Preliminary note to onlookers, which I don't think is necessary for the author of the parent comment: nothing I write below will be sarcastic. I will try my best to write a friendly reply to an interesting post.

Thanks for joining issue with me so specifically. Because I happened to be reading Stumbling on Happiness (recommended to HN by another participant recently) last evening, I thought first of all about what kind of evidence we are talking about here. Many parents (I am one of them) are curious about the issue of what the independent variable of how young people spend their free time does to the dependent variable of which colleges admit which college applicants. I was reminded by my reading last night that to draw a statistically sound conclusion about whether this or that pattern of spending time at high school improves admission chances we would have to look at:

1) students who spend their time according to plan A, and were admitted to their favorite college,

2) students who spent their time contrary to plan A, and were admitted to their favorite college,

3) students who spend their time according to plan A, and were NOT admitted to their favorite college,

4) students who spent their time contrary to plan A, and were NOT admitted to their favorite college.

I express no opinion on what is most expedient for admission to MIT, as a general rule. I also don't know whether or not there have been any recent changes in MIT admission policy under the current admissions dean. As an anecdote, I know several of the recent admitted students to my town from the last few years, and my observation is that their parents "actively and persistently encourage their children in valuable habits (e.g., reading, drawing, outdoor exercise, music practice, etc.)," as I wrote in the grandparent post. But I acknowledge that I haven't done the statistical work outlined in this comment to show that that is the most expedient admission path for any college.

I did a quick look at your previous posts and get the impression--please correct me if I'm wrong--that you may already have completed your undergraduate studies. Do you mind saying in some kind of general way what else may have appeared on the face of your application form that would tend to look like a good fit to MIT, as contrasted with the various applicants in your application year who were not admitted to MIT?

Whether admission to MIT is the sole best criterion for how a young person spends the teenage years I'll leave open as an issue that this comment is not about. I acknowledge that admission to MIT is a worthy goal because it opens up opportunities to be in some great learning environments while an undergraduate student. (Anecdote: one of the local students I know who was admitted to MIT a couple of years ago disappointed her dad terribly by enrolling at Harvard rather than MIT. I have no opinion about whether Harvard or MIT is a better place to major in physics, but her dad evidently does. The dad is a great local physics teacher, which is one of the capacities in which I know his family.)

When I did my quick look at your previous posts I saw a couple comments on education

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021238

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602439

that I find interesting. (I remember lurking in the discussion of the new introductory CS course at MIT, which was interesting all around.) Education policy has long been an interest of mine, so I'm always eager to hear points of view on that subject. (The essays on pg's website about education are what drew me to Hacker News.)