No, it will NOT improve your chances, as all top students will also be committed to their interests. Here’s what you seem to be missing. Admission to Harvard (and YPSM et all) is done by committee. At Harvard, the full Admissions Committee is comprised of over 40 members – half of them Admissions Directors and half of the full time Harvard faculty. And it’s one person-one-vote. Every accepted student must garner 51% of the votes of the Admissions Committee to be admitted. Your commitment may impress Harry Lewis, the Dean of the Computer Science Department who also sits on the Admissions Committee, but it’s also has to impress 20 other people in the room. That’s why it’s so difficult for a student to be admitted.
FWIW: I would recommend submitting the letter but NOT the poster, as submitting the poster will show you seriously do not understand the caliber of students applying to the college. There are applicants applying to Harvard that have sold their AP for millions of dollars while in high school – and your poster, however wonderful, is going to seem pre-schoolish by comparison. Look over this list of top US students, especially those in Computer Science like #6, #10, #16. These are the kind of students applying in the early round to HYPSM who will be your competition! http://www.thebestschools.org/features/worlds-50-smartest-teenagers/
“If I show that I am completely committed to concentrating in Computer Science”. Uh. Yesterday you wrote “I am a female interested in pursuring a major in Computer science or BME.” Well if you’re prepared to lie on your application, I think I’m done trying to advise you.
Yale Admissions has a great set of videos on putting together your application. I think the advice applies to any top college. In this one, Rebekah Westphal, Associate Director of Undergraduate Admissions, discusses sending supplementary materials to Yale:: http://admissions.yale.edu/advice-putting-together-your-application#supplementary
At universities that admit by school, it might be fairly easy to change majors within that school, but not so easy to change to a major in a different school. That would be worth looking into because now and then people do want to change from, say, Electrical Engineering to History. I’d want to know how difficult that would be.
@mathyone If you looked carefully, you would realize that that post was from a couple weeks ago. I have since then talked to my parents as well as my CS teacher and decided that I am completely committed to majoring in CS. Sorry for the confusion.
I think the adcoms will be able to parse out the stack of girls who say they want to major in CS, and those who have been consistently involved with it on a significant level since middle school.
Whether the latter gets a larger bump in desirability to competitive colleges is (to me) an unknown.
But my advice would be if you love CS, do a lot of it, and a lot of different kinds of things that involve CS. Because that’s good for you as a person, not because it makes you more marketable.
Remember that the vast increase in popularity of CS in recent years may make it harder for applicants indicating intended major of CS to be admitted, if the college admits by major (either formally or informally). If a college does this, even if it favors female applicants within the realm of CS applicants, it may still be more difficult to be admitted than the college’s overall admission stats may indicate.