<p>It is very hard to impress with academics. The competition is so rough. Admissions at most top schools is about the choices that you make around your education. For example, what do you do with your free time? Regularly, I meet MIT candidates who study for additional exams in their spare time, thinking that it makes them more competitive. But it usually has the opposite effect.</p>
<p>Most schools are looking for candidates who will have an impact on campus if admitted. Keep in mind that MIT, or any of the other top schools, can fill their class multiple times over with academically qualified students. So barring the truly exceptional (a handful of patents, lead author on a paper in a major journal, IMO medalists), you need some other way to stand out. </p>
<p>Do you play a sport? A significant role on a sports team can show a facility with teamworking (very useful for MIT and for the sciences generally), the possibility to demonstrate some leadership skills, and indeed the whole healthy mind in a healthy body thing. Some 20% of MIT undergraduates compete in intercollegiate sport and roughly 80% participate in the intramural program, so it does help. Or if you are not a sporty person, there are other ways to show teamworking and the ability to function in wider society. Joining a theatre troupe, orchestra, or other arts ensemble offers many of the benefits of sports in terms of what it shows about you. </p>
<p>Heck if you started a band in Junior High, then started another band in High School, then moved schools and started another band at the new school, then it is a reasonable bet that if you come to MIT, then you might well start up a band.</p>
<p>Contrast that with the kid who has some free time, so he spends it alone in his room or in the library reading textbooks in order to pass another exam that his school doesn’t offer. Yes it shows academic motivation, but it also raises the fear that if you come to MIT, you will spend all of your time in your room alone reading textbooks, which isn’t really what an MIT education is all about.</p>
<p>The best answer here is to do what you really enjoy. You only have one shot at High School and you should try to make it as rewarding for you as possible. Have fun. And ideally your idea of what it fun matches well with MIT’s idea of what could be fun, and you get in. Anything that you are doing purely to impress admissions officers is likely to backfire, and badly.</p>