<p>How much does the fact that a coach wants you help at MIT?</p>
<p>It can definitely help you if your stats are good enough.</p>
<p>Probably less than elsewhere, but it's still helpful... athletic achievements are viewed as a strong EC commitment, similar to being really amazing at piano or scrabble or what have you.</p>
<p>I don't think that coaches recruit you at MIT like they do at most other colleges, but i am sure that it will definately help, and it will look great on your app if you're pretty good at it. BTW what sport(s) do you do?</p>
<p>Except in sports you can play on an actual team and make MIT look better, as opposed to scrabble, where they don't have a team. So it helps you more than that.</p>
<p>Actually, I wasn't kidding about the Scrabble thing - they have a really good team at MIT apparently, and the one sophomore is the number 1 ranked scrabble player in the country. Someone sent me an article about it and I thought it was crazy but really cool... like many things at MIT! :)</p>
<p>thanks for hte link byerly...when's a good time to send it? senior year when you're applying i'm guessing.</p>
<p>I'd get on it this right now. Depending on the sport, a coach might want to watch you this summer if there are any tourneys, camps etc where he might do so.</p>
<p>well...i'm only a rising junior...</p>
<p>Having a coach ask for you, I think, would help support your interest in that particular field of athletics. This being said, I don't think it's necessarily any <em>more</em> valuable than being able to similarly demonstrate a love for anything else.</p>
<p>Then again, I don't know much... but don't expect athletics alone to get you into MIT (not that you would, but it's still a safe warning).</p>
<p>Sports help more than having a love for something else. Obviously winning a chemistry olympiad or something is worth a lot. I know people who would have definitely (with 99% confidence) not gotten in without sports.</p>
<p>I don't think sports will really make the difference between getting accepted vs. not, but the admissions officers do take notice when a coach asks for you.</p>
<p>Anecdotal evidence: For five years, I've always been one of the slowest girls on my school's crew team, but I love rowing, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to fill out the recruiting form on the team website. Sure enough, the coach e-mailed me to ask if I was planning on visiting - I had already done my school visit, but I promised to stop by the boathouse when my team went to compete in the Head of the Charles (I wasn't actually competing, I just went to watch, so I had plenty of time to wander around Cambridge looking for the MIT boathouse). Even though I am by no means an excellent athlete, the coach offered to attach an "orange card" (a recruiting card) to my application, and still to this day I don't know how much weight it had on my acceptance, but I do know this:
When I showed up at the CPW registration desk, the admissions officer who took my name looked up at me and said "Hey, you're an athlete, aren't you?" She had recognized my name from the orange card.</p>
<p>I think that's the first time in my life anybody ever called me an athlete. :-)</p>
<p>An orange card? I had no idea about that. Having that definitely supports the claim that athletics help more than many other activities.</p>