How to Get Into MIT with Toilet Paper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo1S8-2pyRY

Seventeen students folded 53,000 feet of toilet paper in half 13 times using the climate-controlled confines of the 825-foot hallway known as the Infinite Corridor at MIT.

Working for eight hours, the students used jumbo rolls of toilet paper with more than 2,000 feet in each roll. The ends were taped together and the long piece folded in half until it was only five feet long, two-and-a-half-feet high, and 8,192 layers. 

Impressive!

Welcome back my dear virtual little siblings! I’m Kevin Zhen, and this is how to get into MIT using TP. Let’s dive right into it. 

The first key concept I want to talk about is uselessness. Yes you heard me right. Uselessness. Allow me to explain. 

Now, typically when we think of MIT, we think of the engineer-entrepreneur who has harnessed the power of the wind to electrify an entire village. Or some teenage inventor that builds robots to collect microplastics in oceans. 

And while this is a totally valid approach to helping you get in – there's a few other ingredients which I feel like most applicants overlook. Playfulness. Humor. Personality. What if I told you we could hit all three of these notes by building something totally useless? 

How? Well at the end of the day MIT wants kids who can solve problems, yeah sure– but they’re also looking for kids who do engineering… just for the pure love and joy of engineering. Take this Head Mounted Toilet Paper Dispenser for example. 

First off, the sheer uselessness of this invention conveys humor. The fact that someone would go out of their way to make something like this, I mean: how is that not funny? Can you imagine getting one of these for Christmas? In fact, if you wrote an essay about how you 3D printed this device and gave it to your sister who you know always has allergies and sniffles for her birthday… that would be a pretty eye-catching approach! See what I mean? 

The beauty of this tactic is that it takes very little time. I am not an engineer. Personally I’m more of a humanities kid myself. But just look at this thing– I mean anyone could make it! And I promise you that MIT really wants you to talk about things like this. In fact, one of their short response questions from 2023 was literally: 

We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do simply for the pleasure of it.

Too many students try to use this section to talk about “what a good person they are.” They mention some volunteering experience that already appears on their activities list or resume, glare which by the way, quick application tip – try not to write about something that appears elsewhere on your application. Or students write about cooking with their family, which, to be fair, is honestly quite wholesome, but not exactly what a school like MIT is looking for. 

Cooking up some curry with your grandma is a very solid approach for a school like Yale or Dartmouth who love down-to-earth kids, but MIT wants playful, quirky and just downright weird students! 

Which brings me to this: the time a bunch of high schoolers tried to break the world record for paper folding back in 2011. These students were from the Boston area and partnered with OrigaMIT, MIT’s origami club, to break a world record. In the end, I think they managed to fold 13,000 feet of single-ply toilet paper 12 times. Now that is something worth bragging about. I love this approach because it conveys both ingenuity and intellectual vitality. While I’m not 100% sure, I’m fairly confident that one of these kids ended up going to MIT… or at the very least a top 5 engineering program in the country. 

Also, take a look at this website right here, Slice of MIT. What does it say? MIT students want you to be SIQ. Surprising, Insightful, Quirky. These are the traits MIT wants in its students– not just someone who’s nice at engineering, but someone who applies engineering in inventive ways. 

Returning back to the toilet paper folding project. Again, we are on a schedule. Time is of the essence. Which is precisely why doing something like this is so clever! It’s actually easier to execute a project like this with a team of motivated individuals in a weekend than it is to start a nonprofit, or code some new app, which could take weeks if not months. 

This is just one example of a relatively low-input, high-impact project that you could accomplish in a couple of hours, but honestly there are hundreds if not thousands. The only limit is your imagination. And I guess how much toilet paper you have access to. 

Final Warning: There’s something really important that just needs to be said. What I’m not advising you to do is to stop doing highly ambitious projects which help showcase your technical skills in computer science and mechanical engineering. 

Obviously, MIT loves that sort of stuff and if you’re watching this as a freshman, sophomore or even junior, you can and should build all those cool things. Like if you manage to create a biodegradable, sustainable toilet paper (clap clap clap) Terrific. Sensational. 

But you have to imagine that in a world where everyone and their second cousin are coding apps or building robots, we need to add some flavor, some spice, some rock and roll, to our application.

And how do we do that? Be useless. But also useful. But also useless. 

Best,

Kevin Zhen