seaslugs

People really need the GRE scores to evaluate your profile. 

wine&cheese, you'll have to define what you mean by "better" - they are closer, yes, but the off campus apartments are generally nicer by about every other metric.
 
Seaslugs, from what i've gathered, I don't think they ever really check. It might be helpful if your partner was there when you pick up your keys, but after that I don't think they ever check.

Hmm, it's the DoD, so there must be a pattern.
April = Month 4 of year.
April 1st = Day 1 of month.
Wednesday = 3rd day of week.
Put that together and you get 4:13pm. If my model holds true, we'll hear at 4:15pm this Friday. Stay tuned everyone.

Your post is very strange. 
"I realized I'm not as competitive as I thought, so I applied to the top Biomedical program in the entire world, predictably got rejected, and take that as confirmation that I'm not competitive anywhere else".  I mean, you're obviously competitive, because I'm sitting here racking my brain how you got into anything STEM related with an 86th percentile math GRE.
Your fatal flaw is that you only applied to MIT. Dude, who does that??? Undergrads from MIT, who are applying to the lab they've been working in for 4 years, who are BFFs with their PIs, don't only apply to MIT because it is that competitive. The obvious answer is to research fit and apply widely, but I can understand that you don't want to waste a year. That said, you can get funding for a Master's, even if it won't be at Yale. I personally think 70 grand is insane and don't understand how an international student can even get that kind of money.

Honestly, it is a no brainer. Stanford is fully funding you and Michigan is asking you to pay. Still, visit both. Stanford really is beautiful but if for some reason you absolutely hate it, then don't go.

graduate school, all the way.
 
i went to a freakin' small liberal arts college in the middle of freakin' nowhere in the 'Bible Belt of Canada'. i met people there who literally had never left their hometown. EVER.
 
i remember the first day in a Sociology 101 class the prof was explaining some social myths like how what we call a 'traditional family' is a relatively new invention or that people lived longer before (which is a lie, given the advances we have in medicine today). then this girl raises her hand and says "oh, but long ago people used to
live like 100s of years!" the prof was like "oh really... like where? or who?" and the girl said "like Methuselah", took out her bible and quoted it. my first week of classes. my 2nd week in Canada. it was like the twilight zone.

Congrats! Heard from Stanford yesterday, hopefully MIT soon