Anyone here got accepted at MIT as an undergraduate?

[twofish-quant]

School wide no, but I remember back when I was talking to the interviewer that comp sci was only about %20 female, which makes me think the gender imbalances in the majors are pretty consistent with everywhere else in the states.

Interesting. It looks like from the statistics that this is what is happening.

 

[SrEstroncio]

To hell with MIT and Caltech.
I got 800 in my phyiscs SAT, 770 on the math II one
95/100 GPA, I got 40 on my IB programme diploma, I was in the national mexican physics olympiad, took part in the math one, I was also in a latin american olimpiad (plus spain and portugal), I was student of the class in my HS and they rejected me last year.

sucks not being born in the US.

I know another mexican guy that scored lower on almost everything on that list and got accepted.

 

[twofish-quant]

It all sounds like MIT is run by Satan himself!

It's an incredibly fun place if you go there with the right mind-set. One thing that is cool is that you can deal with the fact that you are at the near the bottom of the class without falling apart, you end up learning a whole bunch of neat stuff. Also, you get to play with a lot of toys a few years before anyone else does. One of the big attractions of MIT for me was that everyone got an e-mail account, internet access, and there was a campus wide instant messaging system, which isn't a big deal, except that this was in 1987.

As far as who runs MIT, it's the military-industrial-economic power elites that run everything else in the United States. (Read Chomsky).

One thing that's fun is that you walk down the halls and then suddenly a door will open up and you see some well-dressed 50/60-year oldish people coming out of a meeting, and if you peek inside the room, you'll see a *nice* meeting room, so you wonder what they were meeting about, and then the theme from the X-files plays in the background. One weird thing is that some of the professors and administrators seem like models for characters from the X-files, and I don't think it's a coincidence since it turns out Chris Carter's older brother is a professor there.

Now I don't think that there is an agreement by the military-scientific elite with space aliens to enslave mankind. However, I'm pretty sure if there *were* such a conspiracy that MIT would be in the middle of it, and that if you agreed to get the requisite alien implants in your brain, you could probably talk your way into an undergraduate research project in Area 51.

However, one thing that you end up learning that is really, really scarier than finding out about an alien conspiracy, which is that human institutions are run by *people*. *Shudder*

 

[MapleQQQ]

To hell with MIT and Caltech.
I got 800 in my phyiscs SAT, 770 on the math II one
95/100 GPA, I got 40 on my IB programme diploma, I was in the national mexican physics olympiad, took part in the math one, I was also in a latin american olimpiad (plus spain and portugal), I was student of the class in my HS and they rejected me last year.

sucks not being born in the US.

I know another mexican guy that scored lower on almost everything on that list and got accepted.

Too bad it's not about the scores. I bet that "other mexican guy" had a much better personality/attitude, and that is why he was accepted. I made an account JUST to post this, so other people that come by won't keep thinking that everything is a crapshoot just because of apparently random score/grade differences of those accepted and those rejected.

 

[bleedblue1234]

We had 3 kids go last year...

2 were athletic recruits with worse stats than me...

1 was an outstanding student (4.4+ GPA, 35 ACT (4 times), good subject tests, a large number of good EC's..)

Where you go to school is not irrelevant but so much of a crapshoot that I wouldn't put weight into it...

Look at college confidential and the number of perfect SAT's/ACT's getting rejected from Y/S/M etc. Just do your best and you will be fine.

 

[twofish-quant]

Too bad it's not about the scores. I bet that "other mexican guy" had a much better personality/attitude, and that is why he was accepted. I made an account JUST to post this, so other people that come by won't keep thinking that everything is a crapshoot just because of apparently random score/grade differences of those accepted and those rejected.

I know people that review admissions for MIT and what they tell me is that a lot of this *is* a crapshoot. What happens is that MIT (and the other major schools) try to distribute admissions evenly across the United States, so they arrange admissions so that now everyone comes from the same state. So if you have a quota of N students, and you have 5*N good applicants, it becomes a lottery.

Also MIT *will* give preference to American citizens.

So what happens a lot is that you have too many good candidates, so people get accepted and rejected by more or less random criterion. People that I know that help review admissions tend to hate the job because they have to reject too many people that are qualified.

You could probably triple the size of MIT without lowering the quality of students. It really stinks, but it's not an easy problem to fix. Also "to hell to MIT" is a pretty good attitude in dealing with getting rejected by MIT. MIT stinks.

One of the things that you learn at MIT is that you should hate MIT. It took me a while to figure this out, but learning to hate MIT is an essential part of the MIT education, because if you don't learn to hate MIT then you don't have the motivation to fix its flaws and make it better.

IHTFP!

 

[shravas]

MIT does not recruit athletes.

 

[Dembadon]

MIT does not recruit athletes.

Mathletes, perhaps?

 

[Vanadium 50]

MIT does not recruit athletes.

Depends on what you mean. MIT is NCAA Division III, which means no scholarships. However, it does field more athletic teams than any other school in the country, and if you were an exceptional athlete in high school it will look good on your application.

 

[jtbell]

It probably also looks good if you're an exceptional musician. I have some recordings of the MIT Symphony Orchestra that were released commercially, not "vanity" productions by any means.

 

[shravas]

Depends on what you mean. MIT is NCAA Division III, which means no scholarships. However, it does field more athletic teams than any other school in the country, and if you were an exceptional athlete in high school it will look good on your application.

Of course, I just meant that academic standards aren't lowered for athletes like they are at other schools. So being good at sports is just like any other extracurricular. But I don't think they have more teams than any other school anymore though, there were a whole bunch of cuts like two years ago.

 

[Vanadium 50]

You're right. MIT is now #2.