<p>I knew a lot of really smart undergrads at MIT, by a lot of different standards – people who took massively ridiculous courseloads, people who graduated with perfect GPAs, people who discovered fabulous things in their UROPs, people who got into the top graduate programs and scholarship programs in their fields after graduation. </p>
<p>But I don’t know that I could pick one of those people as the smartest person I knew at MIT. For one thing, it’s tough to decide which of those things is most important in deciding who’s smartest. For another, you don’t learn many of those things, even about your friends, easily. Nobody talks about his or her GPA voluntarily, and you might know that somebody was doing a UROP or applying to graduate school, but people don’t really talk about their accomplishments freely.</p>