<p>I was told a lot of the crazy olympiad winners and international award winners and science fair finalist people were antisocial and hard to get along with…has MIT noticed this?</p>
<p>The only reason I can think of why these people were rejected is that they possibly have an arrogant/antisocial personality…</p>
<p>I don’t know. My favorite professor was an international olympiad winner back in the day, and he’s a freaking amazing person (and very nice, and not in any way antisocial).</p>
<p>I wouldn’t go so far as to generalize about “crazy olympiad winners,” but I do agree that there are SPECIFIC CASES where some really “qualified” candidate (with great scores and awards) are surprisingly rejected due to the personal aspect.</p>
<p>Remember the Common Data Set. “Personal qualities and characteristics” are one of two (?) marked “very important”. :)</p>
<p>None. None at all.</p>
<p>omg, when I was looking at the board, i saw your username, I had to comment! I used to be obsessed w/ neopets in elemtary and middle school!</p>
<p>Good to know. 
who are the ones you know I lPlay Neopets?</p>
<p>I know several of them, and they’re realllyyyy nice.</p>
<p>I know several students who’ve attended MOSP, and I have met one USAMO winner. Not one jerk among them.</p>
<p>Ashwin, you write that “these people were rejected,” but in fact, most young mathematicians at this level are accepted to top universities, if not always to their first choice school. Last year there was a case that surprised readers on this board; that individual is now at Duke University, I believe. Duke has always fielded a fairly strong team for the Putnam competition, so I imagine that all’s well that ends well, so to speak.</p>
<p>I know one girl who won something in a well known science/research competition and she’s very nice.
Most really smart/successful people I know are nice. They can be a bit “too” focused which can annoy some people, but in general, they’re nice people.</p>
<p>I think the question might more aptly be “what percentage of top scientists in all age groups are jerks?” The answer is nonzero, although it’s also not 100%. Scientists are people too. ;)</p>
<p>nonzero is such a funny mathematical term :)</p>
<p>Well, Mollie, do you have a rough estimate? Based on your years in the admissions field, have you come across applicants like the ones the OP mentioned…and were suddenly turned off by their horrible attitude?</p>
<p>Why does MIT reject them anyways?</p>
<p>I was actually talking about people with PhDs. At least in developmental neuroscience, there’s no shortage of jerkbag PIs, nor of really smart jerkbag PIs.</p>
<p>I never read applications at MIT – I was a student blogger and worked for the admissions office, but I wasn’t part of reading or deciding on the fate of applications.</p>
<p>Ahh…I see.</p>
<p>I know quite a few international olympiads/Intel finalist etc… after going here at MIT, and I can tell you that I am absolutely humbled by how humble and nice they were, how down-to-earth yet smart they were. And they also make great pset buddies :D</p>
<p>Last year my DS used to car pool to the Columbia Science Honors Saturday program with a girl from another town. She was a senior, he a junior. When he got his PSAT scores I was so proud of him I shamelessly bragged about his perfect 80 in math.
She had the grace to congratulate him, but completely failed to mention that she had gotten a perfect 2400 on the SAT. (Boy was I embarrassed!)
She was one of the top 10 winners in Intel last year, and was a really sweet girl. Always a pleasure to drive with.</p>
<p>From personal experience, I’ve found that a lot of the crazy olympiad winners are nice kids, if a bit shy. I’m feeling it’s a survival mechanism.</p>
<p>Don’t worry too much about it. I’ve competed in my share of math olympiads, and most of the people are surprisingly easy to get along with, even if you don’t share too many interests.</p>
<p>@Treething: I match exactly your description, LOL~</p>
<p>Mollie makes a really good point–further along, you are likely to run into some people who are . . . um . . . “characters.” You’ll also run into some people whose enthusiasm for an area and genuine interest in other people’s work buoys everybody up. I can think of a few people in my field who fall into that category–one Nobelist, others not (but maybe in the future). The distribution of personalities does seem to vary somewhat by field and even sub-field.</p>
<p>As far as IMO team members go, the ones I know anything about are nice. If a person thinks about mathematics a lot (i.e., constantly), it might make her/him seem slightly awkward in normal conversation, but it doesn’t mean that she/he is a jerk.</p>
<p>I would be really cautious about drawing the conclusion that students with outstanding qualifications who were rejected must have some personality defect. There might exist a set of such students who do. But the majority of such students probably just didn’t have applications that reflected the combination of traits that the admissions office is looking for. (I say this in a neutral way.)</p>