This is the most interesting conversation I have read in a while. Admittedly, it is making me feel much better about the fact that we “didn’t know Jack” and, incidentally, my high stats D didn’t even know to take Subject tests until it was too late. She attends a wealthy private academy but only because they gave her a scholarship.
Someone once said that an AO can spot the app from a mile away when an expert was brought in to guide it. This thread has helped me to stop feeling guilty that I didn’t know what my D needed to do or to prove in order to be accepted at a competitive school. She did not start a company or do research or have an internship or any other spike. She just worked hard, played sports, joined clubs, earned a 4.0 UW at a very tough school and earned a 35 ACT on her first try. She also became a NMSF. But after reading the chance threads on CC I have felt that she has no shot at any selective schools bc she is just an old school kid who didn’t get the memo on the new normal in college admissions.
Harvard is looking for people they think will be leaders. You don’t need a national award to get into Harvard but you do need a compelling cohesive story and set of achievements
ome years ago, there was a letter or essay published by someone in admissions (maybe Fitzsimmons?) about what Harvard is looking for in creating a class. There were categories. One was future important scholars. One was future world leaders. My memory of this may not be exactly correct.
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It was me… (I had to search for the post. here it is…)
If you did not have the opportunity to do so, I would recommend that you read the Overachievers, by Alexandra Robbins
Harvard does offer a “what we look for” section of their website at https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/application-process/what-we-look , which links to the NYT article at https://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/harvarddean-part1/?mtrref=undefined&gwh=CA82EF895703E8F9897FBF7C7BF86289 . There is a good amount of information, but it’s vague without a lot of specific details and numbers. If you are looking for a formula like admit with “Doesn’t know jack + significant national award”, you won’t find one, but that’s the nature of holistic admissions. If you search around on the web, you can find former Harvard admissions tell all type resources talking about rating EC/Personal on a 6 point scale with the highest rating reserved for “national recognition.” A few universities do publicly discuss such types of ratings categories and scales. For example, the dean of admissions at Duke published a letter listing their six 5-point scale rating categories, and there are public studies that list the average ratings for different groups within the undergraduate population at Duke among other information about how they admit their class. The Duke letter was discussed at http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1632160-christoph-guttentags-letter-demystifying-admission-process-at-duke-p1.html .
In my view, it is odd that Owen Labrie and the members of the offensive Harvard memes group somehow passed muster with Harvard admissions, as did the members of the Harvard Men’s Soccer Team, who were busy rating and posting objectionable comments about members of the Women’s Soccer Team. The men’s soccer schedule was canceled one year as a result. The Men’s Cross Country Team had annual spreadsheets to rate the members of the Women’s Cross-Country Team. In a bold step forward (written somewhat sarcastically), the Men’s Cross Country Team reported that the 2016 spreadsheet was “free of lewd language.” But there was still evidently a spreadsheet that year. Perhaps they have been completely stopped now. I wonder why no indication of the future actions of these students was discernible from their applications.
I have read that Cecil Rhodes wanted to have “hostility” as a criterion for the selection of Rhodes Scholars. No kidding. I think he was persuaded to morph this into preparation to “fight the world’s fight.” It makes me wonder whether some of the “top” universities have personality elements that particularly resonate with them, but that are veiled in some form.
In my estimation, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are looking for many of the same students, but there seems to be a distinctive “flavor” at each of those schools. In the admissions post about what Harvard looks for, what is distinctive to Harvard, as opposed to other top schools?
(No personal issue with Harvard here–none of my extended family members and none of our friends has applied there, except for some friends I have made after they had already graduated from Harvard.)
If it’s the thread I was thinking of, he was a recruited athlete who says he received “likely letter” or equivalent, which are often given out before November. He didn’t strike me as fake.
Ahh, @Data10, national recognition alone isn’t enough for a top rating. I can see the confusion in that.
Harvard isn’t one of the clearer ‘what we look for’ bits. It’s open to interpretation.
And athletes can be a coach swing. I think I’d point at them.
But this is about a kid asking for chances and imo the best of the kids seek to understand what it takes, beyond high school fame. You aren’t being judged for an admit to another high school.
One thing that seems odd is the apparent reluctance of many posters who need financial aid to run net price calculators on all of the colleges they are considering.
ucbalumnus, I think it may be that the families don’t trust the price calculators, or perhaps don’t believe them. I know we ran one and my reaction was, “You have got to be kidding me! Where do they think we are going to come up with that! There must be an error in the programming of this thing!” Needless to say, there wasn’t.
I have been thinking about the old saying, “You can always tell a Harvard man . . . but you can’t tell him much,” [adding Harvard woman since 1969 or so], and wondering whether there were ways that one could actually tell a Harvard alum, which might then help to identify what Harvard is really looking for.
If I were to try to differentiate the Harvard alums of my acquaintance from the rest of the “top” crowd, aside from the near-universal love of Harvard, the common conviction that it is the best university on the planet (the Vulcan Science Academy inexplicably won’t allow head-to-head comparisons), and the not-infrequent belief that Harvard sets the direction for the rest of the nation’s universities, I think it would be that there seems [just to me] to be a special kind of focused dynamism in pursuit of one’s goals. The Harvard grads I know are also outgoing, funny, generous, and all-round nice people; and grads of other universities are definitely energetic in pursuit of their goals, and have the same good personal qualities! But somehow the Harvard grads tend to set off a feeling, “I had better get out of this person’s way.” That could be just me, or just my Harvard-grad acquaintances. Lately, I think there is a stronger strain of pragmatism, and less of the RFK, "I dream things that never were, and ask, ‘Why not?’ " But again, this could be a small cross-section through the grads, and I know there are still Harvard idealists out there.
The only other common feature that I could come up with: very few blondes among my Harvard grad acquaintances, and a much greater number of blondes among the Princetonians. (Again, could be regional, but among my acquaintances, it’s actually rather striking.)
Many years ago we stumbled on the Ivy League women’s rugby tournament, and got to watch Princeton crush Yale. All the women on the Yale team had brown hair and a little bit of baby fat, and they ranged in height from 5’0" to 5’5". They looked exactly like the women I had known at Yale 15 years earlier. My 5’2" spouse fit right in. Meanwhile, every member of the Princeton team but one was blonde and 5’8" or taller, the exception being an incredibly athletic, model-beautiful 6’2" African-American woman who was the team’s star. It was like Serena Williams and the Valkyries. They, too, looked pretty much like the women I had known at Princeton, with a few exceptions.
“I just want to add that it is my impression that there are students posting “chance me” threads who are just trying to punk the whole thing.”
There was one post a while back from a student that claimed a long list of reasonable but very high stats and achievements, which included a very short note hidden in the middle of the long post that said that he had built an operating nuclear reactor in his garage. I am pretty certain this one was fake.
I too am not a fan of the chance me thread and consider it a high tech substitute for a quarter. I agree that you should compare your profile to that of the typical admit over the past three or so years. Then, consider whether you have an exceptional talent, skill or something that would add special value to your application. About following your dream…There have been complaints about the cost of application so consider the cost of dreaming. Finally, we are encouraged by being told we can become anything we want. A,dean said that to me and I replied I was leaving the immediately for Dallas to be a Cowboy cheerleader. Being 5 ft 2in was not my only constraint. According to the joke, Overall all we should be realistic. If someone has a dream we should talk about what that means and how to get there. Some need a plan and others who wanted to be part of a CSI unit in its first years had to learn about the science training involved.
