<p>There is a common theme of questions, as student hunt for the secret sauce that will make them an automatic admit at MIT (or for that matter HYPS etc.). </p>
<p>Students ask variants of “Will I get in if I am an academic star/recruited athlete/musical prodigy/published researcher?” To which the answer for all of these is “WOW, you have that, that’s great and it would look really good on your application.” However, it alone will not get you in.</p>
<p>There is no secret sauce. Yes, MIT wants academic stars, yes, more academic stars are accepted than not admitted, but no, having that alone will not get you in. What gets you in is the match ([The</a> Match Between You And MIT | MIT Admissions](<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/match]The”>What we look for | MIT Admissions)). Starry students who match well tend to get in, those who do not, tend not to.</p>
<p>And of course there is no hard and fixed rules. Some six years ago, I was interviewing a student and I asked “So what do you do for fun?” This was not a trick question. It also (so I thought at the time) had no real wrong answers. MIT can be a fairly stressful place, and it is a good thing for students to have some way to blow off steam, but I genuinely did not care whether that was carpentry, playing Tennis, or playing World of Warcraft. I really didn’t. And the student looked at me and said “I read Physics textbooks.” Fair enough, this would not be the first time, I have had a student phrase choose to answer in the way that he/she thought would sound the most impressive to an interviewer. Breaking through this facade, is part of the role of the EC. So I grinned and noted that I owned a fair-sized library of recreational mathematics books, and I asked “And apart from that, what do you do for fun.” Now he looked confused and little bit concerned “I read physics textbooks” he insisted. OK, I smiled. “When you get together with your friends after school, what do you do then?” Now he looked a little bit rueful. “Well, I don’t have any, you know, ‘friends’ per se, however there are a couple of kids where a couple of times a year we will all go together to the library after school and we will all read textbooks.” “OK” I smiled, and I moved on.</p>
<p>Now, MIT tends to be a fairly collaborative place. Indeed, most of science tends to be quite collaborative. A modern physics lab is a team enterprise, and some experience of team working would be quite useful. It does not matter if that manifests itself in working on the school musical or the football team, what matters is that you can work with other people to achieve a shared goal. Here we had a student who had not identified a single friend in his high school career. If admitted, he would be highly unlikely to contribute much to the life on campus. He would spend all of his hours alone in his room, or in the library. </p>
<p>But what if he was an academic star?. And as an interviewer, I do not know this, nor should I. I do not see the application. I do not know about his 15 patents, or his two solo articles in Nature before his 17th birthday. And maybe his academic achievements are sufficiently impressive that that will overcome this student’s inability to contribute at all to campus life. And maybe they won’t. That is the job of the admissions office, but I am not at all surprised that being an academic star is not sufficient, on its own to get you in. Nor should it.</p>
<p>Most of the students that I see admitted to MIT are not academic stars, nor do they have published research, nor multi-year research projects. Most of them are just “ordinary” great students, who happen to match MITs ethos and culture extremely well. I regularly meet students who are worried about applying because they are 17 and they haven’t won an international medal, or cured cancer or anything, and so many students with so many astonishing accomplishments have. Do remember that we spend a lot of time on this board discussing a very very small sliver of the applicant pool. And fear not.</p>