<p>So, I have heard time and time again from many friends that acceptance at Harvard and many other colleges is in part dependent on which major one is applying for.</p>
<p>Is this true? For example: Would it be easier for one to get into Harvard if he or she applied for say, German studies, than to apply for biology or one of Harvard's top majors?</p>
<p>On the one hand, not at all. Harvard does not admit students based on their prospective concentration. It doesn’t even permit them to declare a concentration until after their first year, and doesn’t require it until after their second. The Harvard admissions staff knows that about half of undergraduates wind up concentrating in something other than what they thought when they matriculated, much less a year earlier when they applied.</p>
<p>On the other hand, of course Harvard is looking for students with, among other things, academic passions, and it wants students with a variety of such passions – a variety roughly corresponding to the interests of the faculty. Harvard doubtless gets thousands and thousands of applications from students with a serious interest in biology research and life sciences. It will admit hundreds of them, but that’s still a small fraction of the applicant pool. There aren’t thousands of applicants whose resumes – not just their declared area of interest – show a confirmed passion for German literature, or Old Slavic, and those are subjects people at Harvard want to teach. I’m sure it’s easier to stand out as an Old Slavic scholar than as a prospective neurologist. </p>
<p>However, that’s not something you can fake easily at all. And I doubt Harvard admits as many as one Old Slavic jock per year. It’s not anything like a secret back door into easy Harvard admission.</p>
<p>^
“…Old Slavic jock…”</p>
<p>My new favorite name for an indie rock band</p>
<p>i agree with JHS just because you apply for a certain major doesn’t mean your a shoe in for admissions…</p>
<p>Thank you JHS for this explaination. How common are CS and linguistics majors ?</p>
<p>Well, the Computer Science department claims that it has about 100 undergraduates, which probably includes people who declare it as a secondary field (i.e., a minor), but which won’t include any freshmen. The Linguistics Department actually lists all of its concentrators on its website – it had 37 as of this spring. There is a program in Linguistics and Computer Science within the Linguistics Department.</p>
<p>Impressionistically: I think both of these fields probably have a lot more high school seniors who think they want to study them than who actually wind up concentrating in them, for somewhat different reasons. Computer Science is something that high school kids know something about, and it sounds employable, but when they get to college some kids are going to be enticed by areas they knew nothing about before college. Others are going to wind up concentrating in closely related fields like Applied Math because they like the teachers better, or similar reasons. Linguistics is an area that sounds cool to many high school students, but which they know very little about. Some will find that actually studying linguistics isn’t anything like they imagined it would be, so they don’t pursue it.</p>