<p>This one goes out to y'all regular people out there. Y'know, the ones who, while being smarter than the next Tom, Dick and Alfred, never built any wells in Africa or built nuke reactors. Did you get an offer? With average grades and good SATs + essays alone?</p>
<p>Harvard’s acceptance rate was 6.2% last year, and with EA reimplemented this year, those stats are bound to be driven even lower this year.</p>
<p>Harvard cannot afford to offer many slots to “normal” people. To get in, you have to be extraordinary in some respect.</p>
<p>Very very few people get in with merely “average grades,” and I would suspect that most of the ones that do have built their share of “nuclear reactors.”</p>
<p>To answer your question, I had very good grades and scores and a few leadership positions in my school (Mock Trial and a community service organization), but I wasn’t nationally ranked in anything and I didn’t do any crazy things or get any elements in the periodic table named after me.</p>
<p>DE: Yeah, that’s what I wanted to know. I always hear people who are either alumni, offer holders or who work in admissions office (MIT), say things like “find something you like and show us why and <em>how</em> you truly like it” and what not. What if I figured out what I truly like way down the line? What if it’s a regular thing? Honestly (not that I was lying before, haha), I don’t feel comfortable with lying about what I like. I don’t see the point in doing massive community service when I don’t want to. I find that the little things matter more.</p>
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<p>^Here’s my take on it. See if you find it useful in some way.</p>
<p>How you approach your activities matters more than what they are. What a reader would want to see, IMO, is that something in your life, whether academic or otherwise, has grabbed your curiosity and “passion” enough that you can devote yourself to it in length and depth. While grades and scores can show that you’re smart enough to handle schoolwork when asked of you, what you do beyond school demonstrates that you can apply your “smarts” to life, and that you have the initiative to do so.</p>
<p>Interests change. The activities that occupy you evolve over time. Just like adcom understands that what you declare as your major on the application is unlikely to mirror what you decide years later, they cannot possibly expect you to stay with the same activities for life. Rather, they’re interested in what your profile say about you, for the presence of positive traits like perseverance, intellectual curiosity, compassion, leadership, special talents, etc. These stay with you, dictate what you’ll add to the campus.</p>
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<p>Then trust that intuition! It’s not the number of service hours that matters, but rather the work’s meaning and ability to stand out.</p>
<p>Instead of following the crowd and become another Joe, ask what it is that you really like. Is it a trait of yours? A favorite subject area? Does it relate to what you currently do? Someone can enjoy something as simple as cooking, but then go beyond the normal kitchen tasks to join a cooking group, read books on cooking to become an expert, teach friends to cook, recruit people to start a club, start fundraisers, start a company… It’s unlikely the person will be a cook in twenty years, but the zeal to learn, to explore, the entrepreneurship, and the initiative will carry him far in life.</p>
<p>Yes, there are normal kids at Harvard. Not everyone has built wells in Africa or had research published. Good grades, solid test scores, and a genuine story are the simplest ingredients for admission. Past that point, fate remains out of your hands.</p>
<p>Well, that’s great to know. Cheers for that guys.</p>
<p>Now, something else that I wanted to know. Let’s say one is doing the full IB diploma or A-Levels, will one be severely disadvantaged if one’s transcript during these two years are distinctly average but one’s actual final grades are very good? (say, 38/45 for IB or AAA for A-Levels?) I think I might get something like A*AC and a further b for my AS-Level subject. While, I’d think those grades are good (except for the C!), my transcript, due to some minor personal conflicts really falls short. I went to three different schools in span of 6 months.</p>