I know you think you’re sure about your college choice, but you will probably change over the next four years, and what you want in a college will become more defined. Why Harvard? You liked the campus when you visited when you were little? That’s really not specific, and doesn’t reflect much on the school. Let’s be a little more specific, and say that you want Harvard because you want to be surrounded by smart people. Even that isn’t nearly specific enough to convince me that Harvard is necessarily the right place for you. Want a solid and challenging grounding in a canon, with people who also value the great works? You might like Columbia, UChicago, or Yale’s directed study program (or possibly even St. John’s) better. Want to go to a school where you stay up to 3 a.m. talking about Kant all the time? Reed and Swarthmore are probably more likely places for that to happen, although I know a bunch of people who do do that here. (Even that group, here, spends more time just normal-person socializing than we would, I think, at those two schools.) And then beyond intellectual climate, how much of an Ivory Tower do you want? If you want to be engaged with the world, places like NYU and UPenn are probably better than Harvard, which is about in the middle. Amherst, Dartmouth, and Williams would be more solely undergraduate-focused if you want that. This is, by the way, probably one of the opinions that’s most likely to change as you grow more independent from your parents. Most Americans are not ready to leave for college until they actually do (definitely including myself). You don’t want to pick a college that makes current-you happy if it wouldn’t be the best choice for rising-freshman-in-college you. </p>
<p>I feel like telling you “don’t be so sure yet! your opinions will or should change as you grow up and grow more informed”, while accurate, would make at least me dig in and go “I know what I want! I’m right!” and less willing to change. So here’s an anecdote about my college-finding, to illustrate how one should keep an open mind about colleges.</p>
<p>When I was about your age, after my freshman year of high school, I didn’t understand the difference between my local half-commuter private college (barely in USNWR top 150), my excellent state flagship (top 40), and the Ivy League. I was sort of interested in going to the first one, because people said that some smart kids went there. Smart kids? I was a smart kid! I would go there! What was all the hype about HYPS, anyway? They were probably not all that different from the first one, or they were full of arrogant rich people. This was all as the daughter of overly highly educated American parents (three post-graduate degrees between them, two of those from Stanford). By late junior year, I realized that I would have liketa died at the first one, probably died at the second (not academically: I’d probably be doing as well as I am at Harvard, but it’s very much not my social scene), and that yes, HYPS etc. were more for me.</p>
<p>You can’t keep yourself from forming opinions about colleges for now, of course. But do try to stay open-minded and ready to have those opinions change. There is no way that your ideal college won’t change as you change and grow over the next four years. (I mean, you’ve changed and grown since fourth or fifth grade, right? Your next four years will be the same thing, or even more so.) I find that you get a better sense of what you want out of a college once you know more than a handful of people who are in college (probably the class of juniors when you’re a freshman.) Even if they all go to community college, that will help you realize whether or not you’d be ok with that as an option. If you want to aim high for college, aim high in your academics and extracurriculars, but (a) bear in mind that the Ivies aren’t even for everybody, or most people, or most smart people, (b) aim high such that you’ll be content with your high school experience if you don’t get in, and (c) be open to changing your dream school. Especially be open to, say, Berkeley, or Johns Hopkins, or Sarah Lawrence, or Caltech: Yale and Columbia are rather more of the same. People are different, and fit at different places.
If you do well grade-wise and SAT wise, and the book/writing goes well, you’ll have no problem getting in? At this point it’s speculation.</p>