<p>I am a rising freshman at Harvard at a top-10 public high school in the United States. These are some anecdotes about admissions that I've gathered, and the conclusions I have drawn about them.</p>
<p>Some competition is local.</p>
<p>Boy A, Boy B, and Self all do the same extracurricular activity (Latin) from the same high school. Boy A plays sports at an almost-recruitable level. Boy A gets wonderful grades. Boy A was the president of a 10,000 student organization on the state level. Boy A "only" had a 2150-2200 SAT. Boy A had, at the time of application, 4 gold medals on the National Latin Exam, which is pretty good. Boy A is not the best of essay writers.
I am involved with the literary magazine. I have mediocre grades (usually 1 B and 1 B+ a year). I play Latin team on the national level, and have placed 1st and 3rd. I have a near-perfect SAT. At the time of application, I had 4 perfect scores on the National Latin Exam. 8 people received their fourth perfect in my year. I am a pretty darn good essay writer.
Boy B, now, only did Latin. Boy B's grades were good, but not as good as A's. Boy B was the webmaster of that organization, not the president like A. Boy B was involved in Latin team, placing first with me after freshman year, but has failed to make the team since. (He is an "alternate" which means he is almost good enough to make the team, but not quite.) Boy B's test scores were great, but not as good as mine. Boy B had three perfects on the National Latin Exam, and one gold, at the time of application. Boy B is a decent essay writer.</p>
<p>Boy A and I were accepted to Harvard. Boy B was waitlisted. Is Boy B any less qualified than many of the people I will meet as a Harvard freshman next year? No. Is Boy B any less smart than Boy A or me? I don't think so. Would Boy B have been accepted if he had been from a different state, or maybe even school? I think so. However, everything great Boy B did, Boy A or I did better. (And A and I each had two activities, while B had 1.)</p>
<p>There are feeder activities to the top colleges.</p>
<p>However, I don't think that getting into one of them makes you a desirable candidate. I think that desirable candidates tend to cluster in the upper echelons of certain activities.</p>
<p>Hearing the college destinations of the top Latin students in the state and country year after year, I always heard Harvard far the most. (A lot of Latin students do end up going to state schools and what have you, but of the students going to HYPSMIvy, Harvard was most common.) Sometimes one will go to Yale, having been rejected or waitlisted by Harvard, but that's rare. No one has ever chosen Yale, which probably helps our chances at Harvard. Occasionally (once every 3-5 years), someone will go to Princeton. Of the students going to the lower Ivies, it's pretty much randomly distributed.
Yale tends to be harsher to the Latin students, anyway. Boy A was rejected from Yale, as was a debater-Latin whiz-drill team (also known as color guard?) captain last year. On the other hand, my school always has terrific results with Yale and Princeton, except among the top students who take Latin.
For a long time I thought that that was just a coincidence. Then, on Harvard's preview weekend, I was put into a room with three prefrosh ballerinas from one town (I think of <200,000 people, so not that big. I don't know precisely), and one freshman who had come from the same ballet studio. (One of those prefroshes was also an Intel semifinalist or finalist, and is gorgeous. Jealoussss x] haha.) I am solidly of the belief that certain activities just end up sending more students to one school.
To repeat, I wouldn't rush to go find one of these activities--Latin conventions send their top 1-4 kids nationwide to Harvard every year without fail. That's a really small percentage of the kids who attend. Activities may have a good run for a few years, and then fade--I doubt that 20 years from now that ballet studio will have quite the same luck. I am also pretty sure that it's that the people who are drawn to a particular activity are desirable candidates, not that that activity in particular gives candidates a particular desirability over whatever activity they would have chosen if the "feeder" were not available. If you end up doing really well at one activity for several years, though, and look around and see that most all of the best students in your karate studio (or what have you) go to Stanford or Princeton, you're probably in a good place, at least compared to the general admission rate. I don't know how that would affect your chances at Harvard or Yale if one of those is your top choice.</p>
<p>Schools have different goals for their entering classes.</p>
<p>My school has 10-20 kids going to Yale this year, and 3-4 going to Harvard. There were no cross-admits. Some of the Yale students were WL'd at Harvard, but none of the Harvard students were even WL'd at Yale.</p>
<p>Harvard is scary.</p>
<p>Everyone's really good at something. Quite possibly a lot of things. See: Intel ballerina. Before going up to the preview days, I was all like "Oh, whatever, it'll be cool. There will be lots of smart people but hey, I'm smart too. I got in, didn't I?"
The people I met were impressive, but mostly, no cause to freak out. They were pretty normal to interact with.
Then there was the talent show of student organizations.
Holy freak.
Did you know that Harvard is the home to a 40-person incredibly, incredibly good breakdancing troop? FORTY PEOPLE? [I had only ever seen, in person, two people at a time break-dancing.] Did you know that they had similarly ridiculously intense African dancing? Or South Asian? Or East Asian? Or how professional their a cappella groups are? The a cappella groups that tour four continents every spring break? What about the Spanish music band? (Admittedly, a few acts were less impressive.) Did you know that almost none of the members of the non-a cappella groups (I assume that most of the singers had been singers before college) had been in those activities before Harvard? And so they have many other talents? Academic intense talents? Or maybe in one of the activities that manages hundreds of thousands of dollars! And that they are also probably, like the prefroshes and freshmen I actually met, pretty normal and cool to hang out with?
Harvard is not a good place to be faint of heart. I absolutely wouldn't want to be anywhere else, anywhere less frightening, but I think that Harvard is definitely not the right place for a lot of people. (However, I am a rising freshman, which means that I don't know anything about what it's really like. May update this thread after getting to college, but may not. If not, I will at least continue posting elsewhere in this forum a little bit.)</p>