RSI Essays Guide 2025
The mack daddy of all summer research programs, RSI, has just released its essays. Getting into RSI practically guarantees one is admitted to MIT and other tier-1 colleges. In this blog post, we'll help you tackle the essays RSI asks for, so you can maximize your chances of being admitted into this life-changing program.
1. Articulate why the research fields chosen on the previous page are intriguing and exciting to you. For each sub-field, state what you perceive as the one or two most interesting questions or problems in this area. Explain why these sorts of questions interest you. Your responses are shared with mentors. Please respond with clarity and specificity, including what specific prior research/coursework/etc experiences have prepared you to "hit the ground running" in these fields at RSI.
As part of the RSI application, you must select one or two general research areas you are interested in pursuing. Afterwards, you will manually indicate the sub-fields within those general areas that you want to work in. It is crucial that you understand the general research areas well enough to use correct scientific terminology when describing them. You must then identify two frontier problems within each chosen sub-field. In other words, this essay requires you to analyze a sub-field of a sub-field.
This prompt reveals a great deal about RSI itself: it is an ultra-elite program designed for deeply dedicated high-school researchers. One important thing to remember is that the sub-fields and sub-sub-fields you write about will not necessarily correspond to the project you will actually conduct at RSI. Mentors come with pre-existing research projects, and you will join them one-on-one. Because all mentors are anonymous, you cannot simply look them up and tailor your essay to match what they are currently doing.
However, you can make an educated guess. All RSI mentors are MIT professors, research scientists, or graduate students. For this reason, I recommend examining the MIT academic departments most closely aligned with the general research areas you select, identifying the sub-fields they focus on, and exploring the frontier problems those groups are currently tackling. The key, however, is not to choose the most common or popular sub-field at MIT. Instead, select the sub-fields and frontier problems that you can authentically justify based on your prior research experience, coursework, and other academic or extracurricular pursuits.
Your goal is to convince the reader that you will “hit the ground running.” To do this, vividly describe the technical problems you have previously solved that relate to your intended research area. Highlight general scientific skills such as hypothesis formulation, feature engineering, designing novel questions, understanding how to identify meaningful research questions, solving advanced math/physics/chemistry/biology Olympiad-level problems, and using scientific equipment competently.
After demonstrating what you have accomplished, show how these skills will translate to tackling the frontier problems in the sub-fields you discuss. Finally, even though you will look at MIT departments to guide your choices, do not mention any specific professors by name. Because mentors remain anonymous, naming someone who will not actually be your mentor adds no value and may even weaken your application.
2. What are your long-range goals?
In other words, what are your long-term goals? The first RSI essay should be very nerdy and technical. Its purpose is to show that you can thrive in the ultra-rigorous RSI environment, fearlessly tackle frontier problems, and make meaningful, rapid progress on the project you will pursue with your mentor.
The remaining essays, however, are about connecting emotionally with the reader and making them personally want to root for you to attend this program. As a result, I recommend beginning the essay with a vivid account of an experience in your life that provides a strong personal motivation for your long-term goals. For example, if you want to combat climate change, a visceral introduction about how your relatives suffered from environmental pollution could be compelling.
From there, explain how that experience motivated you to pursue academic and leadership activities related to your long-term goal, and how those experiences further shaped and refined that goal. Then clearly state your long-term goal. You need to be specific, show the reader that you have a real, concrete vision for the future.
It is vital that you not only provide a vivid, first-person depiction of you engaging in the work connected to your long-term goal, but also show how achieving that goal will tangibly improve the lives of real people. Conclude the essay with a full-circle moment that explains why achieving this goal will be personally meaningful in light of the event you described in your hook, and how it will recontextualize your current experiences.
3. What activities and/or hobbies demonstrate your leadership, creativity and uniqueness?
Resist the urge to turn this into a long essay that walks the reader through your entire resume. Talking endlessly about yourself will turn the reader off. If you genuinely demonstrate leadership, creativity, and uniqueness, one activity is enough. If you truly can’t resist, then discuss two activities, but no more.
Show the reader, in a vivid first-person perspective, what it looks and feels like when you engage in that activity. Give them a front-row seat to your mind as you work. Highlight the challenges you face, how you overcome them, and what you’ve learned. Show how you take responsibility and lead from the front, when applicable.
Provide strong personal motivations for the one or two activities you choose to highlight. Convey how much these activities genuinely mean to you, and do your best to showcase the tangible, real-world impact they have had on real people.
4. Describe your participation in extracurricular or community outreach activities?
Students, and, I hate when these applications ask redundant questions like this. Summer research programs often do this: they ask one question, then ask a slightly different version of the same question right afterward. I strongly recommend avoiding any repetition in this essay. All of your academic, research, and “nerdy” extracurricular activities should be fully covered in the first essay, where you explain how those experiences prepare you to hit the ground running at RSI.
For this prompt, shift your focus to your non-academic extracurriculars and community outreach. The goal here is to make the reader personally root for you. You want them to empathize with you and genuinely want to see you participate in RSI.
Start the essay with a vivid moment that motivated your interest in community outreach. Then show the reader, in a first-person, immersive way, how you interact with people during this outreach: how you empathize with their challenges, how you work through obstacles, and how your efforts create tangible improvements in their lives. You don’t need to cover everything you’ve ever done. Pick one or two meaningful activities that demonstrate your compassion and your capacity to help others.
Conclude with how these experiences have shaped your goals and aspirations as a future scientist or engineer.
5. Why are you applying to RSI? What aspects most appeal to you?
There are three key themes you need to highlight in your response to this question.
First, emphasize how deeply you want to be challenged, and how you know that working one-on-one with a mentor on a frontier problem will push you intellectually in ways nothing else ever has.
Second, show your desire to meet and collaborate with peers who share your passion for academics and research, students who genuinely love exploring the unknown, who think fearlessly, and who will expose you to new ideas far beyond your primary research interests at RSI.
Third, convey how meaningful it is to learn from people at the very pinnacle of their fields, including Nobel Prize winners, and how transformative it would be to have them evaluate your presentation and offer feedback. Explain how that kind of insight could become a foundational part of your future research career, potentially even life-changing.
To make each of these three reasons compelling, include powerful personal anecdotes. Show the reader, vividly and in the first person, how you grow when you face academic challenges where it’s “you vs. you.” Demonstrate your love for mystery and the thrill of solving problems whose answers are unknown, and how that uncertainty frees you to attempt bold, novel approaches.
Show how interacting with intelligent peers has shaped both your intellectual and personal growth. Share moments when mentors have impacted your life, how receiving advice from someone accomplished, someone you look up to, made you a better researcher and a more confident thinker.
Conclude the essay with a vivid, powerful vision of the person you hope to become immediately after attending RSI.
This account of what it is like to attend RSI will prove useful for addressing this question: https://www.quora.com/Research-Science-Institute-RSI-What-is-it-like-to-attend-RSI
If you want help applying to RSI or any other summer research program, or would just like someone to help you strengthen your overall extracurriculars, schedule a free consultation with an admissions expert today.
