<p>As I look through the decision(both EA and RD) threads and see people with national and international science awards get rejected, I fell that MIT is sick and tired of getting the same types of candidates(really smart people who all just do national competitions with insanely high test scores and crazy awards).
Tell me if this is true? I feel that in order to get accepted to MIT, you need to show that you love and are passionate about a certain activity, whether it may be volunteering at a soup kitchen or doing research with a doctor on a disease a family member has. You can either express this in your essays or through teacher recs. I think that when MIT sees these students who participate in these amazing competitions, they see machines who show no love rather than human beings.
MIT also states that it wants diversity. So, if they keep getting applicants with the same stuff on their resume, they are likely to reject those people and accept someone with lower caliber stats that are different.
What do you guys think? Am I crazy or is there some truth behind it?</p>
<p>hahahaha
short answer, no.
MIT still wants insanely smart people. What you saw were not smart ENOUGH. Wait, let me re-phrase it. What you saw did not have the strongest resume!
You either had to have done insane amounts of research (the not-so-smart-way) or have won international and national level awards (the way genius’s choose).
On top of that you had to excel in every other aspect.</p>
<p>I believe that your assumption is not true, but it does have some important points. MIT looks at diversity quite importantly. Say if Caltech and MIT decides whether to accept a student with only insane academics, Caltech is likely to accept the student more than MIT.</p>
<p>I think MIT wants students who are both smart and those who have the same goals as them. The students who seem to be really qualified (but still got rejected) may not fit MIT’s goals.</p>
<p>Check this out.
[MIT</a> Admissions: The Match Between You And MIT](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/pulse/the_match_between_you_and_mit/index.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/pulse/the_match_between_you_and_mit/index.shtml)</p>
<p>In short, grades and numbers aren’t everything. And I don’t think being insanely smart will get you into MIT.</p>
<p>I think you’re thinking about this the wrong way – MIT doesn’t go about its admissions process rejecting people, but rather accepting people. So it’s not that MIT is “sick and tired” of academically-focused applications (they’re not, at all), but rather that the students who got in were seen as having a great deal to offer the MIT community. And applications aren’t compared with each other, so there’s no point at which MIT is explicitly rejecting someone in order to accept someone else.</p>
<p>Science competitions and national awards aren’t liabilities for admission at MIT. But you don’t need those awards to be admitted, either.</p>
<p>Also, keep in mind that the applications the admissions officers see are quite different from the stats posts people make on CC.</p>
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<p>Wow, perhaps you should learn what you are talking about before you post.</p>
<p>You do NOT have to have done either insane amounts of research or won national/international awards to get into MIT (though both are plusses, certainly). And how DARE you imply that people who did a bunch of research - that thing that scientists, you know, actually do, as opposed to winning competitions - are “not-so-smart” (or for that matter, that anyone capable of getting into MIT is “not-so-smart”)? Or that you need to have won awards in competitions that many applicants haven’t even heard of, to be a genius?</p>
<p>That said, I agree with Mollie. And I think the OP should refrain from comparing students who win prestigious competitions, people who s/he doesn’t really know anything about, to subhuman machines with no heart.</p>
<p>For readers new to the board, both Molliebatmit and Jessiehl worked closely with MIT admissions as bloggers on the website during their years at MIT.</p>
<p>I think that awards always give a better edge… but certainly does not guarantee anything. The people you saw on those Result thread is only a selected few from the CC community and certainly shouldn’t be taken as 100% representative of the total accepted student body’s characteristics. </p>
<p>Everyone gets in for a reason, not just based on whims of a certain admissions officer or evaluator. What anomalies you see can probably be better explained if you had better access to their application. maybe their essays wasn’t as good, or they were too cocky.</p>
<p>My humble input is that while the post Jessie referred to had an insulting way of stating things, under certain careful definitions, it does become considerably less insulting. Winning a competition tends to suggest a certain extent of cleverness, which professors have mentioned helps one resolve issues more quickly during the process of research, and some can <em>choose</em> to partake in these to show they have some very quick problem-solving skills. Not everyone gets a rush from this sort of thing though, and certain individuals light up and become very sharp precisely when one talks about a certain kind of problem. Then, of course there are those who go do research because they think everyone else is doing it, which is of course false. </p>
<p>I think what that poster missed, though, is that the routes suggested were vastly stereotyped, because there are factors going into research that go well beyond classic cleverness, which would be worthier of the term “genius” in my eyes. For instance, in order to resolve problems and have it mean much, one must have ideas worth pursuing. Including such factors would considerably cut down the number of people I actually would call “genius,” but also add a certain category. For instance, there are highly abstract-minded mathematicians I know (to whom I’d ascribe the term “genius”) who never touched a competition out of choice.</p>
<p>I would like like to respond to mathboy 98. I appretiate that you stated that my perspective was stereotypical, you can show cleverness in the field of science or medicine without being in a competition. For example, I know a student who taught an autistic child how to profficently read and write using techniques a standard teacher would not use. This child could do neither and was unresponsive to others prior to meeting the student. The student had done extensive research but never entered a national competition.
Now how is that not considered clever?
IF YOU WANT TO GET IN, you have to show MIT that you have passion and are in some way different from the other thousands of applicants. In other words, if the admission officer dropped all the applications on the floor and they were mixed up, he should be able to pick yours up and tell that it’s yours.
Thanks everyone for posting!!
P.S. I have heard that most of the students who are in the applicant pool for MIT do not have such competitions on their applications. This is true, right??</p>
<p>I’m not sure, lola995, but I sure as heck don’t! I’m not really drawn to competition. I much prefer collaboration and creation.</p>
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<p>You can show your ability in so many different ways not only doing research and wining awards.
MIT is also interested how much you can change the world not the difficult of your problem.</p>
<p>This quote is from MIT
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<p>My son (now an MIT sophomore) had never heard of any of the math and science competitions when he applied. There were questions about them on the application but he he no idea what was being referred to. His high school never discussed or encouraged such activities. On these forums, I’ve seen it stated repeatedly that most successful applicants have not pursued these competitions.</p>
<p>Of course, my son was very accomplished in other ways. I think the typical successful applicant has been at or near the top of his/her class in high school (at least top 5-10%), earned a high GPA (mostly A’s), has high standardized test scores (see the middle 50% stats on the website), and has accomplished SOMETHING ELSE that is distinguishing, and that will add to the MIT community - athletics, arts, a patent, unusual travel, evidence of creativity and passion for something. </p>
<p>In today’s New York Times, Marilee Jones, former Admissions Dean, is profiled, and although she’s not at MIT any longer, I believe her ideas and ideals are still followed. She comments that failing at something is nothing to be afraid of. I think evidence of failure and subsequent diligence at something is prized at MIT, and is something to highlight in an application.</p>
<p>Yes!!! Thank you neuron39!!!
It is important to state that no one must be discouraged from applying to MIT. You can have something in your app that no one else has. AND that can get you in.</p>
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<p>I was actually responding to a poster after you, who seemed to dichotomize things a little too cleanly. In some ways, while it’s phrased in a narrow-minded fashion, it seems to have one right idea, which is that competitions are a good thing to distinguish oneself if one is especially clever at those kinds of things. But in the end, showing lots of promise in problem-solving is something few people care about in the long run if the given individual doesn’t direct the efforts in a concerted way, and this direction is probably part of what a school looks for. Not to mention the extent to which someone is clever at having good ideas often depends a lot on how much they care at all about the given subject matter, and often it’s a tall order to say they care at all about competitions.</p>
<p>anyone wanting to go to MIT must be insanely smart…some people have to have an incredible resume and others just need to have the genetics…female and/or URMs. Interesting that the stats are never broken out that way to show the discrepancies.</p>
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<p>That horse has been beaten to death before. There is absolutely no evidence that women are given a break in admission to MIT. The fact that they perform as well or better on average than the men once admitted to MIT supports that claim. There are fewer female applicants but they are much more self-selecting. I interview candidates for MIT and of the ten candidates I saw this year the top two were unquestionably the only two women I interviewed. I often have a tough time convincing some of the top female students at the local high schools to apply to MIT largely because they are typically less one dimensional and are often less exclusively math and science focused than the men. Those women that do apply to MIT are generally highly motivated and extremely well prepared. One of the women I interviewed this year had completed AP Calc BC as a sophomore, had three years of research experience in a lab, team captain of a winning JETS team, NMF, high scorer on the AIME, was a motivational speaker for troubled teens and had a second degree black belt in taekwando. She clearly stood out from the crowd, but even she is not guaranteed admission. </p>
<p>You are better off focusing on what makes you different and stand out among highly qualified applicants as opposed to worrying about somebody else stealing your spot. There is no single profile that would guarantee admission. 2400 SATs and 16 APs just won’t do it. Being insanely smart may not be enough unless you can also show you have done something with your talent. Remember MIT’s motto is “Mens et Manus” which stands for mind and hand. The whole philosophy of the school is about applying science and technology for the betterment of society. Showing some evidence of that potential is part of the “fit” for MIT.</p>
<p>@cellardweller</p>
<p>You’re entirely correct. As an example, my son had 1600 on the SAT (one sitting) and 17 AP’s (some on his own). He did get in to MIT and several other schools, but was rejected at multiple Ivies. We like to think that was because all involved (including his GC) knew that MIT was his first choice - but this is our rationalization. If more than 3000 kids score 1600 every year (and they all apply to Harvard), and Harvard takes 1800 applicants each year, then they’re rejecting many applicants with perfect scores. The stats alone get you a look, not a guarantee.</p>
<p>Are awards/competitions more easily recognised? For example, it’s easier to just understand, “I won so-and-so competition”, than, “I did this with the help of my friends, we made this, this happened”, etc., right?</p>
<p>I don’t live in the US, thinking of applying as an international student. We don’t have the same competitions here, although similar ones, and I did participate in them, did some stuff. Mostly though, I write [my</a> own computer programs and games](<a href=“http://nikki93.github.com/]my”>http://nikki93.github.com/), and write software libraries. I’m hoping I can incorporate this into my application somehow. :P</p>
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<p>Not necessarily. Some students do not have easy access to math and science competitions or simply elect to demonstrate their abilities through other means. You’d be surprised to what extent the admissions committee will seek out talented individuals with strong potential. Accomplishments in absolute terms is heavily dependent on the resources available to a student. Some schools are literal training grounds for science competitions while others hardly send any students. </p>
<p>Remember that admission to MIT is not a reward for your past work. It is based on an assessment of your expected contribution once admitted. There are thousands of ways you can demonstrate your creative potential without having won some national award or competition, and that includes tinkering in your garage with a few friends.</p>
<p>cellardweller, it is a fact that there are no females in the higher tiers of math. The 2009 cutoff for blue mop was 18 on usamo, and the highest female score was a 15. I think the last time a female was on the us imo team was 1980ish. Females with math oriented applications have a much easier time than males with the exact same awards. </p>
<p>Oh, and to pick apart the girl you find so amazing:
BC Calc as sophomore: so what?<br>
3 years research: did she have connections? And, seeing as she did not get recognition in siemens/intel/isef, she didn’t accomplish that much
captain of winning JETS team: winning what? And captain= school level recognition, nothing more.
NMF: not that big of a deal
“high scorer on aime”: clearly she didn’t score high enough, or you would replace that with “usamo qualifier”
motivational speaker for troubled teens: while this shows she works hard, simply speaking isn’t much of a accomplishment.
tkd 2nd degree blackbelt: from experience, I can say that all this means is that she consistently payed the testing fee.</p>