• baseball
• basketball
• crew (heavyweight)
• crew (lightweight)
• cross country
• fencing
• football
• lacrosse
• rifle
• sailing
• soccer
• squash
• swimming and diving
• tennis
• track and field
• volleyball
• water polo
• softball

MIT's student athletics program offers 41 varsity-level sports, the largest program in the nation.They participate in the NCAA's Division III, the New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference, the New England Football Conference, and NCAA's Division I and Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges (EARC) for crew. They fielded several dominant intercollegiate Tiddlywinks teams through 1980s, winning national and world championships.MIT teams have won or placed highly in national championships in pistol, track and field, swimming and diving, cross country, crew, fencing, and water polo. MIT has produced 128 Academic All-Americans, the third largest membership in the country for any division and the highest number of members for Division III.

The Institute's sports teams are called the Engineers, their mascot since 1914 being a beaver, "nature's engineer." Lester Gardner, a member of the Class of 1898, provided the following justification:

The beaver not only typifies the Tech, but his habits are particularly our own. The beaver is noted for his engineering and mechanical skills and habits of industry. His habits are nocturnal. He does his best work in the dark.

The traditions and student activities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology encompasses hundreds of student activities, organizations, and athletics that contribute to MIT's distinct culture. MIT has over 380 recognized student activity groups, including a campus radio station, The Tech student newspaper, the "world's largest open-shelf collection of science fiction" in English, model railroad club, a vibrant folk dance scene, weekly screenings of popular films by the Lecture Series Committee, and an annual entrepreneurship competition. There are also a large number of Performing arts organizations, including a Marching band, Symphony orchestra, Concert band, Musical theater guild, several A cappella singing groups, and various dance groups.

MIT's Independent Activities Period is a four-week long "term" offering hundreds of optional classes, lectures, demonstrations, and other activities throughout the month of January between the Fall and Spring semesters. Some of the most popular recurring IAP activities are the robotics competitions, the annual "mystery hunt," and Charm School.

MIT students are also famous for engaging in "hacking," which encompasses both the physical exploration of areas that are generally off-limits (such as rooftops and steam tunnels), as well as elaborate practical jokes. Notable hacks have included the theft of Caltech's cannon, reconstructing a Wright Flyer atop the Great Dome, and adorning the John Harvard statue with the Master Chief's Spartan Helmet.

The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and ex-students from MIT who utilized card-counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at blackjack. The team and its successors operated from 1979 through the beginning of the twenty-first century. The origin of blackjack play at MIT was a mini-course called 'How to Gamble if You Must', taught in January 1979 at MIT during Independent Activities Period (IAP). A number of MIT students attended this course and then tried out their techniques in casinos in Atlantic City. Despite initial failures, two of them continued the course and, with the help of a Harvard graduate, formed a professional team who went on to make a fortune in Las Vegas. Stories, some true and some fictionalized, about players from the MIT Blackjack Team formed the basis of the New York Times bestsellers,Bringing Down the House and Busting Vegas, written by Ben Mezrich.

The faculty and student body highly value meritocracy and technical proficiency.MIT has never awarded an honorary degree, nor does it award athletic scholarships, ad eundem degrees, or Latin honors upon graduation.However, MIT has twice awarded honorary professorships: to Winston Churchill in 1949 and Salman Rushdie in 1993.

Many upperclass students and alumni wear a large, heavy, distinctive class ring known as the "Brass Rat". Originally created in 1929, the ring's official name is the "Standard Technology Ring." The undergraduate ring design (a separate graduate student version exists as well) varies slightly from year to year to reflect the unique character of the MIT experience for that class, but always features a three-piece design, with the MIT seal and the class year each appearing on a separate face, flanking a large rectangular bezel bearing an image of a beaver.Тhe initialism IHTFP, representing the informal school motto "I Hate This Fucking Place" and jocularly euphemized as "I Have Truly Found Paradise," "Institute Has The Finest Professors," "It's Hard to Fondle Penguins," and other variations, has occasionally been featured on the ring given its historical prominence in student culture.