Is it possible to go to universities like STANFORD, HARVARD, etc or MIT after doing btech from NIT/IIT? Considering the fact that till now, I have no such extracirculars required..if yes, please let me know the complete procedure. [a JEE dropper]

Ans: Hello Why. Thank you for connecting with us. It is good to know that you are considering the USA for your further studies. However, let me tell you that people from non-tier 1 undergraduate colleges regularly get admitted to these colleges for graduate school. Going further, the reason why you see more IIT graduates being admitted to MIT or Stanford is not because they get preference, but because they’re on average much stronger academically than people from lesser institutions, both in terms of their innate capability as well as the effort they put in over the course. The factors that matter for admission are your GPA, GRE score, recommendations, research, and Statement of Purpose (SOP). GPA and GRE are basically used as cutoffs, while the other criteria are used to decide who gets admitted after the cutoff. As long as you have the same scores and quality of work as an “IIT student," you need not worry. Note that since your college curriculum and fellow students are likely to be much weaker than those at IITs, you will need to work on your own to do much more than your college academics. Upon doing so, you will be able to get summer internships with IIT professors, which will put you in the same standing as IIT students in terms of your application.
In fact, only a small portion of IIT students get admitted to MIT or Stanford since, obviously, there aren’t enough seats for all of them. So even if you’re strong in all the criteria, there is an element of luck, so you can expect to get admitted to some of the top 10 colleges and not to others. However, you will get admitted to some for sure if you’re good enough.

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