Every March, roughly 80 high school students from around the world learn that they have a place at the Research Science Institute (RSI), the summer research program hosted at MIT. It costs participants nothing, and fewer than 2.5% of applicants get in. Top test scores are common in that pool, so they are not what decides it. What sets admitted students apart is evidence that they can already do research on their own.
How RSI works
RSI is organized by the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE), and its structure is simple. The program opens with a week of concentrated STEM classes taught by professors. The next five weeks are a research internship: each student carries out an individual project with guidance from a mentor who is a working scientist or researcher. At the end, every student writes up the results as a research paper and presents the work at the RSI Symposium.
How selective it is
By CEE's count, RSI draws more than 3,000 applications a year, and only a sliver of them succeed.
| RSI at a glance | Figure |
|---|---|
| Applications from the US each year | More than 2,500 |
| Applications from other countries each year | 600 |
| Acceptance rate | Under 2.5% |
| Students admitted each year | Roughly 80 |
| Cost to participants | Free |
CEE has also tracked where RSI alumni went on to study. Across the cohorts from 1984 to 2024, a third enrolled at Harvard and nearly a quarter at MIT.
| University | Share of RSI alumni, 1984–2024 |
|---|---|
| Harvard | 33% |
| MIT | 23% |
| Stanford | 12% |
| Yale |
