<p>I don’t think that there is such a thing as a standard profile. MIT takes students from all over the world with a wide variety of interests. That being said, international admissions to MIT are so competitive, that the accepted international candidates are usually outstanding. </p>
<p>The international applicant pool tends to be more self-selective than the American applicant pool. For a domestic applicant applying to a bunch of US schools, then most of the MIT application (eg SAT tests) will already have been done, and the additional effort involved in applying to MIT is RELATIVELY minor. For an international applicant, the decision to apply to MIT (and I interview many students for whom MIT is their only American application), then the application is a real pain (for example, SATs are often not offered close to the student, and have to be taken at least twice (for the subject tests). So the pool applying tends to be fairly impressive, and then MIT takes only a small percentage of those, so the successful applicants really do tend to be great.</p>
<p>Beyond being great though, there is little commonality. I saw one young woman admitted some years back, where when you considered what she had accomplished, given what little she had to work with (for example her school had a total of one science teacher who taught all science), it was awesome, but when you compare her accomplishments absolutely to some others who had many more opportunities, then her achievements paled beyond some of the others, but the drive, the grit, the talent that she had to demonstrate to get to where she was saw her admitted. That same year, an international student who had a medal in the IMO was also admitted. Also awesome, but a very different profile.</p>