<p>Hello everyone. My daughter will be entering one of the Ten Schools Admissions Organization this year as 9th grade boarding student. It is my daughter's dream to attend Harvard or MIT after graduating from high school and I wanted to get inputs from all you parents who worked so hard to have your children to get accepted at Harvard. It would be great if you can provide your insight to what your children did to get into Harvard. My daughter is thinking about either majoring in business (with ultimate goal of working as private equity manager) or in engineering/med school. Thank you all!</p>
<p>Thank you everyone for your feedback. Perhaps my statement was not clear enough. My question was what your children did to be a competitive applicants to Harvard or MIT (and not their parents). I, myself, usually do not interfere with my daughter to influence her decision but I thought that give a good guidance is always good thing to do as a parents. </p>
<p>For example, what kind of advance placement classes should she take? What kind of SAT II test should she take? What kind of EC activities standout at Harvard and MIT? Should she apply for early decision or as a common application?</p>
<p>We just wanted to find out what your children did to be accepted at these schools so we have a good reference point to help provide parental advice to my daughter if she asks</p>
<p>Thank you</p>
<p>For MIT, I recommend just working hard and becoming invested in a few select ECs. It doesn’t matter what they are – FIRST Robotics is popular, but as long as she is truly passionate about them and participates as more than just a member, they will look good to MIT.</p>
<p>AP classes should be in line with her areas of strength and interest. Obviously, math and science should be taken at the highest possible level, but that should be because she loves and excels in those subjects, not because they are good for MIT admissions.</p>
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<p>The ones she’s interested in.</p>
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<p>The ones she’s qualified for by taking classes that interest her.</p>
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<p>The ones she’s interested in.</p>
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<p>Depends on the other schools she’s applying to. MIT is early action, not early decision, so MIT does not restrict her application. However, if another school restricts her application, she would then apply to MIT regular action. If she doesn’t have her application ready in the fall, then she should apply in the spring.</p>
<p>MIT likes genuine applications. Following your interests leads to the strongest possible application. I suppose it might be possible to fake interests, but there’s really no point in doing so. On CC, a lot of people do FIRST Robotics and Olympiads and all that, but it’s not representative of large chunks of the actual MIT population. (I, for one, never did any sort of science competition or science research or whatever.)</p>
<p>You really should follow your interests and work hard, because nobody can really link admissions success to any one defining factor. You could win Olympiads and FIRST Robotics and still not get in: I think of the last two people to get into MIT from my high school (in the past 5 or 6 years or so), neither had any prestigious national awards or anything… the most any of those two did was taking BC Calculus Junior Year. That goes twice for Harvard. If somebody tells you they know a way to get into Harvard, odds are they’re lying. I know it’s disconcerting to not have any certainty of how to get into a school, but it’s a brutal truth. </p>
<p>To be honest though, she should really sort out what she wants to do. There are a lot of good schools out there, and her interests are likely to change over time. Some of these schools are better for certain areas than others. My other advice is to not try to match your child to the school, but match the school to your child. Let her visit the different college campuses, and see what each of them has to offer. Most importantly, look at how the students act and behave. If your daughter acts like them and meets all necessary stats for qualifications, odds are she’ll get, at the very least, a waitlist.</p>
<p>My advice is mainly just to let things happen naturally. She’ll go to the right school for her… have faith that the college admissions process works. That said, it doesn’t work if you don’t apply, so if you apply to the wrong schools, the process won’t work. It’s more important to figure out the right schools than the most prestigious ones.</p>
<p>Although, one majorly important piece of advice from my own experiences: early action acceptance rates, particularly for Harvard, tend do be incredibly high in comparison to the regular decision ones. As much as certain colleges may claim there’s no difference there really is (actually though this doesn’t hold true for MIT to my knowledge, only to Harvard). If your daughter knows her absolute top school, have her apply early to it. Also, the less parents interfere the better: case and point many parents try to get their kids to start their essays early because they think it will help them. This is, at least in my own experience, false. More time does not equal a better essay… the essays I spent the longest on all ended up as rejections in my experience, whereas the ones I spent shorter amounts of time on tended to be acceptances or wailtists.</p>
<p>Thank you everyone for your useful advice!</p>
<p>You can also look at the decision thread for this year, which is stickied at the top of the page, to see many profiles of applicants who were accepted. In the first post of the FAQ thread, also stickied at the top of this page, there are links to the last several years’ worth of these decision threads.</p>
<p>bsherewego:
The fact that you’re doing some of the legwork for your daughter is already a bad sign. </p>
<p>Your daughter needs to stand on her own. Admissions officers are good at reading between the lines of an application and sensing those who were prepped/propped/pushed by their parents.</p>
<p>Academics are a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition. The hardest academics the student can handle should be the given. If the child is not doing the hardest program at the HS, then rethink whether the child can make it at the elite schools.</p>
<p>After that, the child needs a passion, and to do that passion at an exceptional level. Explore things freshmen year. If the child is not focused by Sophomore year, then it will become harder to develop in time.</p>
<p>To do a passion at an exceptional level requires a gift. help your child find that gift.</p>
<p>OperaDad I like your message 
Especially "To do a passion at an exceptional level requires a gift. help your child find that gift. " Great words!</p>