Hello, I am currently a freshman in high school and lacked motivation towards the beginning of the year and I didn’t realize how badly I wanted to attend a top school until now. I am going to finish the year with 2 A- grades in honors science and social studies (level below honors). I also did not take very hard electives so they will lower my weighted GPA. All of my other core classes are honors and As. If the rest of my application is good and I get the highest grades I can for the next 3 years will I have a chance of admission?
There are so many top colleges out there, why are you fixated on Harvard? Have you even considered Swarthmore, Tufts, Amherst, Williams, Pomona, Middlebury, College of William & Mary, University of Virginia, Duke, etc (notice I didn’t mention one of the ivies).
Harvard is looking for the best-and-brightest high school students from around the country and the world – students who did not lack motivation freshman year, but instead excelled from day 1 (no offense). That’s not to say you don’t stand a chance if you get an ‘A+’ on every course between now and the end of junior year, but I’m trying to understand the obsession with Harvard. Here’s a quick anecdote, I’ve told before:
Bottom line: You want to attend a college where you graduate at the top of your class. Many high school students don’t appreciate that they might have a better chance for a good job by attending a less prestigious college and graduating at the top of their class, rather than graduating in the middle to bottom of the class at Harvard. Based upon this post and your previous posts, obsessing over Harvard, this kind of sounds like you!
Are you saying I don’t have much of a chance?
I’m saying that students with unweighted 4.0 GPA’s and perfect test scores get rejected every year. When a college is that difficult to get into, no one stands a good chance of being admitted.
Let’s do some math, as this will help you concretely understand your odds. Harvard Admissions is on record as saying that 80% of applicants can do the work on their campus, and fully 40% of them are top students with exemplarily credentials.
Now last year almost 40,000 students applied to Harvard. If 40% of them are tippy-top students, that means 16,000 students are the best-of-the-best from across the country and around the world – truly stellar students with top grades, test scores, recommendations and essays. However, Harvard only has room for 1660 students in their freshman class, which means over 14,000 terrifically qualified students are rejected every year – and everyone one of those students had a chance. So, might you have a chance? Sure! But are the odds in your favor? No! Are the odds in anyone’s favor? No!
So, I would suggest you stop obsessing over whether you have a chance at Harvard and just do the best you can for the next two years in high school. And, please don’t forget the advice in post #1: explore other top colleges, as you could excel at any one of them, graduate at the top of your class, and beat out many Harvard students for a job who graduated in the lower half of their class. Attending Harvard shouldn’t be your goal. Getting a top paying job upon graduation should be – and Harvard doesn’t have the corner on that market!
A top-paying job is certainly not the be-all and end-all of
higher education. Good grief.
With perfect grades your chances would be low. With “low freshman grades” your chances are lower. With low sophomore grades, your chances will evaporate. My advice: work hard, don’t fixate on an “elite” college and, when application time comes, be realistic.
It is for the vast majority of students who are not heading off to get a terminal degree, or going to med school, law school etc.
No. By that measure all Harvard professors and administrators are failures, because they are certainly earning far less than they could in other vocations.
You do know that Harvard was founded in order to teach “correct” religious dogma, and that Emerson was influential in changing its mission to one of self-actualization and self realization, where instead of mandatory theological training, students could instead follow their intellectual passions?
Today, sadly, those Emersonian ideals have been perverted. Instead of intellectual growth and self realization many seek merely to chase the almighty buck.
First medicine, then Wall St., then Silicon Valley disproportionately diverted away intellect that is desperately needed in other fields.
Those who chase only dollars will rarely if ever reach true self fulfillment and satisfaction.
We need a a new Emersonian voice now more than ever.
People become successful - financially and otherwise -
when they follow their inner passions.
I hope a few would-be Harvard students will read this and give it at least momentary consideration,
"Are you saying I don’t have much of a chance? "
Pretty much no one has much of a chance to get into Harvard (or Stanford or MIT). There are thousands of universities in the US, and hundreds of very good universities even for tippy-top students.
“If the rest of my application is good and I get the highest grades I can for the next 3 years will I have a chance of admission?”
If the rest of your application is good, and you get very good grades for the next 3 years, then you WILL get accepted to multiple very good universities (and will be in good shape to do well where ever you go). Whether Harvard will be the one of them is hard to say, but it is a long shot for everyone, and it is fundamentally unnecessary for everyone.
@Questar: We will have to agree to disagree. I know many Harvard and Yale students who graduated with a humanities or arts degree (my daughter included) who must now rely on the kindness of their parents to help pay their rent post-graduation because their “passions” did NOT translate into a job that pays a living wage. That’s essentially why my daughter did a post doc after graduating Harvard and is now headed to med school, as she could not stomach the idea of having a survival job bartending or waiting tables for 10-20 years, so she could purse her passion in the arts. And, as someone who has made their living in the arts for the past 40 years, I applaud her decision. Having been very lucky in life as an artist I would never encourage anyone to enter the profession. There are too many ups and downs, too many roller coaster rides, too many lows and not enough highs. If I could do it all over again, I’d follow my daughter’s lead.
FWIW: According to the 2016 survey of Harvard’s graduating class, over 62% of Harvard’s graduating seniors in 2016 went into consulting, finance, engineering, business or technology – top paying jobs: http://features.thecrimson.com/2016/senior-survey/post-harvard/
Admittedly I am an MD PhD , but one who entered the field because of a passion for my research (and after considerable co-exploration of topics in the humanities).
I do not deny at all that a focus on lucrative fields is epidemic at Harvard, and most schools.
The problem is that many, many people entering these
(lucrative) careers have no better reason than an overwhelming desire to attain material wealth.
I can attest after 35 years in medicine that those who
enter it with an eye for material gain, or to please over-bearing parents who live through their children, are most often doomed to a life of stress and great unhappiness.
But please, applicants, if your reason to attend Harvard is merely to become rich, at least have the honesty to be upfront about it on your application.
@Questar: And what does an MD PhD candidate make upon graduation? $50K? $75K? $100K? $125K? $150K? Whatever the amount, I’m sure an MD PhD candidate makes a living wage upon graduation. However, many humanities and arts graduates make less than $25K per year upon graduation – and no person I know can survive on that piddly amount of money. So, before you get on your high horse proclaiming students should pursue their passion, I would suggest you try living off of the average salary a humanities major makes upon graduation! Often times “passion” does not pay the bills!
I stand by my earlier assessment – it should be!
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Since the OP did not ask about starting salaries after college, let’s move off that topic and focus on the original question, please.
You are only a freshman. Hopefully you can find motivation to work in order to learn and gain skills, not for admission to schools. Focusing on college admission can really distort your high school experience and even limit your opportunities to explore.
In a couple of years, you can really focus on where to apply. It is not clear at all why you would want Harvard or some other “top” school. Your guidance office, parents, and you yourself can help you gain more sophisticated knowledge of the choices that are out there.
Good luck! Hope you can enjoy the present without getting ahead of yourself too much.
ps I know plenty of humanities and arts majors who graduated and are doing just fine financially