<p>Hi everyone!
I've been reading some posts here in CC, specifically about MIT, and I see people talking about kids that deserve to be at MIT; Kids who deserved to be and were not accepted, etc. I wonder, what do we know about deserving to be at MIT?
I mean, only the AdCom knows that. If someone has top scores and grades it doesn't mean they deserve to be at MIT. When the Adcom says we've rejected people with 2400 SAT, who built nuclear reactors, etc. It surely shows that having top scores doesn't mean we deserve to be at MIT, and I think it goes also to any other aspect of the application such as EC,s,etc. They are the only ones who know what they want in an applicant, and who deserves to be there. No matter how good or how bad our resum</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s about deserving to be at MIT, either on the rejected student side or the admitted student side. There are a huge number of really spectacular applicants to MIT every year: smart, wonderful people who will do well in life no matter where they go to college. But I don’t think any of them deserves to go to MIT – if you want me to get poetic about it, I think people are admitted to top schools by grace alone and earn their spots by working had and doing great things once they get there.</p>
<p>Still, no one should mistake admission or rejection from MIT as a validation or rejection of his/her approach to life – the admissions officers work hard to select a great class, and they do a wonderful job, but they are by no means picking the “best” 1500 applications in some sort of absolute sense. There’s no way to identify the absolute best applicants, because everybody who applies is so qualified. </p>
<p>So I certainly agree with the point that it’s not possible for us to say who deserves to go to MIT from our limited outside vantage point. But I would extend that further and say that either nobody deserves to go, or, alternately, that many people deserve to go but there are a limited number of spots.</p>
<p>You’re totally right mollie. There’s no such thing as deserving or not deserving applicants. Because certainly there are many rejected students the AdCo would like to admit if they had more spots.
I also believe that even the ad officer doesn’t know what he is looking for until he sees the application. That’s why admissions are still made by humans and not computers (actually, in my country they are made by computers).</p>