u/Then_Wheel_5184

Hi everyone! This isn't directly MIT-related, but MIT seems to match my vibe extremely (from the alumni friends and projects I have seen them do).

Well, for some context, I am a low-income, US citizen living in India, with the most indecisive brain on what major to choose.

For all of high school, I have been an Olympiad kid,
multiple selections to AIME, and it's Indian Eqv (even went till 13 in AIME this year, but couldn't qualify for USAMO due to residency issues).
Made the IOAA Selection Camp this year with a top 5 in the nation score (I hope to represent the USA soon, haha), USACO plat, many other college math comps (pmc/smt/etc) as well.

The activities I did for the past few years also aren't extremely related(?) (like an A math book I wrote, an open source math resource thing I found with thousands of users, a couple of club presidencies, a YouTube channel where I did popular song covers, played basketball and chess quite a LOT actually (2000+ ratings), a decently good research paper on chess mech interp I wrote with some caltech friends I made online?

This extremely unorganized/non-coherent problem is mainly due to my complete obliviousness to what I will do after high school for a very long time (up until 3-4 months ago), with me entering senior year rn :/

I was thinking maybe math + physics would be a decent choice due to me just generally liking math and physics, but like Idk if that would make too much sense in terms of college!? (honestly, I'm quite clueless, please help me)
I'm kinda spiraling recently about this, cuz I feel like I need to "prepare" myself for college admissions...

And please, this is not a chanceme post, Ik MIT is really hard to get into, I just need help on major choice :D

Future Aim: Make as much impact as possible on the world, maybe startups? research? something that would be useful to everyone even after I die, and also travel the world a lot (I legit don't give a singular damn about anything else)

Thanks to anyone who read this and to everyone who decide to spend their valuable time helping me here. Im truly grateful :D

Yes, you read the title correctly. Even after getting into USAMO eqv (INMO) and USACO Plat, I was flat-out rejected from every single summer program I applied to (YYGS, SSP, MITES, Assip). Maybe I should have applied to more reputable programs (we don't count acceptances from programs like LaunchX) or maybe written stronger essays. Obviously, I am not entitled to anything, but I was still hoping I would get in somewhere good, considering the awards (I have many more college comp awards in math to back me up) + decent ECs (top EC was my math platform with 50k+ monthly views and the book I wrote with 11k downloads).... ig, it was a very humbling experience (putting it lightly btw, I cried myself to sleep a lot due to ts)

Well.. today I got info that I'm getting an Oly medal for the exam I preppared for while getting rejected from all these programs, (YAY!! My first oly medal lol) + Maybe camp (t15 in Astro in the USA would be pretty okayish ig haha) (results for this arent announced yet, will update the post when they do in 2 days), As some wise man used to say, Everything works out in the end 😃

Lesson from the story: Just shut tf up, stop crying like me that you didn't get in, continue putting in the work, somehow everything will work out in the end!

Hopefully, I am motivating some people here; that is the intended purpose of this post. I hope whoever reads this will pray that I get into camp,

Thankuuu and Best Regards
-- scooby doodlily doooo

I took too many STEM APs for someone who must self-study all of them. Micro seemed cool, so I took it as well :/

Got a reminder today that I am registered for ts... Gonna follow the other posts already made to try cram up the entire damn syllabus in 2 days and get a 5 (I WANNA SWEEP!)

Please keep me accountable mis amigos

Demographics:

Asian male

Low income (~40k/yr): Significant Financial aid needed

Had to emigrate to India sometime around 1st grade (still I am a US citizen, so considered domestic for many unis.)

extremely rural until 5th grade, after that urban (was very weak academically + poor when we came to the city)

Academics:

3.98 UW, School doesn't calculate weighted (This is based on the A+/A/B/C/D/E/F grades which my school assigns, my 10th board marks is 97.8%)

5’s on 5 APs on top of CBSE (School doesn't offer AP courses, so I self-study for all of them and take them elsewhere)

1540 SAT (800M/740R) (Single Sitting) (Gonna retake in August and get a higher English score hopefully)

Top 3 of 42 (THE highest ranked class in all of my schools branches) and Top 5 of 5000 kids in my batch (the top-most batch in my school) (IIT-JEE prep school, so they rank wrt to all branches available in the nation) (School is about 11.5 hours each day, including Sundays (10 hours on Sundays alone lol, very less ikr), (and yes, we don't have holidays) 😞, ngl ts takes up tooo much of my time. (The other kids from my class have nothing apart from JEE prep, so they aren't applying to US unis)

Double major Math + Business

Extracurricular activities:

1) Founder, Admin & CTO — Math Education Org (11-12): 50k views/month recently; 6k users (65+ countries); managing a team of 30+ active builders, with partnerships and recognition from many ultra-large institutions in the relevant niche. Sponsored by a quant firm. (This project is like ultra-active rn, with the user base projected to reach 50-100k before college apps (lowballing, actually), and monthly web views prolly reaching 0.5 mil). (14 h/week)

2) Author: Olympiad Math Prep Book (10-12): 20k+ Downloads across 40+ countries; Recognised for great quality by leading math organisations in India (they made full videos about this). Personally taught 21 students (online) with 100% qualification rate into either AIME or RMO (AIME equivalent in India) (5-6 hours a week)

3) President—Debate/Speech Club: (10-12): 60+ members (some members had achieved top 5 in several international debate comps); ran workshops & training; managed outreach/content; Doubled membership of club during my terms.

4) Founder & Developer — Education SaaS Platform (9-10): Solo Built and launched an education-focused SaaS platform serving 500+ users; streamlined access to academic resources and student tools. Hosted several charity runs in which we donated 1500+ books to orphanages and government libraries within my city (got recognized by local news, and a BJP party member for this lol)

5) Musician & Lead Vocalist (6-11): Earned Trinity College London Grade 5 certification with distinction; self-taught guitar and drums; lead singer of school/local band performing multiple live events annually (400+ member audience in each); created music content surpassing 1M+ YouTube views.

6) Independent Research — QFin (9-12): Published on arxiv, built ML/stat models; MATLAB/Python analysis; ran optimizations, forward-testings; (Resulted in production of a financial tool used by 40+ traders) (ps: Started this to help my dad with investing. Only way to not let inflation eat up your savings these days :/) (Recently, I'm working with some IIT undergrads on this, might get it published on smtg more "prestigious" later, but unsure whether it will happen before applications end)

7) Tech Intern — Tech Company (10th)
Redesigned and developed entire UI, automated many workflows (reduced video creation time by 90% and average user application time from 12 mins to 2.5 mins, and doubled user retention during applications. Worked very closely with the founding team, who appreciated my work greatly.

Awards:

1. Math Olympiads: AMC 12 (DHR last year, and HR this year with a 144..... lowk wtf were those cutoffs), AIME: 13 (top 5%), RMOx2 (AIME eqv of India), INMOx1 (USAMO eqv of India)
2. (Note: I can't qualify for USAMO under recent rules as I live in India rn.)
3. Selected for Camp in one of the lower-tier Olympiads (US pipeline, not indian) (Astro, or AI, or Chem)
4. Computing Olympiad (USACO Platinum) with a certified perfect score in USACO Gold.
5. PMC (Conducted by UPenn): Ranked within the top 10 in Individuals, and my team ranked 1st, Purple Comet: Team got International 1st with a perfect score.
6. AIR 1 in a national math comp, got grand prize for perfect score. (Prize: the laptop I'm writing this post from lmao)
7. Merit Scholarship of 50% (maximum they offer) for exceptional academic performance.

Sports:

Basketball — Played and won at several District-level tournaments (8-9th grade)
Chess — 2000+ elo on Lichess Rapid

School list:

HYPSM & all ivies, GT, Caltech, Duke, UChicago, UC Berkeley, CMU, Oxford, IIT, NUS. (I can add more, but I need lots of financial aid for US unis, so Idk how practical other unis might be)
(Prolly gonna try keeping IIT/NUS/Oxford as backups as they require only grades/ranks)

Haven't been in this sub recently, but came back as I practically got f##ked by summer apps and the anxiety is getting to me... prolly just gonna lock in this summer for IIT-Prep to make sure I get some decent sub 300 AIR rank, so that even if US unis don't work out in my favour, I can always fall back on IITs/NUS.

Also, I kinda suck at writing (assuming this although people said they are decent cuz I got rejected from most of my summer apps), so I'm probably gonna take some outside help for that. If y'all have any other suggestions apart from the chance me on things like how I should list things better, or like describe things better, please say that as well (would appreciate it a lot 😃)

(Note: for some activities I listed 12 as well, it's because 12th grade starts here during jan itself)