<p>k, now that everyone is looking at this page, i was wondering if being a sports recruit (golf) would be beneficial to the admissions process at MIT and how much it would help. Thanks.</p>
<p>Being a recruit helps, but it doesn't help more than being talented at something non-athletic. MIT is division III in most sports, so the recruitment process (and its subsequent admissions "tip") is much less prominent than it would be at a division I school.</p>
<p>So being a recruited athlete can help an application stand out in the applicant pool, but it won't make up for a weak academic record.</p>
<p>In the past it was only important as non-academic, non-intellectual activities (e.g., elected to student government) but not nearly as important as academic activities. In other words, they would take whoever had the most academic talent/accomplishments and then use non-academic activities as a tiebreaker between candidates that you can't tell who is smarter. </p>
<p>I don't know whether that has changed.</p>
<p>^I don't know. I lived in an isolated area, so all of my academic awards were from my school, I didn't have any opportunity for a job applicable to anything, and I never did the science fair or any other national thing. Basically the only thing besides my school having a pretty good reputation and me being 2nd in my class, going for me was my 10 seasons of varsity sports and two captain positions. I suppose they could have assumed that I had the academic talent, but I always felt the balance I had with sports was key.</p>
<p>But actually being recruited will get you at best a letter in your application and I've heard stories of a lot of people getting rejected despite those.</p>