I attended Harvard’s summer program this past summer. One of the classes I took was relatively more prestigious than most students were taking as it is a mostly graduate class. I developed a good relationship with my professor, scored an A, and was the only high school student in the class of 70 some graduates. My professor has offered to write me a recommendation. Would it be appropriate for this to be used as a teacher recommendation for Harvard and other schools? Or should it be used as an “other recommender” type one? I am using the commonapp btw.
Thanks
No, it would NOT be appropriate to use your Harvard Summer School professor as one of your two teacher recommendations. You should, however, take the professor up on his offer and have him write you a supplemental recommendation which s/he should fax to the Harvard Admissions office.
With regards to other college’s, here’s my take on it. While Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the like might be impressed from reading your glowing recommendation from a Harvard professor, those schools are going to assume that the professor also submitted that letter to Harvard. And, if it’s a fabulous letter – and I’m sure it will be – other colleges are going to assume (rightly or wrongly) that if Harvard accepts you, you will choose to go to Harvard and not their college. So, why should YPS et al waste one of their precious slots on you? Why should they take a chance on you and ruin their yield? (Yes, all high end colleges are concerned about their yield.) Instead, other college’s might waitlist you to gauge your true interest in their college. Bottom line: The Harvard professor should only send the supplemental recommendation to Harvard Admissions and nowhere else.
Full Disclose: My daughter attended Harvard School School, took a small class filled with graduate students, where the professor got to know her, and she earned an A. The Harvard professor wrote a supplemental letter of recommendation for my daughter to Harvard Admissions and she was accepted. I hope it works out just as well for you!
I am not sure I agree with the advice to not use the recommendation for other colleges. That would mean that anytime anyone does research or coursework at a particular university they should only have their teacher or mentor send a recommendation to that particular university and nowhere else because other schools want to protect their yield. I have never heard this to be true.
Having a recommendation from a professor saying that you were one of the top students in a rigorous course would be an important part of your application to any school.
Btw, my daughter got a recommendation from her mentor at one of the schools @gibby mentioned (not Harvard) and only applied to Harvard SCEA where she was accepted. She would have used the same recommendation anywhere else she would have applied if the need arose.
@falcoln1: I’m going to double-down on my statement.
When my daughter looks back on what she could have done differently in her college applications – she submitted the same application, with the same essays, teacher recommendations, EC’s and transcript to HYP – she thinks even that listing Harvard Summer School on her Common Application to Yale and Princeton was a HUGE mistake. Given that Yale and Princeton do NOT accept Harvard Summer School credits taken without prior approval, this allowed YP to see my daughter was more interested in Harvard than Yale or Princeton. After all, both colleges offer summer classes for high school students, so why didn’t my daughter take classes at their university instead of Harvard?
Doing research and getting a research mentor to send in a letter of recommendation is a different animal. Opting to pay ridiculous amounts of money for a summer school program demonstrates INTEREST in that program and in THAT college. It also demonstrates a LACK of first-priority interest to other college’s that also offer summer programs. It’s basically tipping your hat about what choice you might ultimately make if blessed with an acceptance to every school on your list. That’s far different that going to high school in Ann Arbor and doing a research mentorship at UMich and having your UMich mentor and professor send HYP a letter of recommendation.
If what you’re saying is true, then no one should ever go to Summer at Brown, Harvard Summer School or any top school program because it would shut them out at other schools. You cannot generalize your daughter’s experience into advice for the entire HS population. I know a girl who attended Harvard Summer School (and had a sibling there)and she was rejected there but accepted everywhere else including MIT and Stanford. There’s nothing you can take from this anecdote and generalize.
Your daughter’s well-publicized unhappiness with Harvard was one of the reasons that my daughter had serious second thoughts about attending and not having applied to other schools. After two years, despite the record bad weather she has had the two best years of her life and she can’t wait to see her friends and start school next week. She has thrived at Harvard in every sense of the word. Totally, the opposite of how you describe your daughter’s experience.
Perhaps, the Harvard Summer School experience did not keep her out of Yale or Princeton. Perhaps she might not have gotten into Harvard either if not for the recommendation and attendance to the summer program. We don’t know the answer to these questions but please don’t let you speculation turn into hard and fast advice to kids who are attending college programs that they have to somehow hide this fact from other schools.
Yes, top schools like to protect their yield but if you’re a highly desirable student, they are not sitting around trying to read the tea leaves of where you’ll accept. Lastly, I know plenty of kids who attend summer programs such as Harvard and then decide that it’s not a school they want to apply to. If they took a high level course such as organic chemistry are they not supposed to indicate this on their college apps even though they’re not even applying to the school they took it at?
@gibby: You (and your daughter) are overthinking this a lot. It is almost impossible to believe that a student’s application to Yale, Stanford, or Princeton would be made stronger by leaving out an enthusiastic recommendation from a Harvard professor who knows her work well. A student who reached that conclusion would immediately become a prime candidate for a hubrisectomy.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m enjoying this dialogue between 2 of the best posters on CC. 
@Gibby, do you think it would make a difference if a student took a summer course at one SCEA school and got a letter of recommendation from the professor, but decided to apply SCEA to a different school? For example, what if someone went to Stanford Humanities Institute and did well, including getting a letter, but decided that Stanford wasn’t necessarily the best fit and applied SCEA to one of H-Y-P instead, and RD to Stanford? In an extreme case, the student might have done well in the course but decided that the school wasn’t for them, and not even have applied.
On an unrelated note, I admire applicants who are mature and confident enough not to apply to a prestigious school that they don’t believe is a good fit for them. So many apply anyway just to see if they could get in.
Some students might be leaning towards one school and attending Summer School at the “other” school might be a way for them to just confirm to themselves that don’t want to go there. Because of that, it’s hard to second guess the Summer School factor too much.
On the second issue, as I understand it, one is not to ask your Summer School instructors about letters of recommendation.
I don’t think that any student such as OP who sat with graduate school students and got an A as the only HS student should ever shy away from asking for a recommendation. Just the opposite, in fact. Some of these classes at Harvard SSP are extremely HARD! Especially, the eight-credit ones. Kids will often put in 12- 14 hour days to keep up with some of them.
I think @gibby and I can agree to disagree on this issue. He has helped countless students with his invaluable advice so I certainly don’t want to overly object to anything he says. In this case, my advice to OP is to proudly send the rec to wherever they are applying.
@renaissancedad: In the scenario you are describing, my suggestion would be to have the Stanford professor write a supplemental letter of recommendation to whatever school the student is applying to SCEA and in the ADDITIONAL INFORMATION section of the Common Application, the student should write a short paragraph explaining why the SCEA school is now their first-choice school (and not Stanford).
@Falcoln1: Yes, we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one. FWIW: My daughter loved her experience at Harvard SSP, but when she applied to college Harvard did not offer SCEA. So, she applied SCEA to Yale without the Harvard professor’s letter based upon the recommendation from her high school’s guidance counselor. Maybe the GC was wrong, but given the GC’s 15-year track record at the high school and the GC’s relationship with the HYP Admissions staff (HYP had all invited the GC to sit down with them as they discussed other high school student’s applications, so the GC would understand their admissions process better), my daughter followed the GC’s advice.
Well then, the letter of recommendation didn’t really hurt her application to Yale did it? (Sending it might have even helped, imo). If you’re saying that her mere presence at the summer school affected her decision at Yale then why didn’t her super-plugged in GC tell her not to mention her attendance? Why wasn’t she warned not to go to Harvard SSP at all since it would ruin her chances at other schools?
What you’re saying makes little sense to me. Yale and Harvard (or Princeton for that matter) are not such bitter rivals that the mere mention of the other evokes instant disdain in admission committee meetings. In fact, I would have to dig to find it but there was an article written by someone who worked in Harvard’s admissions and he tracked how Yale legacies did at Harvard vs. actual Harvard legacies and found that they were accepted at just a percentage point or two lower than Harvard legacies!! If what you’re saying was true, they should not have had a boost but be penalized for being a Yale legacy. Quite the opposite, either there"s mutual admiration, professional courtesy or perhaps the more logical argument that they are very highly qualified BECAUSE they are children of Yale parents taking place. In any event, they aren’t being penalized in Harvard admissions as your GC would have us believe.
There are kids going to Yale Global Scholars (or whatever it’s called now) who will apply to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton or wherever SCEA. They should not have any reservations about doing so. If Stuy’s GC feels differently then I beg to differ. Kids who attend MITES do not have to only apply to MIT and hide their attendance from other schools. All of this is a bit far-fetched for me.
I think your daughter received poor advice. I also believe that Harvard was a poor fit for her because as you have posted she wanted to major in the dramatic arts and Harvard had no such offering until this year. Stuy should have warned her that she could not pursue what she was interested in at Harvard if they are all that you say they are.
They did. The GC recommended she go to Northwestern for Dramatic Arts, but she could not turn down Harvard’s name. Towards the end of her time at Harvard, she choose to go the pre-med route, but lacked the requirements needed to apply to med school, as she had opted for “soft-science” courses like The Physics of Cooking. FWIW: She’s now doing a post-bac at City College of New York, picking up all those pre-requirements she missed, and is much happier. Some kids just need to find their own way.
^^ Agreed! I feel terrible for her that she spent four (5 1/2 with time off?) years being miserable at Harvard. She’s obviously super-intelligent given that she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and could have probably transferred to any number of top schools where she would have been infinitely more happy pursuing her passions. But as you’ve said, Harvard’s name kept her in her seat. This should be a lesson for all the would be applicants that Harvard is definitely not for everyone. My daughter applied to Harvard specifically because it was a leader in the area she’s interested in and only after she visited multiple other schools. Kids who are in it for just the name may be unpleasantly surprised because all schools are different and no one school is right for everyone despite the name on the diploma.
I am glad your daughter has found her path. I am sure she will make a fantastic physician.
Here’s my final take on how @gibby’s daughter received bad advice and why this advice should not be passed on to others.
If Stuy through their high-level meetings really was told by HYPSM that attending another school’s summer program was a no-no then:
A) They should have warned her not to attend Harvard SSP (in fact, they should have sent a school -wide memo that unless a student wanted to lock themselves into trying for a single top tier school, no one should attend summer programs of top colleges).
B) Given that she did attend, she should have been told to not disclose this to any other school other than Harvard.
So they failed her in two regards IF attending another school’s program is detrimental.
Since I don’t believe in the above hogwash then here’s how she still could have received bad advice if it NOT true that attending another school’s program is some sort of negative:
C) She was told to not include the letter of recommendation to Yale (and I presume others) and only send it to Harvard.
Given this scenario, where she was accepted to Harvard BUT rejected at Yale and Princeton, one could conclude that the letter was instrumental in her Harvard acceptance and quite likely could have pushed her over the edge at Yale and Princeton since she was obviously a fantastic candidate. Again, bad advice from her GC.
If @gibby comes back and counters that she sent the letter to Princeton and still was rejected , then we have to ask why Stuy wasn’t consistent in applying their intimate knowledge and allowed her to send it.
That’s all I have to say. @skieurope usually closes discussions like this down, but I think this is super-important for OP and thousands of others who may read this. @gibby has a cult-like following (and rightly so) but even he can get it wrong once in a very blue moon.
That’s correct; no supplemental letter was sent to YP or other colleges.
While I imagine the letter was instrumental in her Harvard acceptance, we’ll never know how it would have worked out if the letter was sent to Y and P. Personally, I doubt it. She graduated Salutatorian from Stuy. There was only one other student (out of 860) that had a higher GPA than her – and he was also accepted to H, but rejected at Y and P. The year she was accepted to Harvard, Harvard took 24 student’s from her high school, YP took about 2 or 3. Some years, Admissions is just looking for something else.
My older brother went to Harvard and was absolutely miserable there. He had more than enough talent and intellectual ability, but not enough ego or competitiveness. He took time off as well, like @gibby’s daughter, before returning to get his degree in physics, but his overall experience was not a positive one, and he has since gravitated to very different academic environments. My cousin, who is a quiet nerdy type, did fine - he basically found a niche that fit his interests and stayed in it, spending 10 years at Harvard undergraduate and for his PhD.
Didn’t you just negate the crux of your argument why OP shouldn’t send the rec letter to other schools? I thought it was because of Harvard SSP she didn’t get into Yale or Princeton.
And it doesn’t speak well about the supposed great relationship Stuy has with HYPSM if only 2 or 3 kids out of 860 of the very top kids in NYC got into P or Y. My daughter’s small non-descript public HS does almost as well.
Frankly, given those extremely meager results, if I went to Stuy, I would ignore everything they told me to do.
Given that my daughter was accepted to H and my son to YP – all based upon the GC’c advice – I’m not inclined to agree with you. Not many families who attend a New York City public high school have 2 kids going to HY – not from Stuy, or anywhere else. So I consider my family very lucky. Maybe the stats are better at your daughter’s public high school, but in my hood, that’s an anomaly or a pleasant surprise.
As the content (and tone) of this thread has certainly gotten off topic, I would suggest that @SkiEurope close this thread.
Yes, I apologize if I went off topic. Your kids did extremely well and you have every right to be proud of them @gibby.
If OP is still around, I would just like to reiterate that you should send the letter of rec to all colleges you are applying to without fear of repercussions. I think it is additive to your application when a professor of any respected institution can speak of firsthand knowledge of your ability to excel in college level work. I’m certain that they would not look down upon the fact that it was a “Harvard” professor.
@skieurope Do what you will.