RSI Is the Hardest Application You Will Fill Out in High School

The RSI application is the hardest application you will fill out in high school. Its essays and awards lists allow up to 35,000 characters, about 5,800 words, which is about as much writing as the entire Common App plus the supplements for six Ivy League schools. It is also as much as the five longest applications among other competitive summer research programs combined.

On top of that writing, RSI asks for a season by season chronology of your activities, its own recommendation letters, your transcripts and every standardized test score you have. Applications for RSI 2027 close at 11:59 pm Eastern on December 11, 2026, and the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE), the nonprofit that runs RSI, accepts no late submissions.

Below, we walk through everything the form asks for, compare it with the Ivy League and with nine other selective research programs, and explain how to plan your fall so the work carries into your college applications.

Everything the RSI Application Asks For

You complete the RSI application on SlideRoom, an online portal separate from the Common App, so nothing you enter there carries over to your college applications. The form opens with your personal, family and school information and a $75 fee, which CEE may waive for students with financial need, according to its application page and application FAQs. It then asks you to choose two research fields, each with a sub-field, and requires the two to be distinct areas of interest. We read that rule as applying to the sub-fields as well, so you need to be ready to write knowledgeably about two areas of science that overlap very little.

Next come two lists, one for your STEM awards, activities and accomplishments and one for your non-STEM ones, each with its own 5,000-character box. The non-STEM list alone asks you to cover the arts, athletics, hobbies, clubs, journalism, speech and debate, student government, education, public service, employment and entrepreneurship. For each entry, you give some measure of your participation and recognition, rank everything by significance with approximate dates, and separate competitive programs you attended from ones you were admitted to but did not attend.

Then the form asks for the same history again. A required chronology, introduced with CEE's own apology "for some redundancy in requested information," has you rebuild your 9th, 10th and 11th grade years row by row, by academic year and season, naming your primary and secondary STEM activities in each. It covers summer and college-level programs, clubs, competitions, camps, employment, volunteer work and every research project you have done, and it tells you to write "n/a" rather than leave any cell blank.

If you build things, there is one more field. The optional Hands-On Project Portfolio asks for a link to a well-organized, public portfolio of your maker or design projects, such as a website, a YouTube video, a GitHub repository or a Google Drive folder. CEE says it is not generally expected, but if your strongest work is something you built, you will want to put that portfolio together.

Your test score section covers every national exam you have taken, since CEE asks for all of your PSAT, SAT, ACT and AP scores. You also arrange for two or three recommendation letters from STEM teachers or a research supervisor, ideally one math teacher and one science teacher, and a school official, usually your registrar or counselor, uploads your high school transcript along with any college transcripts or online course certificates, as CEE's recommendation and transcript instructions describe.

How Much You Have to Write

RSI asks five essay questions, and each response can run up to 5,000 characters. At a typical six characters per word, counting spaces, that is about 830 words per essay and about 4,200 words for the essays alone, the length of more than six Common App personal essays. Add the two 5,000-character awards lists and the form allows 35,000 characters of typed responses, about 5,800 words, before you fill in a single row of the chronology.

The five prompts, which we walk through in our RSI essays guide, cover your chosen research fields, your long-range goals, the activities that show your leadership, creativity and uniqueness, your extracurricular and community outreach, and why you are applying to RSI.

The first essay takes the most work per word. For each sub-field you chose, it asks you to name the one or two most interesting open questions in that area, explain why they interest you, and show which coursework and research will let you "hit the ground running" at RSI. CEE shares these responses with prospective mentors, so a strong answer discusses as many as four unsolved problems across two separate areas in correct technical language, which makes it closer to a short research proposal than to a college essay.

The awards lists are long by any standard. The Common App gives you 10 activities and 5 honors, about 3,500 characters across both sections once you count every position, organization and description field. RSI's two lists allow 10,000 characters, nearly three times as much, and the chronology then has you restate the same history in a different order.

How RSI Compares to Applying to the Ivy League

One RSI application takes about as much writing as the entire Common App plus the supplements for six Ivy League schools. For the 2026-2027 cycle, each Ivy asks for between 600 and 1,150 words of required supplemental writing. Everything else, the 650-word personal essay, the activities list and the honors section, you write once in the Common App, and at their limits those sections hold about 1,230 words.

Princeton asks for the most, up to 1,150 words across its academic prompt, two Your Voice essays and three 50-word questions. Columbia allows up to 850 words, Brown and Cornell Engineering 800 each, Harvard 750 across five short answers, and Yale about 700. Penn and Dartmouth ask for 600 each.

The full Common App plus the Harvard, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Brown and Columbia supplements comes to about 5,500 words. The full Common App plus the six longest supplements, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Cornell Engineering, Harvard and Yale, comes to about 6,300. RSI's 5,800 words sit between the two.

Add all eight supplements, counting Cornell Engineering, to the full Common App and you reach about 7,500 words, which means one RSI application asks for nearly 80 percent of the writing for the entire Ivy League. These comparisons use maximum allowed lengths on both sides, since neither RSI nor the Ivies require you to use every word.

How RSI Compares to Other Summer Research Programs

Across nine selective summer research programs with published limits, the maximum required writing ranges from 500 to 1,800 words and averages about 1,000. One RSI application, at about 5,800 words, takes as much writing as roughly six of them.

The Simons Summer Research Program at Stony Brook asks for the most among them, six questions capped at 300 words each in the 2026 cycle, for 1,800 words. Stanford SIMR asked for two essays of 3,500 characters each, about 1,170 words. The Summer Science Program asked for six short answers of 180 words, 1,080 in all, and the UC Davis Young Scholars Program for four essays of 255 words plus a 140-character tweet, about 1,040.

BU RISE asks for 750 words across three essays for summer 2027, or 1,000 if you add the 250-word faculty statement for its internship track. Texas Tech's Clark Scholars Program asks for three responses totaling 5,500 characters, about 920 words, and UC Santa Cruz's Scholar Immersion Program asked for two responses totaling 850 words. The Rockefeller Summer Science Research Program asks for three 250-word essays, and the University of Florida's Student Science Training Program asked for a single response of up to 500 words.

RSI's essays alone, about 4,200 words, outweigh Simons, SSP and Stanford SIMR combined, which come to about 4,050. Add RSI's two awards lists and its 5,800 words match Simons, SSP, Stanford SIMR, UC Davis YSP and BU RISE put together, the five longest applications on this list. Simons, the longest, asks for less than a third of what RSI does, and Simons and SSP do not consider test scores at all.

How to Plan Your Fall Around the RSI Application

Start with your recommenders, since they need the most lead time. Ask your math and science teachers as early in the fall as you can, ideally by October, and tell them whether Simons or other programs are also on your list so they can plan every letter at once. Ask your counselor or registrar at the same time about uploading your transcripts, including transcripts from any dual enrollment courses.

Build one dated record of everything you have done since 9th grade, with each activity, program, competition and research project, its dates and your role. Both awards lists, the chronology and next year's Common App activities and honors sections can all be drawn from that single record, which saves you from reconstructing your history four separate times.

Write the research-fields essay next. The reading it requires also prepares you to rank Simons mentors and choose Stanford SIMR research areas, and since Simons deadlines fall later (in the 2026 cycle, January 30 for nominations, February 5 for applications and February 13 for letters), the work you finish for RSI in December feeds directly into your other applications.

The work carries into senior year as well. Your research-fields essay becomes raw material for supplements about your intended major, such as Princeton's academic prompt, Columbia's preferred areas of study and Cornell Engineering's essays. If you are admitted, the paper you write at RSI is the kind of project many alumni enter in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, as we explain in How Much Getting Into RSI Matters for HYPMS.

Get Expert Help With Your RSI Application

Our admissions experts hold PhDs in the sciences and help you choose your research fields, build your awards lists and chronology, and write a research-fields essay that mentors take seriously, so your RSI application also sets up your other summer programs and your college applications next fall. You can learn more about our RSI admissions support or schedule a free consultation with an admissions expert today.