I got Waitlisted at Harvard. Does anybody have any anecdotes about success stories in recent years of getting off the waitlists? Did you do (or know somebody who did) anything spectacular to get in from the waitlist? Or was it just a matter of staying on the waitlist and getting lucky at this point?
This, more or less. Yes, people have gotten off the waitlist. Very few, but it’s possible. IME though, people who get off the waitlist do not come to campus and announce that they got off the waitlist, so few people know who they are. You should assume, though, that the ones getting off are filling a particular niche that Harvard believed it lacked in the entering class. If you want to call that “luck” that those people got off the WL, so be it.