<p>No it’s a really good question, but from my unofficial perspective, the answer is in mathboy98’s post. He says:</p>
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<p>And that is it in a nutshell. Match is largely about attitude. And as MIT is an evidence-based institution, attitude is conveyed less by what you say in a 250 word answer to a question than in what your actions and your decisions over years reveal about your attitudes.</p>
<p>Sure there is a lot of variation. Given 4300 undergraduates, you would expect that. But when you look at the aggregated behaviour of those undergraduates, you can see quite a few common attitudes.</p>
<p>For example, consider the UROP program. This is completely voluntary. Nobody will ever make you take a UROP. Worse, in order to participate in a UROP, a student has to show the initiative to reach out and contact the professor running the project. This can be a little bit scary, particularly to a freshman. Nonetheless, of the class that graduated in 2010, 87% of them had participated in at least one UROP project. And this to my eye goes to match. MIT admissions admits students with the drive, the intellectual curiousity, and the intitiative to participate in the UROP program.</p>
<p>Or take the less obvious statistics. In the class that graduated in 2010, 20% of the class had participated in an intercollegiate sport. More than 80% of the graduating class had participated in an intramural sport. Does this mean that MIT is a jock school? Absolutely not, but a lot of MIT’s eduation, and indeed a lot of the sciences, is based around working in teams. Most successful MIT students work well in teams. Now those don’t necessarily have to be sports teams. Performing arts groups, for example, also rely hugely on teamwork. I think that a comfort with team-working is an attitude, but I think that it is an attitude that is also part of the match. MIT Admissions tends to admit students who can work well in teams.</p>
<p>In the graduating class of 2010, some 30% of the class studied, interned or volunteered abroad at some point during their time at MIT. I think that a curiousity about how the world works, coupled with a willingness to see more of it (including travelling within the US) is also an attitude common to a lot of MIT students.</p>
<p>Yes, with 4300 MIT students, there will be a lot of different manifestations of “MATCH”, that is to say, a lot of different ways of demonstrating certain attitudes, but the attitudes that each of the competitive schools look for (and there is a significant variation between a good match for MIT and a good match for Yale, for example) vary less than you think within any institution.</p>