@NYCGirl04 YES! This is so important to remember. Especially when incoming freshman have yet to fully unclench from the competitiveness of the past year. My tall and skinny son had a similar icebreaker @ the beginning of his freshman year. His introduction was “my pant size is 28” waist x 38” length”. Successful because it broke the ice.
Son was deferred and rejected yesterday.
W 4.8 18 APs ( mostly 5’s and few 4’s) multi variable, linear Algebra and few DE courses, ACT35
Excellent EC’s : published research, founder of non profit( didn’t start only to look good on college apps, he really loves doing what he is doing and expanding his organization globally) .
Lots of other leadership positions at school.
Robotics international competition semi finalist, etc… lots of other Excellent ECs, recommendation from teachers who knew him for 3 years+, very good essays.
I think only thing missing was IMO, ISEF etc . But we didn’t know about all these things earlier. Kids who get these awards start the training very early. He started preparing for it and qualified for Aime. Some of his friends recommended coaching from one of the MIT student for USACO but they charge a lot( $7000 for one level😳)
He didn’t want to spend time and money on this and instead spend his extra time on volunteering and working on his non profit. No regrets. I think MIT was not a good fit for him. I am happy that he is doing what he likes and didn’t focus on college admissions that much.
He has very good offers with scholarships from colleges that value community service and passionate , compassionate kids like him.
Congratulations to the accepted kids! You deserved it!
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Thank you. I’m very proud - and thrilled with the waitlist (MIT is his first choice) and am aware the likelihood that he will make it off it is nearly nil. Knowing that, it gives me hope that he’ll fare well at other schools.
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I still remember applying to MIT back in mid ‘80s. The application form was fairly simple compared to Stanford and Princeton. The main criteria they judged you by was academics. I was a first gen immigrant with few notable extracurriculars, and my English score on the SAT wasn’t spectacular. I made it to the waitlist and was later rejected. Anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered as my parents made it known they couldn’t afford it, so I had to choose EECS at UC Berkeley. Berkeley at the time was also primarily stats driven. Now days the crowd has arrived and things have gotten a lot more competitive. I don’t think I would go out of my way to make the 4% cut at MIT. I would happily go to a good state school to study the major of my choice.
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Hey — can you send me more info on this USACO thing?
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This is rude. Athletes work hard! They have to have the grades to get into MIT AND play a sport on top of it all. My athlete daughter is just as worthy as your non-athlete kid.
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Which is not to say students shouldn’t pursue MIT if that is their dream. They just need to be aware of how difficult it is and weigh whether or not it is worth the headache and heartache to try. For one of our kids it was. For another, it wasn’t. Good luck to all.
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I just messaged you.
Deferred, then waitlisted! Better than I was expecting. Everyone who got accepted please turn down their offers tyty 
Stats/app were:
- 1570 SAT 3.97 UW
- 10 AP courses taken: AP Calc BC (5), APUSH (5), AP Lang (5), AP Chemistry (5), AP Stats (5), AP US Gov, AP Physics C, AP CS A, AP Spanish Lang, AP Literature
- 2 extra AP tests: AP Physics 1 (5), AP Music Theory (4
) - USNCO High Honors (Top 47/16000-ish?)
- MathWorks M3 Challenge final 10%
- GMTK Game Jam Finalist
- 4x AIME/Distinction Qualifier
- Various solo piano, piano trio, and volunteering awards
- Internship at a small biotech startup in SF, full-time and paid
- Research with a JHU adjunct prof into BNNs and their applications in bioinformatics (submitted research portfolio)
- Research at a big Stanford lab (didn’t go very well though)
Both feeling disappointed and affirmed by the decision. Well, I’ll have to wait till May to know my status for sure!
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Something to be proud of - for those who got in!
I don’t know about MIT, so I may be speaking out of turn, but I know my niece who got accepted to Cornell, academically didn’t hold a candle to her other cousins that got rejected at Cornell. The Varsity Blues scandal is proof at some of these elite schools, athletes have a much less academic standard than non-athletes. Maybe if the athletes didn’t do their sport and concentrated on academics they would be as strong as the non-athletes, but no one knows. Certainly, some elite colleges value athletes. I don’t know if MIT is one of them, but I do know of other schools that do…
Forgot to say said niece was a nationally recognized Track and Field athlete coming out of High School.
Is that niece more outgoing than the others or were all relatively equal in leadership?
The Ivy, JHU and MIT athletes in my kids’ classes were not only strong athletes but also great to be around. Leaders. Anecdotes don’t equal data as @skieurope points out.
Maybe leadership or personality is teased out in that Harvard case.
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Thanks for your reply. You have a good point that I didn’t consider. Probably said niece is a little more outgoing than the other cousins, not sure about the leadership angle, except she was definitely a leader on her team. Just seems to me, it is really hard to quantify and judge a personality by a few sheets of paper, but obviously, they do. I remember a professor once told me he had difficulty assigning grades to students when he first started teaching, where to make the cutoffs, knowing how deeply vested the grades were to the students, and when he confided to another professor, the other professor said something like, someone has to play god! These admission workers must feel the same way, right, wrong, or indifferent, they will make some very difficult decisions, and then they and everyone else just have to move on.
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MIT does not do recruitment quite the same as the Ivy League or most other colleges. Being a nationally competitive athlete is definitely a bonus in your application for a number of reasons, but coaches do not get “slots” quite the same way that they do at other institutions.
MIT is unique in that they have extremely rigorous institutional requirements in mathematics and science that all students must fulfill. They are very careful to only admit students they believe will succeed at these requirements.
In general, though, objective stats are a very small piece of the puzzle. These are generally used to establish a baseline of competency. So, while we might look at a 1600 as far superior to a 1500, for a lot of these highly selective schools, these are both scores that indicate a level of readiness for the material and nothing more or less.
So, we look for reasons why the 1500 or 1450 kid got in when the 1600 kid did not, when, in reality, once they crossed a threshold that indicated readiness, the admissions board did not care about their scores at all.
We often say, look at this athlete, or girl in STEM, or low income, or URM student who got in with a lower score. But, there are also white, and Asian young men also getting in with lower scores, and students from those other categories not getting in with high scores. The point is that above a certain level, the scores really do not matter all that much.
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A girl with 1520 SAT score , 4.2 GPA and a boy with a 1600 score , 4.8 GPA … both have similar EC’s, great essays. They both have scores above certain level that they don’t matter … who would get in?
Neither
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Why? Because it’s hard to choose one?either take both or reject both?
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Pointless exercise
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is this another “let me try to prove my point about how my kid should have got in over their classmate” post?
if so, let it go.
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