Hey there! I’m an international applicant, applying to MIT on Early Decision in 2025, for start term fall 2026.
My stats are as follows:
SAT 1590, GPA 4.0/4.0 unweighted, DET 155/160. Graduated as class valedictorian, Rank 1/300.
I have been a silver medalist at the NSEA- Olympiad for Astronomy and Astrophysics.
I won gold at IRIS National and represented at Regeneron ISEF 2024 in computational biology and bioinformatics. I’m a low income student, applying for financial aid.
I’ve been a finalist for NASA KIBO-RPC Robotics JAXA 2025 and an Open Science 101 research scholar with ORC credentials from American Society of Overseas Research, Boston, MA. In addition, I have played varsity track and field and a gold medalist in nationals junior and senior year.
What are my chances of getting accepted into MIT?
Nobody can reasonably chance for colleges with under a 5% acceptance rate. You are a strong applicant – but many many applicants will also have excellent credentials. All anyone can say is apply and give it your all.
As @happy1 noted, no one can chance you for a school like MIT.
As an fyi, MIT does not offer Early Decision, but they do offer Early Action.
Have you tried to be recruited as a track and field athlete? This changes the admissions equation quite a bit at highly rejective schools. At MIT, it is less of an admissions boost, but a recruited athlete is given some consideration, and the odds would be around 50/50 rather than sub 5%. If you haven’t started this process yet, it is likely too late to do so.
I agree with other answers. All that we can really say is that you are a competitive applicant. Your stats are typical for students accepted to MIT, but are also typical for the majority of students rejected by MIT. Also, there are a lot more students that are rejected than there are that are admitted.
I would estimate that your chances are somewhere in the single digit percentages (and I did attend MIT as an international student – but admissions was easier many decades ago when I did it).
For MIT being good at track and field is a good extracurricular activity. Some other highly ranked schools in the US might care a bit more about sports particularly if you are good enough to be a recruited athlete. Stanford for example has a large number of very good athletic teams, although I am pretty sure that it is need aware for international students. The Ivy League schools in general have good athletic programs (the term “Ivy League” literally refers to a sports league, even though it is sometimes incorrectly used to refer to “any highly ranked university”). I think that it is late to get recruited to the athletic teams at schools that you are not already talking to, but you do of course have time to apply.
Stanford has one of the top track and field programs in the country. They recruit the best of the best. Ivy is also D1 and they are wrapping up their recruiting classes right now. MIT is a very good D3 program, and if OP is a national level runner is his home country, he might have a shot there. But again, probably way too late in the process.
Just to give you some stark facts.
MIT reports their own admissions stats:
In this cohort, 1155/21515 domestic applicants were accepted, which is about 5.4%.
129/6717 International applicants were accepted, which is about 1.9%.
These are not random samples, these are all applicants who were convinced they had a chance to be admitted to MIT. But over 98% of International applicants who thought they had a chance to be admitted to MIT were rejected instead.
Of course I am not intending to discourage you from applying. But please make sure you have some very good alternative plans as well.