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Since the question specifically referenced Internationals, I thought I would chime in here as I am an international EC. There is a lot of confusion about extra-curriculars in the international community as a whole both because there are a lot of schools abroad that do not offer extracurricular activities in the way that an American applicant would understand them, and further, that is coupled with the fact that most international universities do not consider extra-curriculars in the admissions process (even top schools like Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, etc.). This leads to a great deal of misunderstanding and distress in the international community as to the admissions criteria of US universities in general, and MIT in particular.
So there are two things that have been said many times on this board but need to be reiterated in this context:
Firstly, MIT (as with most top American universities) evaluates your accomplishments in context. That is to say, given the opportunities that you had, what did you make of them. So I am sometimes asked "How many A-levels/AP exams do I need to get into MIT?" That is a meaningless question. Certainly, a better question is: "How many is normal for the school from which you are applying?" There are some schools which offer only 3 (or fewer) AP courses. For such a school, a student who graduates with 3 APs is doing fine. One who graduates with 4 (one self-studied) is exceptional. At other schools, which offer huge numbers of AP courses, it is common for students to graduate with 6 or more. So is getting 4 a good number or a bad number? At the first school it is exceptional, at the second, it is under-performing. The same idea holds true with regard to extracurricular activities. If your school does not offer any, you will not be penalised for failing to start 6 clubs which have no context in your school's culture. However, if your school offers a rich extracurricular program, then your failure to participate in it may reflect badly on you (depending on what else you are doing with your time).
Secondly, the true question is less what are you doing in your extracurricular activities, than what are you doing when you are not asleep and not in academic studies. Maybe you are a parade leader of the marching band, maybe you run your own business, maybe you work to support your family, maybe you have climbed K2. Whatever it is, this is a better picture of who you are than that you have gotten a 760 in your SAT2 biology test. Taken in that light, the fact that your school does not offer a rich extracurricular program should not stop you from explaining to MIT what it is that you do because it is part of who you are, rather than because your school requires it.
Hope that this helps.
Last edited by Mikalye; 10-19-2009 at 06:53 AM.
Reason: fixing grammar
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