Please note:

The Admissions Office will be closed Monday, May 26, in observance of Memorial Day.

MIT staff blogger Matt McGann '00

Match Game by Matt McGann '00

It may have been snowing outside, but inside, it’s raining applications.

Unfortunately, I missed another classic IAP event last night: the annual 6.270 Robot Competition. Modeled after MIT’s world-famous 2.70/2.007 robotics competition, 6.270 throws in an interesting twist: the robots must be autonomous. The competition is so popular, they hold it in the 1200 seat Kresge Auditorium on campus.

Here on my blog, there has been a lot of interesting discussion after my last post, and lots of good questions, too. I hope to answer many of those questions soon, but today I’ll start with the question that seems to be most prominent: what does it mean to be a “good match” for MIT? What do we look for?

  • Alignment with MIT’s mission. The founding mission of MIT was to improve the world through science and technology. The Task Force on Student Life & Learning — aka the “Task Force,” which was formed during my time as an undergraduate to articulate MIT’s mission for the next 50 years (this is a topic for another post) — reaffirmed that mission, stating, “Today, the goal of discovering and applying knowledge for the benefit of society remains at the center of MIT’s mission.”

  • Collaborative & cooperative spirit. The core of the MIT spirit is collaboration and cooperation: you can see it all over the Institute. The homework (“problem sets”) at MIT is designed to be worked on in groups; cross-department labs are very common; MIT is known for its interdisciplinary research; the Open Source movement is powerful here; publishing and sharing of results is the center of academic research. Fostering a collaborative environment is an important part of the MIT community.

  • Initiative. Opportunities abound at MIT, but they must be seized. Research projects and seed money and interesting lectures and all that good stuff isn’t handed to students on a silver platter, but for those students who take initiative, who take advantage of what’s around them, MIT’s resources are unparalleled. Initiative is also coupled with risk-taking.

  • Risk-taking. Asian Mom provided a great quotation from Marilee Jones, our Dean of Admissions:

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