<p>I'm hoping to be accepted as a football player, and while I'm a very bright individual I'm not an absolute genius. I'd like some insight from current MIT students as to how difficult it is to do well at MIT as well as how that affects one's social life.</p>
<p>[MIT</a> Videos - theU - MIT: “Intro”](<a href=“http://www.theu.com/college_videos_view/theu_mit_intro_243]MIT”>http://www.theu.com/college_videos_view/theu_mit_intro_243)</p>
<p>MIT is definitely tough, and it’s tough for everybody. But because it’s tough for everybody, the social life is organized around that concept – some days you have to study really hard, and some days you need a break, and everybody else is going through the same process. MIT students like to work hard and play hard, and there are lots of different styles of “play” available.</p>
<p>How difficult it is to do well depends on yourself: how smart you are, how hardworking you are, and the types of classes and extracurricular schedule you choose to pursue. It also depends on your definition of “doing well” – if that means straight A’s, then it will probably be very difficult.</p>
<p>It’s also worth mentioning, maybe, that MIT doesn’t recruit for athletic activities in the sense that Division I schools do. So if you’re accepted, it won’t be “as a football player”, it will be because you’re smart and talented enough to hack it here.</p>
<p>yeah, if you wanna get into college for your athletic skills, go somewhere else like ohio state or ucla. leave mit alone please. i don’t think the kids there would care about athletes. you can’t get into mit for playing football puhhleasee</p>
<p>Er, pigs<em>at</em>sea, we’re not exactly lacking in athletics or people interested in sports here. You can’t get in based solely on this activity, but it is an activity that adds to an application like any other activity.</p>
<p>exactly PiperXP. </p>
<p>Now more on the “MIT Life”</p>
<p>I watched the above video and some others on that website as well. Are there any students who could give input as to their own experience?</p>
<p>It’s kind of tough to give an overview of “MIT life” in general – different people across campus like to do different things and have fun in different ways.</p>
<p>For myself, my friends and I liked to eat dinner together and do homework in our floor lounge during the week (usually involving equal parts homework and goofing off). On the weekends, we’d sometimes order pizza and watch a movie, and sometimes go into Boston to go shopping or to dinner, and sometimes we would go to a frat party, and sometimes we would play beer pong in the floor lounge. I always had time to have fun on the weekends for at least part of the weekend, although I often had extracurricular stuff on the weekends and always had to do homework on Sundays.</p>
<p>I think the major difference between my life at MIT and my friends’ lives at state schools was that I didn’t have the time (or, really, the inclination) to party hard three or four days a week. But I was a double major who spent 15 hours a week in my UROP lab – if I’d wanted to make the time, I probably could have partied three nights a week or something. Most people at MIT don’t make that choice.</p>
<p>Thanks molliebatmit. That’s the kind of description I was looking for. MIT sounds like an awesome place academically but I’ve been uneasy about the social life and how much work there would be. It sounds difficult yet manageable, and it seems as if people can really choose how academic vs. social their lives are.</p>
<p>“i don’t think the kids there would care about athletes.”</p>
<p>As a 4 year MIT varsity athlete, I take issue with that statement…</p>
<p>As others have said, the work is tough, and there’s a lot of it, but you can balance it with the rest of your life. A lot of MIT varsity athletes have said that they actually thought that playing a sport helped their academics, because it forced them to structure their time.</p>
<p>One thing to note, particularly as a football player (since at many high schools, football players are celebrities): MIT has an extremely high rate of <em>participation</em> in athletics, but the spectator aspect, not so much. If you play football at MIT, you will be playing for yourself and your team, not for any sort of public glory or even much of an audience. Spectator crowds at MIT sporting events tend to be, well, not crowds, and most people don’t follow the teams or know who is on them. They’re busy dealing with their <em>own</em> teams, activities, and schoolwork. Certainly, your friends will be supportive of you, and be happy for you when they hear that you won a game, but you won’t be seen as special.</p>
<p>Alright thanks for the input. I understand that MIT isn’t like University of Michigan where the school pride is strong and conspicuous.</p>
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I think that is poorly phrased. Actually I think that school pride at MIT is very strong, and very conspicuous. It is however not manifested in having 70000 supporters turn up to a football game to cheer that our supporters club managed to convince a top high school football prospect to accept our football program’s offer as opposed to another schools.</p>
<p>In that sense, MIT is very proud. We are thrilled that the top high school prospects that we target usually accept our offer rather than that of our competition (with some exceptions). Its just that the top high school prospects that we target tend not to be the top athletes in the country.</p>
<p>This is not to say that MIT doesn’t care about physical activity. Over three quarters of the student population participates in the Intramural program (more than 1000 teams last year) and that does not count the varsity sports program or the club sports. This is a higher sports participation rate than at the University of Michigan, who does run an impressive recreational sports program ([Department</a> of Recreational Sports - University of Michigan](<a href=“http://www.recsports.umich.edu/]Department”>http://www.recsports.umich.edu/)). And it is something about which the MIT community tends to be manifestly proud if not quite as conspicuous.</p>
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<p>What? School pride exists only in sports?</p>
<p>in other words, yay! go robots!</p>
<p>I stand corrected. When I referred to school pride I was talking about fan turnout as opposed to intramural/varsity sports participation or general pride in being a student at MIT. </p>
<p>Can any MIT students comment on the turnout to football games?</p>
<p>I don’t know that I could estimate exactly how many people attend, but usually there are some fraternity brothers of players, other interested students, some local parents, and the cheerleading squad. It’s not a huge number, though – probably on the order of a hundred.</p>
<p>More people show up for basketball games than for football games, for sure. I’m not sure if that has to do with the fact that basketball games are inside.</p>