary to solve heaps of meaningless tasks and parse huge texts in search of answers under a timer. Lest the wait torment you as much as it did me in those days, let's fast forward to the night I got the results of my last test:

My first reaction was "it could have been worse." As expected, I flunked my reading (though not disastrously), made three mistakes in math, and wrote an essay on 6/6/6. Wonderful. I decided that the lack of Reading would be forgiven for me as a foreigner with a good TOEFL, and that this part would not influence so much against the background of fairly good subjects (after all, I went there to do science, and not read letters from the founding fathers of the USA to each other) . The main thing is that after all the tests, dobby was finally free.

Chapter 8

December, 2017

I agreed with my school in advance that in case of good test results, I would need their help in collecting documents. Someone may have problems at this stage, but I maintained a fairly good relationship with the teachers and, in general, my initiative was received positively.

The following was to be obtained:

• Transcript of grades for the last 3 years of study.
• The results of my tests on the transcript (for universities that allowed to do so)
• Fee Waiver Request to avoid paying the $75 Application Fee per application.
• Recommendation from my School Counselor.
• Two recommendations from teachers.

I would like to give you some very useful advice: do all documents in English. There is no point in making them in Russian, translating them into English, and even more so having it all certified by a professional translator for money.

When I arrived in my hometown, the first thing I did was head to school and cheered everyone up with relatively good test results. I decided to start with a transcript: in fact, this is just a statement of your grades for the last 3 years of school. I was given a flash drive with a table containing my grades for each quarter, and after a couple of simple translations and fiddling with tables, I got this:

From what you should pay attention: in Belarus there is a 10-point scale, and this must be reported in advance, because. not every admissions committee will be able to correctly interpret the essence of your grades. On the right side of the transcript, I posted the results of all standardized tests: I remind you that sending them > 4 costs a lot of money, and some universities allow you to send your scores along with the official transcript. 

By the way, on what basis the above documents are submitted:

1. You, as a student, take tests, register on the Common App website, fill in information about yourself, fill out a general form for admission, select the universities you are interested in, indicate the mailing address of your School Counselor and teachers who will give recommendations.
2. Your School Counselor (in American schools, this is a special person who should deal with your admission - I decided to write to the school principal), receives an invitation by mail, creates an account, fills in information about the school and uploads your grades, gives a brief description in the form of a form with questions about student and uploads his recommendation in PDF. He also approves the student's request for a Fee Waiver, if one has been made. 
3. Teachers who receive a referral request from you do the same, except they don't upload grade transcripts.

And this is where the fun begins. Since no one from my school had ever worked with such a system, and I needed to keep the whole situation under control, I decided that the most correct way would be to do everything myself. To do this, I first of all started 4 email accounts on Mail.ru:

1. For your School Counselor (transcripts, recommendations).
2. For a math teacher (recommendation #1)
3. For an English teacher (recommendation #2)
4. For your school (the official address of the school was needed, as well as for sending the Fee Waiver)

Theoretically, each School Counselor and teacher in this system has a bunch of students who need to prepare documents, but in my case everything was completely different. I personally controlled every stage of the submission of documents and during the time of admission I acted on behalf of 7 (!) Completely different actors (soon my parents were also added). If you apply from the CIS, then get ready for the fact that you will most likely have to do the same - you and only you are responsible for your admission, and keeping the whole process in your hands is much easier than trying to force other people to do everything to deadlines. Moreover, you and only you will know the answers to questions that will be found in different parts of the Common Application.

The next step was to prepare the Fee Waiver, which helped me save $1350 on survey submissions. It is provided upon request from your school representative to explain why the $75 Application Fee is a problem for you. There is no need to bring any proofs and attach bank statements: just write the average income in your family, and there will be no questions. The exemption from the application fee is a completely legal procedure, and it should be used by everyone for whom $ 75 is really a lot of money. Having put a seal on the resulting Fee Waiver, I sent it in PDF on behalf of my school to the admissions committees of all universities. Some may ignore you (that's fine), but MIT answered me almost immediately:

When the applications for wavers were sent out, the last step remained: to prepare 3 recommendations from the director and teachers. I think you will not be too surprised if I say that you will also have to write these things yourself. Luckily, my English teacher agreed to write me one of the recommendations in her own name, and also help with checking the rest. 

Writing such letters is a separate science, and each country has its own. One of the reasons why you should try to write such recommendations yourself, or at least participate in writing them, is that your teachers are unlikely to have experience in writing such papers for American universities. It is worth writing immediately in English, so that later you do not bother with the translation.

Basic tips for writing recommendation letters found on the Internet:

1. List the student's strengths, but not a list of everything he knows or can do.
2. Show his most outstanding achievements.
3. Support points 1 and 2 with stories and examples.
4. Try to use powerful words and phrases, but avoid clichés.
5. Emphasize the uniqueness of achievements against the background of other students - “the best student in the last few years” and the like.
6. Show how the student's past achievements will definitely lead to his future success, and what prospects await him.
7. Show what contribution the student will make to the university.
8. Put it all on one page.

Since you will have three recommendations, you need to make sure that they do not talk about the same thing and reveal you as a person from different sides. Personally, I broke them like this:

• In the recommendation from the director of the school, he wrote about his academic achievements, olympiads and other initiatives. This revealed me as an outstanding student and the main pride of the school for the last 1000 years of graduation.
• In the recommendation from the class teacher and mathematics teacher - about how I grew up and changed over 6 years (of course, for the better), studied well and showed myself in the team, a little about my personal qualities.
• In the recommendation from the English teacher, there was a little more emphasis on my soft skills and participation in the debate club.

All these letters should present you as an exceptionally strong candidate, but at the same time look realistic. I'm far from an expert in this matter, so I can only give one general advice: do not rush. Such papers rarely come out perfect the first time, but you can be very tempted to finish it quickly and say: “And so it will do!”. Re-read what you write several times and how it all adds up to a whole picture of you. Your image in the eyes of the selection committee directly depends on this.

Chapter 9

December, 2017

After I had prepared all the documents from the school and letters of recommendation, the only thing left was to write an essay.

As I said before, they are all written in special fields through the Common Application, and only MIT accepts documents through its portal. “Write an essay” is perhaps too rough a description of what needed to be done: in fact, each of my 18 universities had their own list of questions that had to be answered in writing, meeting a hard word limit. However, in addition to these questions, there is one essay that is common to all universities, which is part of the Common App Questionnaire. It, in fact, is the main one and requires the most time and effort.

But before we dive into writing huge canvases of text, I want to talk about one more optional stage of admission - an interview. It is optional for the reason that not all universities can afford to conduct interviews with a huge number of foreign applicants, and out of 18 I was offered an interview only in two.

The first one was with a representative from MIT. My interviewer turned out to be a graduate student who happened to be very similar to Leonard from The Big Bang Theory, which only added to the whole process of soulfulness.

 
I did not prepare for the interview in any way, except that I thought a little about the questions that I would ask if I had such a chance. We talked quite lightly for about an hour: I talked about myself, my hobbies, why I want to go to MIT, etc. He asked about university life, scientific prospects for undergraduate students and all sorts of things. At the end of the call, he said that he would give good feedback, and we said goodbye. It is possible that this phrase is said to absolutely everyone, but for some reason I wanted to believe him.

There isn't much to say about the following interview other than the funny fact that it took me by surprise: I was visiting and I had to talk to a Princeton representative on the phone on the balcony. I don’t know why, but talking on the phone in English always seemed to me much more scary than video calls, although the audibility was almost the same. 

To be honest, I don’t know how important all these interviews are, but they seemed to me to be something created more for the applicants themselves: there is an opportunity to communicate with real students of the university you want to go to, learn more about all the nuances and make a more conscious choice.

Now about the essay: I calculated that in total, in order to answer all the questions from 18 universities, I needed to write 11,000 words. On the calendar it was December 27, 5 days before the deadline. It's time to start.

For their main Common App essay (limit of 650 words), they could choose one of the proposed topics:

There was also the option to write something completely different, but I decided that the topic “Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?”. It looked like a good opportunity to reveal my path from a complete ignoramus to an international Olympiad, with all the difficulties and adversity that came along the way. It turned out quite well, in my opinion. I really lived by the Olympiads for the last 2 years of my school, my admission to a Belarusian university depended on them (what an irony), and leaving just a mention of them in the form of a list of diplomas seemed to me something unacceptable.

There are many essay writing tips. They overlap in many ways with those found in letters of recommendation, and I honestly can't give you better advice other than google it. The main thing is that this essay conveys your individual story - I dug quite a lot on the Internet and studied the main mistakes that applicants make: someone wrote about what a cool grandfather they had and how he inspired them (this will make the admission committee want to take your grandfather, not you). Someone poured too much water and went headlong into graphomania, for which there was not much content (fortunately, my English was too poor to accidentally do this). 

Once again my English teacher helped me with the proofreading of my main essay, and it was ready before December 27th. It remained to write answers to all other questions, which are smaller in volume (usually up to 300 words) and for the most part simpler. Here is an example of what I came across:

1. Caltech students have long been known for their quirky sense of humor, whether it be through planning creative pranks, building elaborate party sets, or even the year-long preparation that goes into our annual Ditch Day. Please describe an unusual way in which you have fun. (200 words max. I think I wrote something cool)
2. Tell us about something that is meaningful to you and why. (100 to 250 words is an awesome question. You don’t even know what to answer to such questions.)
3. Why Yale?

Questions from the category “Why %universityname%?” met in the list at every second university, so I copy-pasted them without shame or conscience and only slightly modified them. In fact, many of the other questions also intersected, and after a while I slowly began to go crazy, trying not to get confused in a huge pile of topics and mercilessly copying semantic pieces that I had already beautifully written that could be reused.

Some universities asked directly (on forms) if I belonged to the LGBT community and offered to talk about it for a couple of hundred words. In general, given the progressive agenda of American universities, there was a great temptation to lie and write something like an even more overwhelming story about a gay astronomer who faced Belarusian discrimination but still came to success! 

This all led me to one more thought: in addition to answering questions, in your Common App questionnaire you need to indicate your hobbies, achievements and all that. I wrote about diplomas, I also wrote about the fact that there was a Duolingo Ambassador, but the most important thing is: who and how will verify the accuracy of this information? Nobody asked me to upload copies of diplomas or anything like that. All things indicated that in my questionnaire I could lie as much as I liked and write about my non-existent exploits and fictitious hobbies.

That thought was funny. Why be the leader of a school boy scout group when you can lie about it and no one will ever know? Some things, of course, can be checked, but for some reason I was firmly convinced that at least half of the essays from international students came with a lot of lies and exaggerations.

Perhaps this was the most frustrating moment in writing an essay: you know that the competition is huge. You perfectly understand that between a mediocre student and a memorable child prodigy, they will choose the second one. You also understand that all your competitors are selling themselves to the fullest, and you have no other choice but to enter this game and try to put every positive thing about yourself up for sale.

Of course, everyone around you will tell you that you need to be yourself, but think for yourself: who does the selection committee need - you, or the candidate who seems stronger to them and will be remembered more than the others? It’s great if these two personalities coincide, but if writing an essay taught me anything, it’s the ability to sell myself: I have never tried to please someone so hard as in that questionnaire on December 31.

I remember a video where some guys involved in helping with admission talked about the prestigious Olympiad, which was supposed to send no more than one person from the school. So that their candidate could get there, they specially designed an entire school (!) with a couple of staff members and a single student. 

All I am trying to convey is that when you enter the best universities, you will compete with young scientists, businessmen, and who the hell else. You just have to stand out in some way.

Of course, in this matter one must not overdo it and create a living image, in which, first of all, they will believe. I didn’t write about what didn’t exist, but I caught myself thinking that I deliberately exaggerate many things and constantly try to guess where “weakness” can be shown for contrast and where not. 

After long days of writing, copy-pasting, and continuous analysis, my MyMIT profile is finally complete:

And on Common App too:

There were only a few hours left before the new year. All documents have been sent. The realization of what had just happened did not come to me immediately: too much energy had to be given away in the last couple of days. I did everything in my power, and most importantly, I kept the promise I made to myself that sleepless night in the hospital. I have reached the final. Then it was just a matter of waiting. Nothing else depended on me.

Chapter 10

March, 2018

Several months have passed. In order not to get bored, I signed up for front-end development courses in one of the local galleys, a month later I became discouraged, and then for some reason I took up machine learning and generally had fun as best I could.

In fact, after the New Year's deadline, I had one more thing to do: fill out the CSS Profile, ISFAA, and other forms about my family's income that were required when applying for Financial Aid. There is absolutely nothing to tell there: just carefully fill out the papers, and also upload certificates of parents' income (naturally, in English).

Sometimes I was visited by thoughts about what I would do if I did. The prospect of going back to the first year did not seem like a step back at all, but an opportunity to “start everything from scratch” and a kind of rebirth. For some reason, I was sure that I would hardly choose computer science as my specialty - after all, I studied there for 2 years, although this was not known to the American side. The good news is that many universities provide quite a lot of flexibility in choosing the courses that you are interested in, as well as various cool things like a double major. For some reason, I promised myself to take care of the Feynman Lectures on Physics over the summer if I get to some cool place - probably because of the desire to try my hand at astrophysics again outside of school Olympiads.

Time flew by unnoticed, and the letter that arrived on March 10 took me by surprise.

I don’t know why, but most of all I wanted to get into MIT - it so happened that this university had its own portal for applicants, its own memorable hostel, a lamp interviewer from TBBT and a separate place in my heart. The letter arrived at 8 pm, and as soon as I threw it into our MIT Applicants conversation (by the way, she managed to move to Telegram during the receipt), I realized that more than a year had passed since its creation (27.12.2016/2016/XNUMX). It was a long journey, and what I was waiting for now was by no means the results of another test: in the next few weeks, the outcome of my whole story, which originated on an ordinary evening in India in December XNUMX, was to be decided.

But before I had time to put myself in the proper mood, I suddenly received another letter:

That's something I didn't expect that evening. Without thinking twice, I opened the portal.

Alas, I didn't get into caltech. However, this was not too much of a surprise for me - the number of their students is much smaller than in other universities, and about 20 of them are international students per year. “Not fate,” I thought, and went to bed.

March 14 came. The letter with the decision on MIT was supposed to arrive at 1:28 at night, and I naturally did not intend to go to bed early. Finally, it appeared.

I took a deep breath.

I don't know if it was an intrigue for you, but I didn't get in. 

Of course, it was sad, but not too bad - after all, I still had 16 universities left. Sometimes my head was visited by especially bright thoughts:

Me: “If you estimate that the admission rate for international students is somewhere around 3%, then the probability of getting into at least one of the 18 universities is 42%. It's not that bad!"
My brain: "You do realize you're using probability the wrong way, right?"
Me: “I just wanted to hear something smart and calm down.”

A couple of days later I received another email:

It's funny, but already from the first lines of the letter it was possible to understand whether you were enrolled or not. If you watch those videos where people on camera are happy to receive acceptance letters, you will notice that they all begin with the word “Congratulations!”. There was nothing to congratulate me on. 

And the rejection letters kept coming. For example, here are a few more:

I noticed that absolutely each of them had the same template:

1. We are very, very sorry that you will not be able to study with us!
2. We have a lot of applicants every year, we physically can’t enroll everyone and therefore we didn’t enroll you.
3. It was a very difficult decision for us, and in no way does it say anything bad about your intellectual or personal qualities! We are very impressed with your abilities and achievements, and we have no doubt that you will find a great university for yourself.

In other words, "it's not about you." You don’t need to be seven spans in your forehead to understand that absolutely every one of those who didn’t receive such a polite answer, and even a complete idiot will hear about how well done he is and how truly sorry they are. 

The rejection letter will contain absolutely nothing of yours except your name. All that you end up with after many months of your efforts and careful preparation is a piece of hypocrisy a couple of paragraphs long, completely inhuman and uninformative, from which you will not feel better. Of course, everyone would like to know the truth about what exactly made the admissions committee take someone else, and not you, but you will never know that either. It is important for every university to maintain its reputation, and the best way to do this is to send a mass mailing without giving any reasons.

The most annoying thing is that you won’t even be able to understand if someone actually read your essays. Of course, this is not announced, but by simple reasoning, we can come to the conclusion that in all top universities there are not physically enough people to pay attention to each candidate, and at least half of the applications are automatically filtered based on your tests and other criteria pleasing to the university. You can put your heart and soul into writing the best essay in the world, but it will go to oblivion due to the fact that you wrote some SAT too badly. And I very much doubt that this happens only in undergraduate admissions committees.

Of course, there is some truth in what is written. According to the admission officers themselves, when it is possible to filter the pool of candidates to a tangible amount (say, at the rate of 5 people per place), then the selection process is not much different from random. As with many job interviews, it's hard to predict how successful a prospective student will be. Given that most applicants are very smart and talented, in reality it can be much easier to flip a coin. No matter how much the admission committee would like to make the process as fair as possible, in the end, admission is a lottery, the right to take part in which, nevertheless, still needs to be earned.

Chapter 11

March went on as usual, and every week I received more and more rejections. 

Letters came in a variety of places: at lectures, in the subway, in the hostel. I never read them all the way through because I knew full well that I would see absolutely nothing new or personal. 

In those days, I was in a rather apathetic state. After the rejections from Caltech and MIT, I wasn't too upset because I knew that there were 16 more universities where I could try my luck. Each time I opened the letter with the hope that I would see congratulations inside, and each time I found the same words there - “we are sorry”. That was enough. 

Did I believe in myself? Perhaps yes. After the winter deadlines, for some reason I had a lot of confidence that I would at least go somewhere with my set of tests, essays and achievements, but with each successive refusal, my optimism faded more and more. 

Almost no one in my circle knew what was going on in my life during those weeks. For them, I have always been and remained an ordinary second-year student, with no intention of dropping out or going somewhere.

But one day my secret was in danger of being exposed. It was the most ordinary evening: a friend was doing some very important work on my laptop, and I was serenely pacing around the block when a notification about another letter from the university suddenly appeared on the phone screen. The mail was just opened in the next tab, and any curious click (which is typical for my girlfriend) would immediately tear the veil of secrecy from this event. I figured I should open the email as soon as possible and delete it before it got too much attention, but I stopped halfway through:

The heart beat faster. I didn’t see the usual words “we are sorry”, I didn’t see indignation because of the huge pool of candidates or any praise addressed to me, they simply and without any leads told me that I had entered.

I don’t know if it was possible to understand at least something from my facial expression at that moment - probably, the realization of what I had just read did not immediately dawn on me. 

I could. All the rejections that could come from the remaining universities no longer mattered much, because no matter what happens, my life will never be the same. Getting into at least one university was my main goal, and this letter said that there was no need to worry further. 

In addition to congratulations, the letter included an invitation to participate in Admitted Students Weekend, a 4-day event from NYU Shanghai, within which you could fly to China and meet your future classmates, go on excursions and generally see the university itself. NYU paid for everything except the cost of the visa, but participation in the event was played randomly among students who expressed a desire to participate. After weighing the pros and cons, I signed up for the lottery and won. The only thing I haven't been able to do yet is look at the amount of financial assistance that I have been granted. There was some kind of bug in the system, and financial assistance did not want to be displayed on the site, although I was sure that there would be a full amount from the meet full demonstrated need principle. Otherwise, there was no point in enrolling me.

I kept getting rejected from various other universities, but I didn't care anymore. China, of course, is not America, but in the case of NYU, the education was entirely in English and there was an opportunity to go to study at another campus for one year - in New York, Abu Dhabi or somewhere in Europe among partner universities. After some time, I even received this thing in the mail:

It was an official acceptance letter! The envelope also included a joke passport, in English and Chinese. Although everything can now be done electronically, most universities still send out paper letters in beautiful envelopes.

The Admitted Student Weekend wasn't supposed to take place until the end of April, and in the meantime, I just sat happy and watched various videos about NYU to get a better feel for the atmosphere there. The prospect of learning Chinese seemed to me more intriguing than intimidating - all graduates needed to master it at least at an intermediate level.

Wandering around the expanses of youtube, I came across a channel of a girl named Natasha. She herself was a student of NYU 3-4 courses and in one of her videos she talked about her history of admission. She herself passed all the tests a couple of years ago in the same way that I did, and entered NYU Shanghai on full funding. Natasha's story only added to my optimism, although I was surprised at how few views a video with such valuable information collects. 

Time passed, and after about a week, information about the fin finally appeared in my personal account. Help:

And this is where I got a little carried away. The amount I saw ($30,000) barely covered half the full cost of tuition for the year. It seems that something went wrong. I decided to write to Natasha:

But shouldn't they just have me deployed, knowing that I don't have that kind of money?

And here I realized where I had miscalculated. NYU is almost the only university on my list that does not have the “meet full demonstrated need” criterion. Perhaps these things changed in the process of my admission, but the fact remained: the shop was closed. For a while I tried to correspond with the university and asked if they would like to reconsider their decision, but it was all in vain. 

Naturally, I did not go to the admitted students weekend. And the refusals from other universities continued to go: one day, I received 9 pieces at once.

And nothing in these failures has changed. All the same general phrases, all the same sincere regret.

April 1st arrived. Including NYU, at that point I was rejected by 17 universities - what a wonderful thing to collect. The last remaining university, Vanderbilt University, has just submitted its decision. With an almost complete absence of any hope, I opened the letter, expecting to see a refusal there and finally close this protracted story with admission. But there was no refusal.

A flame of hope lit up in my chest. Waitlist is not the best thing that can happen to you, but it's not a rejection. People from the waitlist begin to be recruited if accepted students decide to go to some other university. In the case of Vanderbilt, who was clearly not the No. 1 choice for most strong applicants anyway, I figured I had a chance. 

Some of Anya's acquaintances were also sent to the wait list, so it did not look like something completely hopeless. All I had to do was confirm my interest and wait.

Chapter 12

July 2018 

It was a typical summer day at MIT. Leaving one of the institute's laboratories, I went to the dormitory building, where all my things were already in one of the rooms. In theory, I could take my time and come here only in September, but I decided to take the opportunity and come earlier, as soon as my visa was opened. Every day more and more international students arrived: almost immediately I became acquainted with an Australian and a Mexican who, by sheer chance, worked with me in the same laboratory. During the summer, although most of the students were on vacation, life at the university was in full swing: research, internships were carried out, and even a special group of MIT students remained who organized the reception of constantly visiting international students, gave them a tour of the campus and, in general, helped them to get used to in a new place. 

For the remaining 2 months of the summer, I had to do something like my little research on the application of Deep Learning in recommender systems. It was one of the many topics proposed by the institute, and for some reason it seemed to me very interesting and close to what I was doing in Belarus at that time. As it turned out later, for many of the guys who arrived in the summer, the topic of research in one way or another affected machine learning, although these projects were quite simple and were more of an educational nature. Probably, you are already interested in the second paragraph of one obsessive question: how did I end up at MIT? Didn't I get a rejection letter back in mid-March? Or did I fake it on purpose to keep the intrigue? 

And the answer is simple: MIT is the Manipal Institute of Technology in India, which I did get into for a summer internship. Let's start again.

It was a typical summer day in India. I learned from my own experience that this season is not the most favorable for holding an international Olympiad: almost every day it rained, which always started in a matter of seconds, sometimes leaving no time even to open an umbrella.

I kept getting messages that I was still on the Waitlist and had to confirm my interest every couple of weeks. Back at the dorm and noticing another letter from them in the mailbox, I opened it and got ready to do it again: 

All hope was dead. The last refusal put an end to this story. I took my finger off the touchpad and it was all over. 

Conclusion

So my story of a year and a half has come to an end. Many thanks to everyone who has read up to this point, and I really hope that my experience has not become discouraging for you. At the end of the article, I would like to share some thoughts that arose during its writing, as well as give a couple of tips to those who decide to do so.

Perhaps someone is tormented by the question: what exactly did I lack? There is no exact answer to it, but I suspect that everything is quite banal: I was just worse than the rest. I am not a gold medalist in physics and I am not Dasha Navalnaya. I don’t have any special talents, achievements or a memorable background - I’m the most ordinary guy from a country unknown to the world who just decided to try his luck. I did everything that was in my power, but it was not enough compared to the rest.

Why, then, after 2 years, I decided to write all this and share my failure? No matter how strange it may sound to someone, but I believe that in the CIS countries there are a huge number of talented guys (much smarter than me) who are not even aware of what opportunities they have. Undergraduate admission abroad is still considered something absolutely impossible, and I really wanted to show that in reality there is nothing mythical and insurmountable in this process.

What did not work out for me does not mean at all that it will not work out for you, your friends or your children. A little about the fate of the characters featured in the article:

• Anya, who inspired me to do this whole thing, successfully completed the 3rd grade of an American school and is now studying at MIT. 
• Natasha, according to her YouTube channel, graduated from NYU Shanghai after studying for a year in New York, and is now studying for a master's degree somewhere in Germany.
• Oleg works in computer vision in Moscow.

And finally, I would like to give some general advice:

1. Start as early as possible. I know people who have been applying since 7th grade: the more time you have, the easier it will be for you to prepare and develop a good strategy.
2. Do not give up. If you didn't get in the first time, you can still get in the second or third. If you demonstrate to the selection committee that you have grown a lot over the past year, then there will be much more chances. If I had started to enroll in the 11th grade, then by the time of the events of the article it would have been my third attempt. You don't need to retake tests.
3. Explore less popular universities as well as universities outside of the US. Full funding is not as rare as you might think, and SAT and TOEFL scores can come in handy when applying to other countries. I have not studied the issue much, but I know that there are several universities in South Korea that have a real chance of getting into.
4. Think twice before approaching one of those "admission gurus" who will help you get into Harvard for a hefty sum. Most of these people have nothing to do with university admissions, so ask yourself clearly: what exactly are you going to help and is it worth the money. You will most likely be able to pass the tests and collect the documents yourself. I did.
5. If you are from Ukraine, try UGS or other non-profit organizations that can help you. I do not know of analogues in other countries, but, most likely, they are.
6. Try looking for private grants or scholarships. Perhaps universities are not the only way to get money for education.
7. If you have undertaken to act, believe in yourself, otherwise you simply will not have the strength to bring this matter to the end. 

I sincerely would like this story to end with a happy ending, and my personal example would inspire you to exploits and accomplishments. I would like to leave a photo at the end of the article against the backdrop of MIT, as if saying to the whole world: “Look, this is possible! I did it, and you can do it too!”

Alas, but not fate. Do I regret the time I wasted? Not really. I am well aware that I would regret much more if I were afraid to try to implement what I really believed in. 18 rejections hit your self-esteem quite hard, but even in this case, you should not forget about why you are doing all this. By itself, studying at a prestigious university, although it is a wonderful experience, should not be your ultimate goal. Do you want to gain knowledge and change the world for the better, as absolutely every applicant writes in their essays? Then the absence of a fashionable Ivy League diploma should not stop you. There are many more accessible universities, and there are plenty of free books, courses, and lectures on the internet to help you learn much of what Harvard would teach you. Personally, I am very grateful to the community Open data science for a huge contribution to open education and the ultimate concentration of smart people to ask questions. Anyone who is interested in machine learning and data analysis, but for some reason is still not a member, I recommend joining immediately.

And for each of you who get excited about doing it, I want to quote from the MIT answer:

"Regardless of which letter awaits you, please know that we think you're simply fantastic - and we can't wait to see how you change our world for the better."

Source: habr.com