<p>But Harvard is a crapshoot for everyone–at least, for everyone whose family name can’t be found on a building, or found regularly above the fold in The New York Times.</p>
<p>But you don’t want to hear that, so let me tell you instead that there are several things in this thread that would rub me the wrong way if I were your alumni interviewer.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This reason strikes me as shallow, common and uncompelling. Harvard Medical School and Harvard College have very little to do with each other. They are miles apart. Their faculties overlap only in very rare cases. If I heard you say that when I asked, “Why Harvard?” I would think you were really saying, “I want to go to Harvard College because I think it will give me an advantage getting into Harvard Medical School.” It’s not a very good answer to “Why Harvard?” and it’s not a very good reason to go to Harvard College.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This would make me suspect you were puffing yourself up. Individual research? How do you fund it? If it’s research that’s really going to advance the boundaries of scientific knowledge, doesn’t it cost something? And why would the local university let you have its lab space and its resources for your individual research? Doesn’t the local university need its resources for its own faculty and students, and their work? </p>
<p>Or are you really a high-school student who’s managed to get himself attached to an ongoing research project at the university, a project on which the principal investigator–the person who gets the grants that fund the research–is a member of the faculty? If you’re more than that, be sure to explain that fully. (In your application, much more than your alumni interview. The weight given to alumni interviews is minimal.) If, on the other hand, you are a high-school student who’s gotten himself some bench-research experience at the local university, that’s good, but it’s not extraordinary among Harvard applicants.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This both confuses me and makes me think maybe you’re a little confused, too. Do you mean graduate school in neuroscience, or medical school followed by training in neurology? Have you really researched what either of those tracks–Ph.D. in neuroscience, or M.D. followed by specialty training–entails? The fact that you want to “major in neurology and minor in Spanish as a graduate student” makes me think you need to do more investigating.</p>
<p>If this thread had been your interview, I would have come away thinking that you care a lot about accomplishments, and you’re interested in Harvard because it’s famous (even more, because it’s famously selective). I wouldn’t have a sense that Harvard can meet your academic goals any better than Penn or Rice or the University of Michigan (sometimes, even for accepted applicants, Harvard can’t, but it makes your case stronger when it can), or that you have thought very much about what you can contribute to Harvard College. And I think that if they get that same impression in the admissions office, you’ll end up in the pile of highly qualified denied applicants.</p>
<p>From what you’ve shared here, you seem smart and accomplished. Those things are necessary, but not sufficient. I think that if you really want to go to Harvard, you need to work on focusing and clarifying your personal narrative, and the path you project for your future. If you didn’t really have a career trajectory in mind, that would probably be OK. But if you say you have one, you’d better have it in sharp focus.</p>
and I can memorize pretty quickly.
, and I hope to get that published in the future and enter some contests.</p>