<p>hello:</p>
<p>Your problem is that you are making two false assumptions. They are:</p>
<p>1) Most people who get into Harvard, etc. are not “popular” in a traditional sense. As people have said, this is not necessarily true. As another piece of anecdotal evidence, the one girl from my class to go to Harvard (we are a really small class) was definitely popular in a traditional sense. She was the head of clubs like debate, she hung out with the “jocks” and other “cool” kids, she went to parties. She was also very smart, very ambitious, very accomplished and rather intellectual, but not in a “geeky” way at all. Thus, popular, but also Harvard material.</p>
<p>B) That people who are seen as “geeky” in high-school can’t also be “people who are socially competent and are liked by many people.” This is just a false assumption. I was not popular in a stereotypical way in high school, in that if a stranger dropped into my school, they would probably guess that my friends were the “nerds.” And we were, in our way. Well, nerds/weird arty kids. Most of us didn’t do sports, liked school a lot, tended to like sci-fi/fantasy, tended to be the ones taking either Comp-Sci or Art or Theater instead of Econ as our electives, etc. </p>
<p>But just because we had interests that aren’t cool in high school doesn’t mean we were all socially incompetent. We just had our own parallel social circle, where people went out on the weekends, dated, broke up, had fights, made up, teased some people, liked others more than they deserved, gossiped, flirted, hung out at lunch etc, etc, etc. We were generally leaders in things like the Sci-Fi club and the Literary Magazine and Theater instead of Debate and the Newspaper and Mock Trial, but we still had those leadership skills. We just did what interested us.</p>
<p>And guess what? We all managed to be social and have leadership roles in college, too!</p>
<p>Thus, while it is generally true that top schools want many of their students to be able to interact socially (unless they have a major talent to make up for not being able to), the fact i, most people who have the ECs to get into Harvard WILL be socially competent, even if they weren’t “cool.” Interviews and letters of rec will almost always be enough to indicate if someone is completely socially incompetent, in which case the adcoms can decide whether that person is talented enough in other ways to be worth admitting (and sometimes, they are). But my guess is, most people who Harvard admits have it all.</p>
haha.</p>