@florida26: You must have a freshman 
I wish my daughter’s experience was purely an isolated one, but it’s not. My daughter did not write this 2012 Crimson article, but it expresses the way she feels about her time at Harvard:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/5/24/grateful-hatred-harvard/
MODERATOR’S NOTE
Everyone’s experience/perception is different. Got it. Let’s move on. Keep further posts on-topic please to avoid this discussion being closed.
I do have a freshman. In response to the original post do what you love as trite as that may sound Why make yourself miserable just to get into a school Everybody is at Harvard for a reason. Their parents may be rich or they may be a child of a politician or they may have lived in a car during high school. Five to ten percent of the people are at Harvard for purely academic reasons. Harvard is looking for leaders and that varies from student to student. There is no one fixed formula. When you apply what will separate you from the rest of the applicants? That is what you need to answer
I have deleted a number of posts that purely attacked other members without actually expressing a point of view. I made minor edits to other posts if they referenced ones that were no longer here. To add to what skieurope is saying, if you disagree with another member, post your opinion without taking a swipe at them. If you think they posted something that is factually incorrect, then post what you think is correct with citations (links), but again without disparaging comments.
I agree with many of the comments and especially florida26 - “there is no one fixed formula” … Some applicants try to game admissions and are successful I suspect … Most are doing things they truly enjoy in high school, thrilled to be accepted, and may still wonder (at least for the 1st week) why he/she got the nod.
For many, Harvard is a wonderful fit and truly is what you make of it; for others, not a good match - especially if you need a lot of external support and validation.
fwiw, one note re. gibby and “80 page” theses; it truly is an opportunity and not required in any concentration, nor does choosing not to do one preclude Latin honors. Non-departmental Cum laude requires Magna grades, so has some standing. (Princeton, on the other hand, I understand, still requires all students to write a senior thesis.)
The votes are in. Most undergrads at Harvard don’t contort themselves to fit an imagined mold of the perfect applicant. Most are just bright students who got in just being themselves and doing the things they genuinely want to do.
I described some of the comments from this thread last night to my two sons (one’s a junior, the other a freshman)… They recognized the scheming, contorting, twisted, master planner in only a few of their peers. That’s not how most of their hundreds of friends and acquaintances got into Harvard.
That’s not to say all these kids didn’t work very hard to get to where they are. I know my sons did. Many, many hours of homework. Many hours of commitment to school. Lots of difficult, often boring hard work. Certainly. Few people get good at things that matter without that sort of effort and commitment. But neither of them ever felt on the verge of a mental breakdown, and they don’t know many folks who experienced that in high school, or experience it now. Stress, sleep deprivation, pressure - sure. But on the verge of a breakdown? No.
And that’s also not to say that these students didn’t also appreciate the resume-building aspects of the things that they did. Again, I know my guys did. Many conversations about whether or not to participate in an activity or to take a course ended with “and in addition, that’d look good on my college app.”
But the following does not describe them and it describes very, very few of their friends or acquaintances:
“But pretty much every class I took, every EC in which I participated, hell, every relationship i nurtured with a teacher, had some element of of my ‘Get into Harvard Master Plan.’”
This sort of experience appears to be the rare exception, at least among my sons’ circles of hundreds of Harvard undergraduate friends.
And no, most of these kids weren’t dreaming of Harvard as elementary school children. My younger son doesn’t really even remember that he knew Harvard existed before his freshman or sophomore year of high school. My older son told me that for most of his friends, before they were accepted to Harvard, it was just a name. It didn’t occupy a high place in their minds. For my older son, Harvard started out as his fifth-choice school. It’s after one is accepted that Harvard takes on a more significant role in one’s life. I guess that’d be true of many students vis-a-vis the college in which they ultimately attended.
I wonder whether this comes down to the need for control.
Many students who are credible applicants to Harvard do a lot of great stuff, achieve a lot of things in high school, and are conditioned that if they work hard enough at something, they will accomplish it. My sons’ high school experiences were certainly much like that. If they worked hard enough, studied hard enough, did enough problems, wrote enough re-writes of the essay or the paper, they’d get an A. Or maybe an A-. Or at the very worst, a B. Imagine going for four years where “failure” is a B in a difficult subject. These sorts of students develop an attitude of mastery. I know my guys did.
And then, for those who apply to the most selective schools, they hear the statistics: acceptance rates of 12%, 10%, 8%, less than 6%. No longer is the student in control. There are forces there out of the student’s control: admissions committees.
So, I suppose that to some number of enterprising young folks, the quest then is to control the admissions committee, to manipulate the committee, to rig the game, to reverse engineer what the “ideal applicant” looks like and to build one up from scratch. Almost like a golem.
And as we can see here, it works once in a while. Admissions committees are composed of non-omniscient human beings who have limited contact with applicants. They can be fooled.
But, to the original poster, let me say: It’s easier to get into Harvard just being your best self than to create this fictional facsimile of the successful applicant. It is possible to fool the admissions committee, but it isn’t easy. There aren’t that many kids who succeed with this methodology. My sons know a few like this, but the vast majority (those are the precise words my older son used, unprompted by me: “vast majority”) got there by just being their best.
That’s not to say that nothing @thinkingtoohard initially advises was good advice. The poster had 10 recommendations. I agree completely with most of them. I agree at least a little bit with most of the others.
Only this is truly flawed:
“-Try not to start having mental breakdowns until at least junior year…honestly it’s a hard 4 years if you are serious about Harvard so mentally prepare yourself for how much high school will suck”
For the vast majority of Harvard undergrads, high school didn’t suck. They don’t have mental breakdowns - not as juniors, not in any year of high school. They work hard, they sacrifice time, effort, energy to accomplish their goals, their ambitious, driven, self-directed. But they don’t experience four years of mental anguish. They enjoy their high school careers, they don’t make every decision dependent on how it affects them and their desire to apply to Harvard, they don’t try to game the system and fool the admissions committees.
I will repeat: If you’re doing it that way, you’re doing it wrong.
Don’t take the advice of trying to construct a reasonable facsimile of a Harvard applicant. Harvard doesn’t want facsimiles. They want the real thing. And usually, they get it. Be the real thing.
I agree with everything notjoe said. The only thing I have seen outside of that that makes a difference is dating Taylor Swift, having a dad worth 2 billion, being born to the premier of China or going to Phillip Exeter. 
@notjoe first of all, i found your post well reasoned and articulated. I’m also flattered that you used some of my comments as fodder for evening conversation with your two sons (though surely not in a way flattering to my posts).
I agree that the soundest advice is always to be your “true” self. But my point was that some of us don’t yet have this well developed sense of our true selves, what we want to do with our lives or where our respective passions lie. Add to this the elusive crapshoot of elite college admissions, the intoxicating allure and affirmation of Harvard, and i’ll bet there are more “schemers” who were admitted like me than you think.
When i’m sitting in Annenberg Hall in a few years (after my gap year)"having breakfast with my Freshman peers, i most certainly won’t brag about my “Harvard Master Plan” nor would i expect my peers to admit how much of what they did in HS was motivated by getting into Harvard. It would be unseemly. Who wouldn’t want their peers to believe that they only reluctantly decided to grace Harvard with their presence? This forum is called “College Confidential” so we can air these dirty little secrets.
I encourage you to read this article in the latest Yale Daily News and tell me i’m the only one out there gaming the system:
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/02/24/my-glimpse-into-admissions/
This ideal of being a “reluctant” Harvard student, pure of motivation and intellect, is a hard one to live up to. It upsets me to be characterized as some sleazy contortion artist, a “golem” because i admitted (confidentially) that i tried to play the game to the best of my ability (and succeeded). As the student described in the Yale article, i had a sense of what Admissions wanted to hear, i knew which boxes to check. I also figured out how to build a narrative about my application, an echo chamber where my recommenders would hit all the same themes and boxes. Am i less worthy because i figured it out ((and undeniably got very lucky)?
So, to wrap up, my humble advice is yes, be your truest self, but play the game to the best of your ability, and don’t let people make you feel sleazy, or less deserving or underhanded about it. Parents on this thread tend to have this idealized vision of what a candidate should look like. They tend to come down hard on us “schemers” and “contortionists.” How dare we dream about getting into Harvard or Yale or Princeton from eighth grade?
In my book, that is NOT having a master plan; it’s crafting a well-thought out application. It’s why wealthy parents pay college counselors thousands of dollars to sit down with their kid and help them fill out an application. It’s using practical common sense advice found in the college help section of many book stores and libraries. If you figured out how to do it on your own, that’s good for you! My guess is that most students filling out their college applications, not just at HYP but everywhere, try to do the same thing. However . . .
While you achieved your goal, what would have happened if you didn’t? Harvard only has so many beds – especially for international students, like yourself. I imagine many students who do the same thing are not admitted to HYP. As a result, I would think they would walk from their high school and college applications process bitter and depressed. Your advice works only if you succeed. And with an acceptance rate of less than 6%, your advice will not work for everyone. That’s the issue I have with it.
A student cannot predict if they will be admitted to Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton – or none of them. If the OP was unsuccessful in their quest – and most students are – s/he would have been better off doing things they enjoyed, rather than wasting their high school career doing things for the sake of gaining admittance.
Regurge why are you taking a gap year? Are you going to work for the peace corp or are you a z lister? That might help everybody understand a lot better
I am not a Z-lister, nor am i a legacy candidate or an athlete. I am, however, at the very top of my class, had stellar scores, recommendations, etc. I consider myself (and my mother would agree) a kind person. Not a “striver” or at all ego-maniacal. Had i not gotten into Harvard, i would have most likely applied to Pomona. My self-worth was not on the line. Yes i wanted Harvard very badly and i would have been disappointed, but certainly not crushed had i been rejected. Life is fraught and full of disappointments. No one i know felt they were a lock to get into Harvard. None of my rejected friends were “bitter or depressed.” I look forward to de-compressing during my gap year (all that sleazy scheming takes a toll!) and working on a business i started in high school. My dream is to drop out of Harvard because my business becomes so successful! but we shall see.
@Regurge1,
Thank you for your kind comments.
" (though surely not in a way flattering to my posts)."
Perhaps a little more flattering than you might think.
Frankly, I sorta suspect that you would have been admitted to Harvard without your “master plan.” It was just gilding the lily. I don’t think some of you kids quite recognize your true strengths. I know my sons haven’t always.
I think that perhaps you have a “passion” (although I truly hate the use of that word in this context - but it’s convenient shorthand). You are taking a gap year to pursue an entrepreneurial venture that you believe helped you get into Harvard. I’m betting that on that point, you’re right - the admissions committee saw that and that went a very long way toward your acceptance.
Whether or not you “feel” especially “passionate” about this venture, it is sufficiently-important to you and worthy enough to you for you to take a year off from attending your DREAM school, the school that you’ve dedicated your LIFE to gaining entry since grammar school, to follow-through on it. Whether you realize it or not, that’s the sort of commitment to something that is vaguely called “passion.”
One reason why I hate the use of that word is that it strongly suggests some sort of intense subjective feelings. But that’s not the case for everyone.
Again, I’ll use my sons as examples. My younger guy is a math guy. He is truly passionate about math, in every sense of the word, including in terms of subjective feelings toward it. They’ve had eight feet of snow in Cambridge and he’s mad because they canceled his math classes (along with all the others). He came home for Christmas, asked me to buy him a particular math book, I did. It arrived two days later, and he spent the rest of the break in his room, working out the psets in the book. Are you taking this course, I asked? No, he said, I’m just interested in the topic. That is an easily-identifiable passion.
My older son is a classicist, and a rather good one. In high school, he received five or six gold medals on the National Latin Exam, including two Perfect Papers, several Greek awards, had the highest Latin and Greek GPAs, exhausted his school’s classical curriculum by 10th grade, and spent his last two years working on topics of his own choosing in classics… I’m sure when Harvard looked at his app, they just mumbled to each other “classicist.” But at first, he thought he’d be an engineer. Go figure. The problem was that the word “passion” threw him off. He doesn’t “love” the classics the way the younger guy loves math. But he’s very, very good at it. He enjoys it enough to work at it hard and gain satisfaction from is, and because he’s rather good at it, is comfortable doing it, No intense feelings, but it falls within the definition of “passion,” too.
I see your entrepreneurial enterprise along those lines. I think you have more of a passion than you’ve realized up until now.
“This ideal of being a ‘reluctant’ Harvard student,…”
I’m not really on board with the stereotype of the “reluctant” Harvard student. Both my sons, in the end, were very enthusiastic to go to Harvard. Especially the younger guy. But that was their destination, not their starting point. My older son wasn’t sure where he wanted to go until his campus visit. He’d really loved Hopkins. He’s met the director of undergraduate studies, who avidly pursued my son. He loved Maryland, which has a beautiful, sprawling campus, and where he was very avidly recruited. They treated him like a rock star. And in terms of engineering, they’re perceived as being an engineering powerhouse. Harvard, not as much. I went with him to Harvard. After a day there, meeting students and faculty (we didn’t go up at Visitas - just during an ordinary school week), he came to me and said firmly, “This is the right place for me.”
That’s hardly reluctant. But neither was it something he decided when he was 10 years old, sight unseen.
But clearly, his college search was backwards from yours. He decided what schools fit for him rather than trying to fit to schools with dazzling names. The same with the younger guy.
"When i’m sitting in Annenberg Hall in a few years (after my gap year)"having breakfast with my Freshman peers, i most certainly won’t brag about my ‘Harvard Master Plan’ nor would i expect my peers to admit how much of what they did in HS was motivated by getting into Harvard. It would be unseemly. "
It’s unlikely that, having “gamed” your way into Harvard that you’re going to give up on what you perceive to be a winning strategy. That my older son can determine who did this to get into Harvard doesn’t necessarily come from folks offering confessions, but rather from observing what they’re still up to. Only now, it’s for law school. Or grad school, or maneuvering for a job on Wall Street or something.
As well, while I know you sympathize with thinkingtoohard’s perspective, I’m not sure you really share it. I don’t have any sense that you were suffering so much anguish during high school that you were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. To some extent, what you’ve described is as much a difference of degree as of kind. Everyone does their best to finesse the system. I don’t object to that. I object some to how you’ve taken what for most people is a helpful tactic and turned into your primary strategy. But my fundamental objection is that no high school student should drive himself or herself to the brink of (or over the brink of) mental illness in pursuit of admission to any school.
If that’s what you’re experiencing, you’re doing it wrong.
I wish you the very best - both for your gap year, if you finally decide to take it - and for your Harvard career and afterward. My hope for you is that you will see a little more clearly your real strengths, and thus decide in the future to rely less on parlor tricks and more on your fundamental talents and skills.
I think that both notjoe and gibby give beyond excellent advice. Enjoy life and follow your dreams. Life is short. I would note that resurge in some of his earlier posts had been accused of sexual harassment at his prep school. I know of a recent case that hard work got someone into Harvard. It all got rescinded in a flash because of sexual harassment. It was so sad because of all the hard work. So if the gap year is any way related to the complaint take the year to reflect on your future
@florida26, please read that post in context. I explained that I was called into the dean’s office because a female classmate found my comments in debate class “belittling” to her. I believe both she and I learned a lesson: I learned to be a less aggressive, more successful debater (and a better listener) and she learned that people can disagree with her without feeling it’s because she’s a woman. Although the dean brought up that my classmate felt “sexually harassed,” I was never accused of any kind of harassment, nor has the incident in any way been an impetus to take a gap year.
@notjoe, the more I read of your posts the bigger a fan I become. You are a CC rock star (you too, @gibby). Your sons sound like wonderful human beings and I’m glad there will be people like them at Harvard.
Finally, though I love the attention, I feel I have somehow hijacked this post. I’m sorry to have blathered on and I’m also sorry that I became defensive or too personal in my responses.
Regurge One final comment. Harvard seems like a community of people trying to work together for the rest of their lives. The people in your house could be your lifelong friends. I don’t think it is a good idea of going into Harvard with the hopes of dropping out. Maybe you will drop out but I hope you are able to finish. Last years admission video was by Mark Zuckerberg and he said something like " Hi my name is Mark. Welcome to Harvard. I dropped out but I hope you don’t" Your talents and skills can make you and Harvard a better place. You might meet some amazing people your third or fourth year at Harvard. Or you might inspire some people to be really great!!! The best of luck to you!!!
I like the approach of combining “Applying SIdeways” with the more deliberate approach outlined by @thinkingtohard and @Regurge01. Be intentional in your approach to how you will Apply Sideways, instead of leaving it to chance and hoping it will work out if you care passionately enough about something. The two approaches don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
@notjoe, @gibby - I’ll second @Regurge01 - you two are CC rock stars!
@florida26 - From what I understand, the guy who dated Taylor Swift would have been accepted even if he had never met her
Now back to your regularly scheduled thread…
@baltimoreguy: My kids followed and adhered to the advice given in ***Acing the College Application: How to Maximize Your Chances for Admission to the College of Your Choice *** by Michele Hernandez. I would highly recommend the book to anyone, as Ms. Hernandez is a retired Dartmouth Admissions Director and understands how ivy league admissions work. This book, along with many others that can be found in the college help section of bookstores, will help students craft an application that has a clear and concise narrative that resonates with Admissions directors so they know who you are and understand what you bring to the table.
@Regurge01 and @BldrDad: Thank you for your kind words.