<p>I got deferred from Harvard for Early Action even though I feel like I had good academics, SATs, and ECs. I read the stats of the people who posted on the stickied thread ("Official Harvard University 2018 SCEA Decisions") and I feel I am similar to many of the people who got accepted. I think it was the application itself that was the deciding factor for many applicants, since so many applicants have 4.0 GPA, 2300+ SAT, and many ECs.</p>
<p>For those of you who were accepted into Harvard (or any Ivy League university), can you share some information about your application itself? What did you write your Common App essay on? What was your tone? How about your supplement? Did you sound confident in your essay/supplement? (maybe overconfident?) Did you sound professional or did you try to appeal to the admissions officers personally? (e.g. by telling a joke) Did you do anything special in your application that you think might have influenced their decision?</p>
<p>I really really want to go to Harvard and I would greatly appreciate any information that can improve my chances even slightly. Thank you very much!</p>
<p>Oh, Omnifeed, you may have read the stickied thread, but you seem to have missed its main point.</p>
<p>Every single year, Harvard denies admission to, literally, tens of thousands of applicants who are just as good as the couple thousand they admit. And there is absolutely nothing “wrong” with those applicants who are denied, nor is there anything they could really have done to tip the scales in their favor.</p>
<p>When I was in graduate school, a hundred years ago, I had a friend who had been a couple of classes ahead of me at Harvard, and who worked in Harvard admissions for a few years between college and grad school. This friend of mine said that her job as an admissions officer consisted of denying the applications of hundreds of perfectly well qualified, ambitious, high-achieving young people for absolutely no reason, except that there were no more beds available in the freshman dorms. And this was in the late 1980s, when the applicant pool was about half the size of today’s applicant pool.</p>
<p>Here’s the straight dope: you’ve been deferred, not denied, so you’re still in the running. If Harvard really didn’t want you, they’d have denied you. But there is absolutely nothing you can learn from the lucky students getting the fat envelope this winter that will ensure that you get a fat envelope from Cambridge in the spring. Because even if those students think they know what got them in, they probably don’t. (And if they did know, there’s no guarantee it would work again for you. You don’t know whether the same people are reading your application, and you don’t know whether the people in Cambridge will look at your application and say, “But we already took a jokester in the Early Action round.”)</p>
<p>I wish you well, and I hope you get one. But if you believe you can do anything in the world to make that happen, you’re deluding yourself.</p>
<p>And, really, I am sorry you were disappointed this month.</p>
<p>I understand the admission process has a very large luck factor involved. However, I am also positive that there are things that can be done to improve one’s chances. For example, I was under the impression that universities like Harvard like “natural geniuses” who didn’t do much in school and still get high marks. For my Common App essay, I purposely sounded like one of those “natural geniuses.” However, I learned afterwards that Harvard actually prefers hard workers. I am going to rewrite my essay because of this.</p>
<p>I’m sure there are other tips and tricks to improve my chances (even if it’s by 0.0001%) and I’d like to know as many of them as possible. You never know, one of them might push me over the cutoff.</p>
<p>P.S. Regarding your friend at Harvard who worked as an admissions officer, did she volunteer or was this a pay job? Do you recall if she enjoyed her job? Do you know if she got to meet the students whose applications she read? I know these questions are weird but I’m very curious.</p>
<p>No, it was Carol’s paid job after she graduated. She did it for three years, I think. She liked it a lot, but didn’t want to do it indefinitely. There’s a good reason, I think, why a lot of the people who work in college admissions are young. It’s grueling, whether you’re on the road during travel season or holed up in your office or apartment during reading season, and it’s easy to burn out because it’s very much the same from admission cycle to admission cycle, and there’s not much of an upward career trajectory. After all, there are a lot of regional admissions officers, but there’s just one dean.</p>
<p>She did occasionally meet students whose files she’d read–only the admitted ones, who’d enrolled at Harvard, of course. Carol told me that she hated denying so many excellent students for no good reason, but that for every student from her docket who did get in, she could tell you exactly why.</p>
<p>And as for Harvard liking “natural geniuses,” I think they do. And they like hard workers. And hockey players and musicians and politicos and computer nerds and poets and community activists. They simply don’t have enough room in the Yard (and the upperclass houses and the libraries and the lecture halls) for everybody they like.</p>
<p>I’m not sure where you got this impression, but it’s completely untrue. My daughter, a senior at Harvard, worked her ass off in high school, often spending 4-5 hours a night on homework after coming home exhausted from her EC’s. And her teachers mentioned this in their recommendation letters!</p>
<p>At Harvard, she and her friends, often pull all nighters studying for exams or writing papers, especially during reading and exam week. Truth be told, my daughter works harder than any other college student that I know – and that includes my son, who is at Yale.</p>
<p>Maybe this is where you went wrong with your application: rather than being just yourself in your essay, you tried to second guess what you thought the Admissions Committee wanted and . . . </p>
<p>I want to believe this too but I think Harvard deferred so many of us because if we were Rejected then students who have similar stats like us wouldn’t bother applying and that would affect Harvard’s Selectivity and consequently affect its rankings. More Deferrals in SCEA, more applicants for RD and more Rejections in March is good for Harvard.</p>
<p>Regarding those worried about deferral, I don’t think Harvard is really worried people with similar stats will stop applying. They’ll always apply. Hope springs eternal. And you still have hope! Good luck everyone! I’m applying RD because I’m such a darn optimist.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Harvard just plain isn’t worried that people will stop applying. It’s not a problem Harvard has confronted in more than 100 years, and it doesn’t look as if it will become one any time soon.</p></li>
<li><p>Stanford does reject a much higher percentage of its early applicants than many of its academic peers do, and it doesn’t seem to be suppressing the application numbers there.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>“Oh hey, when you’re writing your essays, aren’t you supposed to sound like, um, yourself, or was I way off?”
Yes, you are supposed to sound like yourself, if yourself is smart, hard working, motivated, caring, creative, etc etc.</p>
<p>I have decided to rewrite my essay. I have 2 topics in mind and I’m having trouble deciding which one to write. Here are my 2 topics:</p>
<p>Topic #1 (background central to identity): Curiosity. I am a very curious person; I like to experiment and learn stuff by myself. I learned how to make websites when I was in grade 5 because I was curious how websites work. I like to experiment with new technologies like motion controllers. I also conducted a lot of small science experiments on my own.</p>
<p>Topic #2 (failure): Failure to see what’s important. At first, I wrote code to experiment and to have fun. When I entered high school, I gradually began to code just to improve my chances of getting into college. My motivation shifted from curiosity to performing well in competitions and trying to start the next Facebook. By grade 12, coding became almost a chore. When I was writing my university application, I finally realized that I should not be coding to reach an end; I should code simply because I loved to code.</p>
<p>The 2 ideas sound like they should be combined into 1 essay, but I can’t fit that much information into 650 words. Which essay topic do you think is better?</p>
<p>I expect the colleges defer students who they consider to be admissible, because some of them will come up with a new award or accomplishment while their application is sitting around, and then they’ll be admitted.</p>
<p>“Regarding those worried about deferral, I don’t think Harvard is really worried people with similar stats will stop applying. They’ll always apply. Hope springs eternal.”</p>
<p>I’m not sure this is really true. Reading the 3% figure gave me some pause as to whether it’s even worth the cost of submitting the application. I would not be surprised if the doughnut class starts to drop out of the applicant pool.</p>
<p>Omnifeed: Just to respond to your original post…</p>
<p>I got accepted this year in the SCEA round, and based on the note my admissions officer sent me, I’m pretty darn sure it was because of my essay. I won’t go into too much detail, but it was basically about how I like taking standardized tests and how that connects to my personality and future career plans. It was original, told a story about me, and showed what I will bring to the table as a college student. </p>
<p>Yes, I have strong grades and test scores, but that doesn’t really make an applicant stand out, nor do ECs (unless they’re super weird/unique); the only way adcoms can get a glimpse of who you are as a person is by the essay(s). So don’t write about what you think they want – write about something important to YOU. Otherwise, they’ll see right through your tactic.</p>
<p>I also think my essay played an important role in being accepted to Harvard. Sure, I had unique ECs and I’m from an underrepresented country but I know at least two other people similar to me who were flat out rejected (in the previous years).
My essay was very personal. It was about the past four years of my life. My tone was normal. I didn’t try to sound like Shakespeare like most kids do and fail in a very epic manner. I just told a story like I would tell a friend. I didn’t try to impress anyone with my incredible knowledge of fancy words or what a hero I am. But I’m sure anyone who read the first paragraph of my essay would want to read more and see what happens! I also subtly showed off my qualities. I didn’t write a list of adjectives to describe myself. Instead of saying I’m a persistent person, I highlighted my stubbornness in a situation I was faced with. “SHOW, don’t tell”
In my supplemental essays, I wrote about dancing as an extracurricular activity and engineering for my optional essay. I am very passionate about both of those things and I really made them see it.</p>
<p>I wrote two essays. One was an experimental second-person essay that was very in-the-moment. I’m pretty proud of it, it kinds of pounds at you. The other was a story of my ‘failure’, which in retrospect was kind of dynamic/arrogant (I had On Top of the World, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, and Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You) on a loop while writing it), though I took real pains to be humorous throughout (I started with a joke! and included Barney from HIMYM). It definitely ‘showed a part of [me] that isn’t present in the application’. I think that the essay is to show who you are as more than just numbers (which make me look like a geeky robot!).</p>
<p>Also I learned through the process that there are no ‘good’ essays, only essays that are right for you.</p>
<p>@thebeatlestoday, so jealous that your admissions officer told you why you were admitted! Mine just said that he liked learning about me through my application. Lovely stationery though!</p>
<p>I will have to agree with what all the SCEA Admits have said.</p>
<p>Judging from the note I got from my admissions officer, it was because of my essay and because I just presented myself as a well-rounded person. In terms of my essay, I wrote about singing. I was a bit hesitant because I thought it would sound like I was not taking the topic seriously enough and I thought the adcom would not understand all the references and puns I made, but it worked! And as for the application itself, a quote from my adcom’s note: “I loved that your personality came through and we got such a good idea of who you are–an academic, an athlete, volunteer, linguist, and great community member (not even mentioning your singing + stellar sibling qualities)” I didn’t cure cancer, I didn’t do anything SUPER AMAZING that people think all Harvard acceptees must do. I just presented myself as the person I am and I made sure the adcom’s got to know me with the little amount of words I had. And it worked.</p>
<p>Just do you, and if they don’t want you, it’s their loss.</p>
<p>I, also, have to agree with what all the other SCEA Admits have said.</p>
<p>Everyone who gets in will have outstanding academic records, simply because it is Harvard. What sets you apart is who you show yourself to be. In my note from my adcom, she mentioned how cool my volunteering experiences sounded and that’s something I talked in-depth about with my interviewer because I REALLY love my volunteer work! It really is all about passion.
For essays, it’s basically the same thing. When I shared my common app essay with my english teacher and my guidance counselor they both said they didn’t like it because “colleges like it when you tell one specific story about…” such and such topic that I just really did not feel like I should write about. I felt that the only way for them to get to know me was if I shared that essay with them. My common app essay showed a more serious, introspective side of me and then my optional one was way more playful and fun. Really, just try to showcase who you are, not who you think Harvard wants to accept. I really have nothing SUPER SPECIAL about me (no crazy-cool invention, I haven’t started a business, I have no cool international service experiences), but I just showed them that I like to work hard and I put all my heart and soul into everything I do!
The way I think of it is this: Show exactly who you are. If a college likes that, then that is a good place for you to be. If they do not accept you because they didn’t like what your application shows about you, then that school is just not the place for you and really it’s a blessing that you’re not going to waste your time attending an institution that just isn’t for you. </p>
<p>I hope that helped a bit, and I wish you the best of luck through this process and wherever it may take you :)</p>
<p>Same thing happened to me. I showed one of my short supplemental essays to a few people and all of them said it was terrible but I got in. The problem is that teachers and other adults think they know what colleges want but they’re wrong. I’m glad I ignored them.</p>