Why MIT asks what you do for fun

MMIT's admissions office lists the ability to prioritize balance, with healthy interests outside academics and time for rest, among the traits it looks for in applicants. Students applying to MIT often strip their files down to science anyway: every slot a lab, a competition or a coding project, as if anything else would look unserious.

The office reads that file differently from the way its author intended. MIT has long asked applicants, in one form or another, what they do simply for the pleasure of it, and a former director of admissions gave a reason for caring that has less to do with rest than with how work actually gets done at the Institute.