The personal curriculum that got me accepted into MIT
This personal curriculum spanned over the course of more than five years. It started off completely unstructured and random, led to me falling in love with physics, and ended with an acceptance letter to a dream school at 30 years old.
I didn’t come from a traditional physics background. I was certainly not the kid winning Olympiads at 15. What I did have was an obsession with understanding the world deeply enough that I was willing to build my own education from scratch.
This curriculum is not just about what I studied. It’s proof of why I believe curiosity, when paired with consistency and structure, can radically alter the trajectory of your life.
YEAR 1
When I first started this journey, I didn’t have a planned out curriculum. I didn’t even realize it would become one. I spent the first few months of the year reading books that made me fall in love with the universe just because I found them interesting. From there, I really just followed my curiosity and the insatiable urge to know more.
I started by reading books about the universe and reality:
Cosmos by Carl Sagan
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman
The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
Got hooked pretty quickly. A lot of the concepts (specifically in ABHOT) were hard for me to comprehend and I realized I wanted to learn more about physics, so I found and watched:
MIT OCW 8.01 Classical Mechanics lectures (not all of them, didn’t take notes or do the provided assignments/assessments, just watched)
all of the Cosmos episodes
PBS Space Time videos like “What is spacetime?” “Entropy” “Dark matter”
Veritasum videos on things like electricity, relativity, misconceptions in physics, etc.
At this point I realized that if I wanted to learn more I really needed to brush up on my math. A lot of the material that interested me felt unapproachable. So here came the math review era:
found 3blue1brown videos really helpful, lots of Essence of Linear Algebra
used Khan Academy to review Algebra (linear equations, functions, exponents, logarithms, graphing, systems of equations) and Trigonometry (sine/cosine, radians, identities, vectors)
used Professor Leonard for Precalc, still one of the best free online math teachers I’ve ever found
did a lot of reading up online on vectors, dot products, transformations, etc. Physics is pretty impossible without spatial thinking
found a used copy of the No Bullshit Guide to Linear Algebra by Ivan Savov, was a pretty great for the visuals alone
During these months, I side-quested into Astronomy (for no particular reason other than I was fascinated by it):
downloaded Stellarium and learned/followed constellations, planets, moon phases, seasonal sky motion
downloaded the Sky Guide app to stargaze
read Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott (this book was inspired by a Princeton course they co-taught, so good)
got a copy of Turn Left at Orion, 10/10 for beginners
watched the best Crash Course on Astronomy on the internet
spent one too many Friday nights consuming gummies and perusing the NASA Eyes website
