I was ballparking it. I can accept thousands but tens of thousands is overdoing it. MIT received 17,909 applicants for its most recent class (of which 1,742 were admitted). Obviously there weren’t tens of thousands of musicians in that group.
I graduated from high school in 1989; I was accepted by MIT, but I ultimately chose to go to another school (Rice).
I guess I was a pretty good applicant, but hardly the Nobel-laureate-in-waiting that some are suggesting one needs to be to stand a chance:
I got a 1470 on the SAT (back when 1600 was the maximum), and was ranked 3rd in my graduating class. I played tuba, having made the Texas All-State Band twice. I was a member of my school’s Academic Decathlon team, but hardly a dominant one. I was a member of my school’s Number Sense (a form of competitive mental arithmetic, basically) team, but I was very much the weakest of my school’s three-member “travelling team.”
I’d played football and basketball in junior high, but did not continue competitive sports in high school.
I thought I wanted to major in aeronautical or mechanical engineering, but didn’t have any stronger feelings than that.
So I dunno; like I said, my qualifications were good but not mind-blowing, and they accepted me.
As it turns out, I was quite pleased with my decision to go to Rice; I enjoyed it a lot, learned a lot, and was quite well-prepared once it came time for graduate school (where I was again accepted by MIT, but chose instead to attend Caltech). As a few others have mentioned, if you have a graduate degree then nobody really cares where your bachelor’s was from, anyway.
I’d just like to add a personal suggestion to anonymous User:
Print out this thread and save it!
You’ve asked a lot of good questions, and received a lot of good advice.
But you’re 14 years old, and have several years to keep thinking about your future plans.
Your plans will probably change. And when you finally do enter university, you may find it very interesting to compare your 14-year-old hopes to your 18-year-old reality.
So --save this thread, and see how many of your dreams come true!
OTOH, sometimes it can be easier than people think. I got a National Merit Scholarship, and had a recruiter from Harvard fly out to visit me 3000 miles away. I did play the cello, but I was crap at it.
Yes many play the violin but how many play it as well as I do not intended to brag. If I make it in the top 5 of the state, then would not that mean something.
Yes, it will mean SOMETHING but that may not be a big factor in MIT’s decision. What if the other people in the Top 5 also apply to MIT and a couple of them are more qualified than you in other ways? You only talk about your violin playing in the context of using it to get into MIT. That is the real issue. Do you actually like playing the violin and would you still be doing it for its own sake if you knew it wouldn’t be a factor one way or the other in 4 years?
Anonymous people on the internet cannot answer this question within any bit of accuracy that an actual admissions officer at MIT would be able to. GIVE THEM A CALL.
Hilariously, there’s an article on that front page that mentions a one-armed violinist. So to answer your question - no, I don’t suppose the admissions officers will be overly excited about a Top 5 violinist from Random New England State. (Not that it takes away from your abilities or talent - but I think a bit of perspective is going to do you far more good than cracking into the Top 3.)
Just an aside: what is this “SAT II” that some of you have mentioned? I only recall there being one SAT when I was in High School (graduated in 1987).
This is for graduate level, but I’ve heard MIT can be pretty random at times. All top tier universities can seem a little arbitrary in selection process, but MIT in particular is known for being… unique. I contacted their admissions advisor for my field, and for comp sci they didn’t want to know about your research and they didn’t even want GREs, they just wanted you to take a comp-sci focused English test, submit your transcripts, and send an essay. They also made it clear that they didn’t even want letters of rec. This is in stark contrast to even Carnegie-Mellon, who didn’t ask for GREs either, but at least wanted letters of rec and encouraged you to submit research (even if incomplete or unpublished).
They used to call them “Acheivment Tests” in my day which is just a bit after your day (graduated in 1993). They’re subject matter tests, and IIRC you were required to take 2 of them, unless some program required a specific test, then you’de end up taking more of them.
They are subject tests. They were implemented some time in the early 90s I believe. Many colleges require certain ones, and others they will sometimes use as a means to skip you a level in a class. I took three of them, the Math IIC (which was required for Engineering applicants at a lot of schools, and covers advanced algebra, geometry, trig and beginning calculus and allows a calculator), the Writing (a bunch of essays) and I took German as well (I got a 480, which sounds terrible, but was actually good enough for me to skip the first two introductory courses of German in college…from what I understood at the time, most people taking the foreign language ones were native speakers).
Yup… MIT is D3 for men’s soccer. D3 schools can not offer athletic money.
Anonymous User, why are you asking us, random strangers on the Internet, when you could be asking the MIT admissions folks? TONIGHT, the Art of Problem Solving is hosting a live web Q&A session with two MIT admissions officers, Matt McGann (their Director of Admissions) and Dawn Wendell (an admissions associate).
More information here: http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=144&t=502685
You have to register with the site to participate, but it’s free.
Also, this is the eight year in a row that AoPS has hosted one of these. You should read the past chat transcripts and see if it addresses any of your questions.
I got into MIT in 1969. During my interview they asked me about debating team more than anything else. A friend of mine went to to Music and Art HS in NY, played violin, never actually got a HS diploma, but did get 1600 on her SATs. (I only got 1563.)
It depends a lot on what the admissions office is looking for. They are not looking for a class full of the same kind of people, I see lots of resumes from MIT grads now, and the emphasis seems to be on undergrad research. I’d suspect that some kind of independent work like that is going to count more than joining clubs or doing service. I also suspect that leading one club will count more than being a member of 10. But asking the admissions office is the right way to go.
I don’t understand why they don’t interview applicants for undergrad degrees like the UK equivilants (Oxbridge) do. It’s basically the only way of differentiating between people identically good on paper.
P.S. Regarding Oxbridge, if OP is really obsessed with MIT then he can always apply to Cambridge and switch to MIT in his third year, I believe they swap with one another somehow.
They do at MIT. Plenty of schools do.
I interviewed with a local alumnus after I sent in my application.
Another '70’s MIT guy here - I knew I wanted to be an engineer, so I wanted to get into the biggest-name engineering school there was, and I wanted to get the hell out of the town I was in and move to someplace civilized, and MIT was it. It’s hard to remember my interview after all these years, but I do recall they wanted to talk more about my HS quiz show stuff and my playing with model rockets than anything academic. So yes, they do need to see conventional accomplishments, but since every applicant has them, they actually don’t matter. They’re looking for a mix of people, perhaps more so now than then, but really, they could pick a freshman class at random from their applicant pool and still do just as well.
But you know what? It really didn’t matter all that much then, either. It ain’t the only prestigious tech school out there, and it does come with some limitations. Sure, the name looks good on a resume, but it looks even better as a grad-school name, since that goes higher. But you have a real problem if you decide, as many classmates did and so often happens at any school, to move on to something different. If it isn’t there, you have to transfer, and that’s a pain. You may even decide well before application time that something else holds your interest and you might not even want to go there anyway.
In hindsight, and even before graduation, I had actually come to regret the decision - although I never considered something other than engineering, I wished I had gone to a more broad-based school with a broad range of subjects, somewhere that had a wider range of people with a wider range of interests, more girls (not the same problem at MIT as it used to be, to be sure), and overall a more normal human environment. Those are truly formative, maturing years, and I really thought I could have done a better job on that in an environment that doesn’t expect full adulthood as much as MIT does.
The big name schools are still there for graduate work, if that’s where you’re headed eventually, and MIT won’t care if you went to Podunk State or MIT itself for your undergrad degree. And, a couple of years into a career, believe it or not, nobody else will care very much where you went anymore.
Don’t stress out over it; enjoy high school and your classmates and friends as much as you can, and check back with us in a couple of years, okay? You’re doing fine, don’t worry.