<p>I appreciate the advice, and I think I might ask him to not. I admit that I was a little upset to hear that he’d written a rec letter, as it now has me worrying that I might be more of a courtesy waitlister than an actual candidate, but I’m not going to let that deter me.</p>
<p>And I’m definitely getting excited for my other options - I’ll be going up to spend a couple days in New York and Montreal to visit them. Still, I won’t pretend that I’m not holding on to a shred of hope for Harvard ;)</p>
<p>So you’re saying that the other school’s have admissions officers who have developed ESP? That they will sniff out your desire to attend Harvard and rescind their offers of admission? Is this your suggestion?</p>
So it really depends upon whether H yielded the desired proportion of internationals and from where as to whether it is an advantage or disadvantage to you. There is no way to know.</p>
<p>Yes, but you might as well put your effort on some other school. It is NO use to put effort on Harvard while you are on the waitlist. You will get rejected anyway!! So I advise you to just try for a different school. Have any of your parents attended Harvard University? In other words, are you a legacy student? @stupiddorkyidiot</p>
<p>Yes. @T26E4. Colleges discuss with each other all the time. For example, a few years ago, at more former high school, there was a girl who was accepted to Yale and waitlisted at Harvard. She kept showing interest to Harvard and then all of a sudden, Yale decided that she is interested in another school so she had her acceptance revoked. Later on, she had also been rejected by Harvard.</p>
<p>@PrincetonTigers, that sounds beyond dubious to me. I have a couple of friends in the Class of 2016 who maintained a spot on the Harvard waitlist while putting in a deposit at another Ivy, and none of them had an acceptance rescinded. Additionally, I’ve read a couple years worth of waitlist backlogs on this forum, and nobody has ever mentioned that sort of thing happening simply because of of accepting a waitlist spot at Harvard.</p>
<p>Also how can you say rejection is a sure thing? Nobody is pretending the odds are not grossly unfavorable, but you seem to believe that because you were rejected, everybody else will be too. I can counter your anecdote of rejection with an anecdote of my own: my friend who got in last year off the waitlist, who had no hooks, no legacy, just a very strong application.</p>
<p>Besides, in my case, I have literally nothing to lose by pursuing my waitlist spot. I wasn’t even waitlisted anywhere else, so it’s not like I could possibly even be wasting effort by trying to get off the list at Harvard. Why are you still so concerned with this two years after the fact?</p>
<p>EDIT: Does a first place national award from the Science Olympiad guarantee you a spot at a school as selective as Harvard? Doesn’t that fact that it WASN’T enough in your case maybe demonstrate that the admissions process is a little more nuanced than “major award -> instant admissions”?</p>
<p>I think P’tonTigers is a ■■■■■. No university withdraws an acceptance because of interest shown in another institution. Nope, it doesn’t happen. </p>
<p>Ignore him. I hope the moderators take note of him…</p>
<p>I don’t think there is any preference to legacy for students in WL. From my small sample, my son was admitted at Harvard during RD and another student from his school was waitlisted. We also know another student - a family friend- was waitlisted but not legacy or any hooks. Both got removed from WL and were admitted.</p>
<p>^^^
Well, there is always the question of the infamous Z-list. For those who don’t know, towards the end of the long waitlist road, some students are put on the Z-list, which means they are given a place in the class of the FOLLOWING year. If they want to go to Harvard, they must take a gap year and then attend. Having been interested in this since my son was a freshman (when he told me about the Z-list), I have seen kids in our town who have followed this path. But every one of them has been a legacy. Every one. There are people who say that this is a myth, but it seems very unlikely to me that being a legacy doesn’t mean much anymore.</p>
<p>@Enough, that’s the reason I was asking. I am a legacy and was waitlisted. I was wondering if I might have a better than average chance on the WL, given that many/most z-listers are legacies, or if it’s more likely that it was just a courtesy.</p>
<p>I’ve read that H is very specific about what determines legacy status - it’s only if you have a parent who attended undergrad. However, I could be wrong.</p>
<p>With Harvard accepting nearly 895 students EA this year (which is approximately half their class size), do u think the yield will be higher than last year’s yield, which was almost 80.2%!!! Any thoughts on the topic would be appreciated!</p>
<p>Although Harvard is, as far as I know, officially silent on the subject, there has been some speculation in this forum recently whether siblings of Harvard College students and alumni also get a small bump. Personally, I think they do. But I have no hard proof.</p>
<p>@stupiddorkyidiot, I must have missed your original post. I don’t have the definitive answer to the Z-list question, but my empirical evidence tells me that legacies (read: children of one/two Harvard grads) have a leg up (a very big leg). I also know legacies who haven’t even made it to the waitlist.</p>
<p>@Enough - hmm. Who knows… perhaps I’ll email them with an update. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hung up on it or anything - but I’d always wonder if I could’ve made it if I’d tried, you know?</p>
<p>So the whole z-list comes off of the waitlist? That’s exciting. I had assumed it would function more like WashU’s now-defunct January Program, which sent its decisions in March like all the rest.</p>