I must admit, the arrogance of the MIT interviewer comes out lout and clear. But I suspect that is typical for these type of jobs. These people probably need to convince themselves that they can really tell who would be the best fit for their schools from their interviews. In reality, that is likely an impossible task. If a person is going to MIT, they should have a great mathematical aptitude and a love of all things math and physics. That is all they should require. Interestingly, Einstein likely would have been rejected from MIT. He was known as an arrogant young man, so much so that he could not get a job in academia after being awarded his doctorate, thus the reason he worked for the Patent Office. Of course, it was there he did some of his deepest thinking and wrote his five miracle papers. All an MIT interviewer should concern themselves with will be the passion of their interviewees for t he subject matter they will be studying and their aptitude to be successful. All the rest is window dressing. To reject somebody because they pretended to be more interested in something like Martial Arts than they really were . . . . wow. I suspect MIT has no interest in schooling any future politicians.
@Sally305
I appreciate your reply, and I take no offense. I have lot of things to learn in life and I am learning every day, today was one of those days.
Regarding scholarships to kids from abroad, here is the story of a poor boy from India, who is a brilliant mathematician, who had to take a bus to the nearest big city to self educate himself in complex math problems, sell “papads” to make a living, whose application to Cambridge [his motivation was a brilliant mathematician from India who went to Cambridge] was denied because he did not have the money to go.
<a href=“A Vision of Stars, Grounded in the Dust of Rural India - The New York Times”>A Vision of Stars, Grounded in the Dust of Rural India - The New York Times;
[It’s</a> 30 on 30 for papad seller-turned-tutor - Times Of India](<a href=“http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-05-31/india/27782579_1_super-30-iit-aspirants-abhayanand]It’s”>http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-05-31/india/27782579_1_super-30-iit-aspirants-abhayanand)
It enriches America and American Institutions to subsidize education for kids like this. This will make our competitive kids to catch or do better than these geniuses [I hope] that come from abroad to study here.
@gingersnaps and @davidg,
Sounds like sour grapes. I do remember a student like yourself who waltzed in for an interview two hours late and told me I looked “old.” (I’m not - my children are just starting college).
Actually. No. And that’s probably why you were declined at a school. Lack of higher order thinking. Clearly research will show that many student with that profile are turned down, and many without it are taken (it is possible to get a degree in something other than math, science or engineering there).
Nevertheless - we can agree to disagree. But I can only tell you that there has been a vast disparity in the students who “thought” they had a shot, and the ones who got in.
BTW - I also ask a version of the question you quoted on some occassions - but the rationale and subsequent analysis behind it may involve more than you think. You can learn from the lesson, or disregard the advice at your own peril. That “80 year old” was your gate-keeper and if he gave you a low score, that pretty much sinks you.
Like I said, I’m often mystified when students insult the very people they are begging to admit them. But you do us the honor - in a pile of 19,000 it becomes easier to identify the ones to weed out first. For that - I thank you! 
@ExieMITAlum
Thanks for the nice reply. I am glad you are conscientious and pay attention to the child and not the portfolio.
Still at the end of the day, spending countless hours of cracking the books, doing ECs, and paying 70 to 80K a year for a college education, I am not sure where it leads you?
You come out and may be get a job sooner than a state school educated kid, may be a few thousand dollars extra in pay, but then you start worrying about paying your college loans for the rest of your life? Does the IVY education guarantee that you will make even 100,000 dollars more than a kid going to a state school for the same degree? No, I do not think so.
With the billions of dollars in endowments, the IVYs should be the ones really paying for these highly qualified kids to come to their institutions so they can be the best scientist, or doctor or engineer who discovers the next best thing and the school can boast that our students invented this, our students lead the world etc.
That apart, thanks for all your posts very informative.
I’ve actually talked to several students who fit that profile and in every case they did get into MIT. Those are the easiest to advocate for. Tuition is free below a certain thresh hold - a great advantage at a school that doesn’t award merit aid/ Many other schools would rank him highly as well and find the funding. Sad that Cambridge was not as forward thinking. 
You’re welcome. I like your ability to debate thoughtfully.
When I was debating colleges - my mother pointed out that the key to success was to attend college and embrace the education rather than go driving towards a career. She was right. I push my own children to think in the same manner.
Because - honestly - talented students don’t need a school to shine - just a place with enough resources that they can spin their own gold from straw. Good luck with your journey. i suspect we’ll be hearing positive things about you.
(and for the record - for many of those hard working kids who don’t get their first choice - you can be sure someone on the committee was advocating for them up until the final consensus had to be made. It’s really hard on Adcoms who have favorites but not enough votes to get them into the final admit pile) My husband describes his own selection meetings as very “passionate and heated.”
MIT, Sour grapes? I applied to one college back in the 70’s, Penn-State University Park, and with a 1300+ SAT coming from a top public school system, knew I would be accepted. Even back then, when education was much less expensive, I was sensitive to the cost burden to my parents. Going to the University of Pa never really entered the equation. Later I applied to three Law-schools, and was accepted to all three. Now I have my own business and have been very successful at what I do. I have sour grapes about nothing. My life went as I wanted it to go and for the most part I did it my way. When I am up in Court against an opponent lawyer, I never look at where he went to lawschool or undergraduate school to size him up. I look only at his reputation as a good or not so good trial lawyer. As for deep thinking, I find the “ivy league” graduates no better at coming up with legal arguments or nuances than any other lawyers I deal with. I just recognize arrogance when I see it. There is no possibility you can talk to somebody for forty-five minutes and size them up as a better candidate or not for your University. But I get you have to try given the number of applicants to MIT. I just think it sad that otherwise qualified candidates might lose out because you are so small minded as to use ridiculous subjective standards to exclude them.
I love the facetious nature of this
oh - in case you aren’t kidding - employers do that all the time. Life isn’t fair - nor are things we want guaranteed. I do, however, make allowances for the socially awkward nerds (ala Big Bang Theory).
So - given a wide field of students with nearly identical stats - how would you decide which of the 19,000 qualified student must be told "no? if you can only choose 1,000 of them.
The problem, ExieMITAlum, is that you believe that interviewers or other process would be able to identify the fake from the legitimate ECs (btw, what is a legitimate EC???).
But the truth is that given that the wealthy have more access to resources, they can help their kids with the ECs. Be it robotic club, or outdor activity, or karate lessons, or whatever.
To me the reliance on ECs is really distorting the system. It is one thing to make adjustments for HS conditions (national prep schools vs. suburban vs. inner), another completely different is to give bonus points to the kid of some professor who knew another professor and got the kid in the lab. Yes, the EC was legit, the kid indeed worked 2 years in the lab, but the entire opportunity was manufactured by their parents.
well said davidg ! I have often heard that the kids with padded resume (payed services through prep schools and companies) are always able to get in elite schools. It is only the truly smart kids with genuine passion and hearts poured into their applications and essays,whose parents cannot afford such schools and services, don’t catch the attention of the adcoms. I have seen several examples of deserving seniors each year who are so passionate about what they want to be, where they want to study, ending up in state colleges, not getting into their top choices. But ultimately they have all done so well in their state Us and went on to great grad colleges ! I wonder how these so called ‘holistic’ seeking adcoms missed these gems initially.
Seems to me MIT that many if not most of your applicants can be admitted or rejected outright by an objective evaluation of their records. For those caught in the twilight world of maybe . . any further evaluations should not be limited to a personal interview with one person, such as yourself, who will use subjective tools and predilections to give a thumbs up or down. Perhaps an evaluation by a panel of three would be more reasonable (similar to an appellate court), or actually speaking with teachers and employers and supervisors to get a good feel for the fit and abilities of the applicant… These kids are seventeen, eighteen years old, being interviewed for admittance to their dream school. And they are going to be judged for acceptance by how they perform in that interview? about whether they exaggerate on their martial arts abilities or interests? Youve got to be kidding me. I would hope the interview process would be far better than that.
I love all the armchair adcoms on this site. For the love of God. MIT gets more than TEN TIMES the number of applicants it has spots for. And the majority of them are just as qualified as the kids who get in. Of course there is subjectivity in admissions decisions. And it’s not just one person interviewing every kid, so of course there are variances there as well. If you have several days of free time, work your way through the “How did HE get in?” thread. It largely ends up being about MIT.
davidg, how do you propose to handle these interviews? And at what point do we start telling our kids that they need to have different dreams? My daughter would love to dance with ABT. My son would love to play in the NBA. Yet we have not given our kids false hopes that their “dreams” might come true. Somehow, with the college admissions process, everything is always on the table. It has gotten ridiculous.
I have not gone through the rejection process yet but I know it is coming. My Junior “D” is focused on an “exclusive” School where she will not likely be accepted and if d is accepted I will likely not be able to afford.
D has a 3.9 unweighted GPA, 32 ACT, 1370 on the SAT, marching band and some school activities. Even with a potential increase of 2 points on the ACT and 100 points on the SAT D will just be breaching the top 25% percentile. Unless we get some unforseen “hook” there is absolutely nothing to make D stand out over the the thousands of other applicants.
Where D lost focus and I think a lot of parents are losing focus on here is that the field that they choose to study at college is much more important than the school they go to.
Everybody has different priorities in life but being able to support yourself after college is a pretty standard expectation. How many kids are going to college now that when they come out will be working a retail or fast food job with a 4 year degree? Or unemployed? Do you want you kid to be in a field where they will be in demand or in a field that has oversupply and low wages?
Helping your child get his/herself focused on that career path and in a college that matches your career is much more important than the name brand on the college.
So in my case my “D” and I are going to have a talk that hopefully will get her refocused on that degree that will support the lifestyle she envisions for herself after graduation and gently remind her that she has chosen a degree that is in demand and she will likely get a job whether “D” goes to a 1st or 2nd tier school.
I am happy that my “D” will be the first in my family with an Engineering degree - I could care less if it comes from MIT or my state university.
Maybe I’m a really crummy alumna interviewer, but I do not believe this to be true.
Yes, there are some (not many) students who do not seem to be passionate about anything. Most of them, however, open and and really start to glow when I ask them about their activities, their families, and what they want to do with their lives. There are a few (not many) who apply to my alma mater because of the size and location; most everyone starts talking about their tours, the people they know who went there and loved it, the atmosphere, or the student groups.
Frankly, the only ECs I find to be “fake” are the club ones - kids might be the President of five clubs, but if they all meet once a month, he’s doing far less work than the varsity athlete who spends three hours a day, six days a week on training. That comes out in an interview when I ask them what they did that day, or that week.
@SlimDaddy Excellent post. By gently reminding your daughter that there is a long long long phase after college and THAT is what she should be preparing for you’re able to not only sidestep the insanity but also are provide invaluable guidance for how to life a life.
You’re not a crummy interviewer. Tufts is a good school but honestly - lately - I’ve had a raft of students and local counselors treating getting into MIT as a blood sport. And with applications up 50% over a few years ago with no increase in slots - it just feels like it’s getting worse with many students like some described in these threads having spent their entire teenage years trying to load up on the most activities not realizing that lack of depth hurts them more than helps them.
<< She literally didn’t have a life other than academics,volunteer/hospital/ community work all 4 years, Medical University research work all 4 years, insane amount of clubs and leadership positions at school, is a teacher’s pet in almost every subject, played jv/varsity sports- 3 years, got a perfect GPA, 2350+SAT I,800s in 3 SAT II,5s in 4 APs, wrote excellent essays as per her teachers and counselor(was reviewed many times and was saved by teachers as a model essay for future students -she put her heart and soul into the applications),currently with 6 AP’s in her senior year- from a medium sized public school,has about 25 trophies and medals for winning in numerous regional/state and national competitions in and out of school- almost every thing she needs to do for a medical career>>
What strikes me about this and similar posts is that line “she literally didn’t have a life” …except…this astonishing litany of activities! Isn’t that a life? Isn’t that a really busy, full, enriching, rewarding life? Challenging sure, time consuming obviously, maybe sometimes frustrating or overwhelming, but for the most part, the life the parent described and says isn’t a life represents not just a huge outpouring of effort, but an amazing set of opportunities and impressive accomplishments which should be valued for their own sake, not as a means to any end, college or otherwise.
If it didn’t feel like a life, or not like the life she wanted, the student should have been doing something else, it seems to me. Maybe the temporary grief about rejections will abate and the student will regroup, look at her extraordinary accomplishments and figure out what the next step is toward her goals. Or possibly, the rejections may be a sign that some of her efforts, some pieces of this life/not a life weren’t coming from a particularly authentic place. She owes it to herself at this place on her personal path to get very clear and honest about what she wants and why she wants it. If one of my kids was saying “I dont have a life”, that would be a signal to do some major soul searching and I would support her making the immediate changes to create a life that felt good, real and rewarding. Of course, not every night of calculus homework is rewarding (!), I’m talking about an overall sense of congruence and daily life having intrinsic value.
Please understand I’m not being callous about any young person’s grief and disappointment. I have a highly achieving sophomore and junior at a small private school and I’m very well aware that the college admissions process these days is a consuming and difficult endeavor and the rejections seem to feel like personal indictments or judgment in a way they didn’t for us and previous generations. Life is full of disappointment and cultivating resilience and learning strategies for dealing with what we’re powerless to change is a lifelong project, as is learning how to accept our feelings around loss, etc. What I’m addressing here is this repeated lament of not having a life, or having “wasted” 4 years of high school if the college admissions didn’t go as expected. This is so sad and unnecessary. Let’s help our children to take ownership of their lives, and discover their unique selves in the process. When life has a quality of organic unfolding rather than curated appearances and engineered outcomes, doors will appear (and open) that never could have been predicted or anticipated. We all know this, it’s just hard for us to put aside our own fear and desire for everything to be guaranteed for our kids who are leaving the safety of home! Although the teenagers have clearly internalized the pressure around these often preposterous goals, my sense is that adults may have more to do with creating the unreachable brass rings and concomitant stress…but even if we can’t see our own role in the problem, we can become a part of the solution, whether preventative or remedial, and at the very least, we are well situated to help our children design lives that feel like their own, and hopefully never feel like “not a life”.
Again, my comments are not meant to be critical or contentious, rather, supportive of our children’s welfare and development…
Admissions is a subjective process and it’s important to remember that the process is not designed to be fair. The process is designed for the schools to find a set of students whom it feels would excel at the institution and would contribute to the institution and it’s community.
This set is a subset of a larger set we call the applicant pool. There are thousands of combinations of people we can choose from the applicant pool to make a set of admitted students that the school would be happy with. Your daughter just did not happen to fit into any of these that were chosen. While it is unfortunate, there are still other schools to be considered who can offer her just as good of an education and where she will be just as happy at. Perhaps she doesn’t get the brand name, but short of having a building on campus named after you, when you are talking in the astronomical numbers that is top tier school admissions, it’s almost all luck past a certain point anymore.
@MITalum-you don’t realize that you might hurt many parents/students when you say lack of depth as in some here. I do understand that you may not have meant to point at my posting but would like to clarify some here. In reality, my D has worked passionately in her out of school performing arts EC for 12 years , graduated with a diploma from it ,has performed numerous charity shows with her EC and raised thousands of $s for a local charity hospital she volunteers at these past 4 years and still continues to do, played her school sport at varsity level and her team holds state championship and won numerous trophies for her school, in a couple of other school club where she is the President, she was the sole contributor in repeatedly winning regionals & state finals- every EC that she is in, she did with utmost passion and involvement all her high school in addition to excelling in her academics, and pursuing research all 4 years in medicine and working for a publication this summer along with her IVY alum mentor! If passions like all these is not what is so called ‘depth’, can you please describe what an interviewer’s perception of depth is for the benefit of future students/parents? Perhaps may be a student can start a passion while he/or she is in the womb?
Even my D’s research mentor is absolutely devastated with my D’s rejections because she has a high school D in the line! Of course she didn’t apply to MIT-that was not her reach-I am talking about the others.
There definitely has to be something else which you adcom people are forced to look at in the applications other than just all rounded personalities- that’s the secret adcoms won’t reveal ! Your words are outright hurting to the overachieving kids as well who are currently in the grieving process with their rejections. I am not talking only on behalf of my D- she has 4 other friends on the same boat from her school -all of them overachievers-but ORM !I am sure there are many more gems out there.
@honey bee, I enjoyed your post, it makes a lot of sense,thanks. When I said that she didn’t have a life except blah blah…I really meant from my perspective that her life was revolving around these things- never partied or dated but has amazing and supportive friends from all walks! But to date she enjoyed every activity she was involved in. When one doesn’t get rewarded for everything he/she has done so far, it is only natural for them to grieve for a while and perhaps it will pinch them for long in a tiny corner of their mind, but it is just a learning experience and I am sure they will move on. I am worried about some other kids who will not be able to handle this situation in a healthy way and rather regress if things didn’t work out. I am a social worker and I am relating my experiences only with a much broader perspective in the society and to bring attention to the myths about elite/prestigious colleges and prestige obsessed society that shapes up our children. I personally feel that it is the student and not the so called elite college that shapes up one’s future. There are good and bad professors in almost every college, just as there are good and bad environments in almost every college. It is all upto the student to make use of any environment and flourish or de-flourish.
This thread I think was meant for students and parents to cope with the stress they are currently undergoing, rather than being poked at by some alums for so called lack of depth that they see in the thread. Of course I do appreciate all the insights that the alums have provided for the benefit of the future applicants and parents, but all I would like to say is please be watchful with your words not to pinpoint irrational deficiencies you might ‘see’ as lack of depth as posted in some above, with you yourself having a lack of depth of insight into the overachieving students’ true picture. One cannot generalize anything. Every case is individual.
This thread was primarily meant for support for parents to deal with their kid’s situation and not to criticize a kid’s accomplishments . If an alum interviewer can clearly see in a flash of a second that they see lack of depth in a candidate by just glancing a thread, or can see from a distance during an IV, I seriously doubt their personality suits a good interviewer, or is a so called ‘holistic’ viewer.
My intention is only to bring to the attention of the alums how some of their words here might affect the parties involved here and just to request them to be a little empathetic in such situations and not show any arrogance whatsoever in their words.
Thanks to each and every other forum member here for the amazing support and advise for people out here. Your support would mean a lot to so many of us here- parents and students !