<p>Ben may be overwhelmed by the number of obviously nonacademic factors that "matter", but I'm not.</p>
<p>Let's be clear about this, based on purely academic factors, there are enough qualified students to fill MIT's class many times over. The options seem limited. Either go with a lottery scheme amongst the qualified students, which is clearly fair, but a little unsatisfying. Or amongst the qualified students, look for those who are likely to add the most to the MIT environment.</p>
<p>That is where all those non-academic factors do matter. </p>
<p>The student formed a rockabilly band in High School. That might matter, heck maybe he will form one on campus. </p>
<p>The student can potentially be a professional baseball player, that might matter. Ideally, he will generate favourable press. </p>
<p>The student's hobby is memorising Proust, that may also matter but negatively, any solitary hobby that takes place entirely in one's bedroom does little to add to life on campus. But if he or she singlehandedly formed the High School's Proust club and convinced 30 HS students to join it, then that demonstrates leadership, the ability to change the environment, and the willingness to put one's ideas into action, all highly commended traits.</p>
<p>All of these only matter if the student is in the "academically qualified" bucket to begin with. MIT is not going to admit an unqualified student regardless of what they might bring to the campus.</p>
<p>Very well said. At the same time, it's important to remember that qualifed/not qualified is not the only academic judgment there is, and there are many different levels of academically "qualified" students, some very much smarter than others.</p>
<p>The risk is that by including rockabilly bands, baseball, Proust, and knitting in the evaluation, one reduces the relative importance of intelligence differences among "qualified" students and turns the institution into the Camp for the Qualified, Well-Rounded and Sociable. That may or may not be the goal. I think Harvard is doing a great job at this already, but obviously to each his own.</p>
<p>Having been recruited to play baseball at MIT this fall I know quite a bit about how baseball helps admissions at MIT. The manager of the baseball team submits a ranked list of 15 recruits to admissions who then give slightly more attention to these applications. The ranking is done in terms of both academic and athletic potential, a candidate with an SAT I Math score below 700 will not be put on this list. Baseball, and sports in general, do not make much of an impact on admissions decisions at MIT, compared to other schools of its caliber (with the exception of CalTech) MIT is much more stringent in their admissions policies for athletes.</p>
<p>Ben, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here. Yes, demonstrated excellence is useful, but a demonstration of tenacity at a sport will probably help you even if you aren't particularly good at it (like me in most sports I've played, ha! :)). You don't have to be a star for athletics, or music, or anything else, for it to count in your favor. It's what it shows about you that really matters.</p>
<p>Tenacity just cannot be overlooked. Honestly, and call me crazy, I love the blue collar football background that I had coming into MIT. It was really a plus. I may not have taken advanced topology in high school, but I really knew how to work. Results have been good so far, 5.0 in EECS.</p>
<p>kirbus prime, is eecs electrical engineering and computer science. If it is could you tell me if it is advisable to know programming for computer science, like java and c++?</p>