Chances for an international student attending Grad school at MIT?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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<p>Hi all,
I've heard that there's a cap on accepting international students (not to exceed a certain % of the class) for undergrad. I'm wondering if this applies to the grad. program as well.</p>

<p>I'm an international student attending the University of Arkansas majoring in Computer Engineering; I'm going to be a senior in the Fall. I haven't taken the GRE yet. I'm really interested in going to MIT for my grad study.
My GPA is about 3.95 (and I expect it to be within the .1 range at graduation).
I'm also doing some research work related to my field of study for a professor. I can speak English fluently, but not perfect when it comes to writing (as you can probably tell). </p>

<p>Do you think I should give it a shot?
How hard is it to get a scholarship?
What kind of score range is considered "kind of safe" on the GRE?
What else should I know? </p>

<p>Also, are the extracurricular activities really important? (should I try to be more social? like joining more organizations?)</p>

<p>Thank you all in advance, I really appreciate it.</p>

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<p>Yes, you should give it a shot. Not sure if there is a cap on internationals, but I don't think there is. </p>

<p>Don't join extracurricular activities for your resume'. They are worthless for grad school admissions in science or engineering. </p>

<p>The only activity they will care about is research and/or work experience in your field.</p>

<p>PhD work is fully-funded but you need to do a master's first. Master's you do have to pay for unless you find a scholarship. You may be able to climb prestigewise by getting a master's at a good engineering school, and then go from that school to a very top one.</p>

<p>For GRE scores, it's important to ace the math score. 800 or extremely close. Verbal and Writing aren't that important. 500-600 range would be ok. For an international student, the main concern would be that you speak well.</p>

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<p>There is not a school-wide cap on international admissions at the graduate level, but programs often place internal limits, particularly for PhD programs where large numbers of students are funded by the US government. Many of the big graduate fellowships are restricted to US citizens only.</p>

<p>No GRE score is "safe" for any top tier graduate program, as basically everybody who applies for science and engineering graduate programs has around an 800 on the GRE math section -- test scores are not a good way to determine who's qualified, though they are an easy way to weed out people who get very low scores.</p>

<p>The MIT EECS program actually has only one admissions process -- students are admitted to the PhD program and pick up a master's along the way. There is no separate admissions process for master's students. It's very competitive, and in recent years has accepted less than 5% of applicants. They have an FAQ page [url=<a href="http://www.eecs.mit.edu/grad/faqs.html%5Dhere%5B/url"&gt;http://www.eecs.mit.edu/grad/faqs.html]here[/url&lt;/a&gt;].&lt;/p>

<p>I found [url=<a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Eharchol/gradschooltalk.pdf%5Dthis%5B/url"&gt;http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf]this[/url&lt;/a&gt;] document very helpful when applying to PhD programs, even though I'm not in EECS.</p>

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<p>Thank you collegealum314 and molliebatmit for the answers. I really appreciate you guys helping out.</p>