What would you do? SCEA Harvard for 15% chance VS. SCEA other schools for 30% or more.

Parents Forum
41

Well, I will ask again: how much do you know about what Harvard seeks, OP? Do you understand the complexity of what they look for? You listed your awards and some activities; lots of kids claim to be a novelist, etc, etc. You didn’t even mention your idea for the work you would do there (major.) Or Why Harvard and not some other. You’re just listing a ‘Here I am.’

Sorry, but what shows you your match? Are you aware of the parts of the CA and what they want to find in there? Ie, what the whole in holistic is? Congrats on the achievements.

This isn’t really even about top choice. I want to know how OP truly matched himself and matches. Harvard will want to know, too.

42

I agree with PG to. Apply to whatever school you like best. If you can apply EA do so. If your favorite school is an ED school AND your family can afford it apply there. I went to Harvard believe me, it’s not this perfect school. Are you going to want to do music there? Do you like the people in the music department. Will you want to compose music? Is it the best place to study that? Are you interested in continuing with creative writing? I’m pretty sure Harvard is not the best place to go for that. If you are interested in making films there are better choices on the other coast.

Obviously your scores and grades are good enough that you won’t go straight to the reject pile, but you need to figure out what you want out of college.

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@timeupjunior What subjects are you interested in studying? Which subject tests did you take and what are your scores?

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Sorry if I confused anyone, I am the dad seeking advice here.

@Much2learn He is interested in studying biology, he got inspired by his IB biology teacher who won Presidential Scholar Teacher Recognition Award. He has not taken any Sat subject tests yet.

@mathmom A lot of good questions. He enjoys writing and music making. He wants to study biology.

@lookingforward What good does it do if I know what Harvard is looking for? Is it not the best you can do by saying “Here I am – take it or leave it”?

Thank you @Pizzagirl and @thumper1 for the best advice.

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“Do you like the people in the music department. Will you want to compose music? Is it the best place to study that? Are you interested in continuing with creative writing? I’m pretty sure Harvard is not the best place to go for that. If you are interested in making films there are better choices on the other coast.”

I second what mathmom has said.
your DS should apply to colleges that have great programs in the areas he is interested in.
Is Harvard the best college for a student interested in continuing to play and learn music? no, there are other colleges that have better music programs.
Have you run the NPC for Harvard and the other colleges your Son is thinking about applying to?
Can you afford H? or the other ED college?
College is NOT the final stage, the “be all and end all” of a students life. it is only a stepping stone.
And there are many paths open to talented students such as your DS.
NO ONE has the name of the college they went to carved on their tombstone.
your DS would possibly be a lot happier at another college that values highly talented musical talent.

And 20 years from now he really wont care where he went to college.
stop fixating on the name of the college- look beyond “prestige” .

46

OP, you started by asking about how to play the early application card. Now, after presenting what “I” have done, it tuns out to be your son. I believe one needs to explore what a college values and looks for, as well as what it actually offers, as part of matching oneself to the college and the college to the student’s wants, needs and strengths. Without that, it’s a shot in the dark, uninformed.

Now it turns out it’s biology, and none of the activities listed are related to bio or math-sci. Only one EC is even with hs peers. I think you may have assumed top stats and top achievements in music flat out translate to high desirability.

We’ve got tens of thousands of posts on CC, trying to unravel what colleges want. The colleges themselves reveal much of that, sometimes quite clearly. If you just throw his hat into the ring without looking for this info, it’s incomplete. Let me put it another way: do you let him take on new musical challenges without knowing what the sentiment is, without refining, without considering what any reviewers might expect?

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Some elite colleges have very renowned schools of music. I don’t believe Harvard to be one of those.

48

“What good does it do if I know what Harvard is looking for? Is it not the best you can do by saying “Here I am – take it or leave it”?”

If your son were seeking a job, is this the advice you’d give him?

Which one of you is interested in Harvard, and can you articulate why H specifically would meet those needs/desires better than other top schools? (Hint - the lower admission rate has nothing to do with the answer). I somehow get the sense you think that H is a “better prize” and I’m curious as to why, esp given his profile, role of music, and desires.

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True,though to play devil’s advocate here, Yo Yo Ma chose to go to Harvard not for the music, but for the other stuff. Of course he took most of his lessons outside of Harvard. I like to think the education he got at Harvard broadened him and pushed him to do things like the Silk Road Project, but he may have been thinking along those lines before he ever got there. http://www.silkroadproject.org/

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Did he actually score a 2400 or is that the “I’m gunning for a 2400” score?

Where do kids with his profile from HIS HS end up?

Those are the two salient facts in my opinion. If the kids like him end up at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford and he LOVES Harvard above any other school, he should apply to Harvard. If the kids like him end up at Cornell or CMU or JHU then he is taking a calculated risk by applying to Harvard early.

For what it’s worth, the two kids in my life that I have known with profiles similar to your son- one ended up at JHU doing the conservatory program in addition to a regular academic major (not in music). The other ended up at Julliard- his teachers encouraged him to think long and hard about HYP (he was a competitive candidate) but he followed his heart.

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What does the student think? We’ve heard nothing about what type of school he is looking for. With all that music it seems weird to me that he would want a school that doesn’t have a particularly strong music program.

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@TimeUpJunior Does he want to study music too? Is he interested in biology for pre-med? Are there other subjects he is interested in as a plan B if he loses interest in biology/pre-med?

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@Much2learn He told us his dream is to invent a drug that will cure all human ills. I said " good luck with that, son".

He wants to pursue biology – pharmacology path, not necessarily biology–pre-med – doctor route.

When it comes to music, it will be a long discussion. He really enjoys composing music, he can sit in his room for hours and then emerges with excitement “Hey, dad, you want to hear what I just have come up?” To be honest, he wrote some pretty good music for a 16 year old. We have had lengthy discussion about choosing music as a career.
The truth is that he MIGHT turn out to be a great composer, but also he may VERY well end up being just another poor musician.

@blossom Yes, he did score 2400 on Sat. He just got the detailed report yesterday, he answered correctly all the questions in the CR, math, and writing section. He got 11 out of 12 on his essay. His music teacher advises him to at least minor in music no matter what he chooses to study in college. Yes, we have looked very closely at JHU, it is very appealing with the famed Peabody school of music.

@mathmom That is one of the reasons behind the original post. For ten years, his teacher has been instilling in him the wisdom that music is about life. She told him great stories about the greatest musicians in history, from Bach, to Beethoven, to Mozart, to Chopin … One thing in common abot them is that they all had extraordinary lives, music was just the natural outflow of their life experiences.

@Pizzagirl Yes, that will be my advice to him too if he goes to a job interview. It is a fake to mold yourself to what other may have in their mind. Just be yourself, if others see the fit, fine, if not, you move on.

@lookingforward Nobody can unravel what Harvard is looking for in an admit. I would venture further that it does you no good even if you figured out the magic formula. If Harvard sees something desirable in him, good, if not, fine too.

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@timeupjunior “Yes, that will be my advice to him too if he goes to a job interview. It is a fake to mold yourself to what other may have in their mind. Just be yourself, if others see the fit, fine, if not, you move on.”

While I like the idea of what you are saying, that is just not the world we live in, at least for professional jobs. Professional jobs are difficult to come by and competition for good jobs is steep. It is very important to prepare for interviews, and try to put your best, most professional foot forward in the current environment. I suspect that anyone who does not do that will not last long in an interview with @Pizzagirl.

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Oh, come on, you all say there is no magic formula to getting into a lottery school and now you’re telling the OP, of course they have to make themselves match Harvard’s magic formula. I’m going to assume they met the basic application expectations described by each of these schools (eg. years of study of major subjects, required testing).

Of course, if son wants to go into a 6 year MD program and Harvard has no such thing, it’s not a fit. But beyond that, the question that should be asked is whether the school matches his criteria, not whether he matches theirs.

A job usually has fairly focused and specific requirements, depending on the tasks to be performed. One doesn’t see job listings looking for extremely bright and talented individuals where the area of talent doesn’t matter–could be music, could be physics, could be acting. It’s a very poor analogy.

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I question that it doesn’t really matter so much to you, because you started a thread on this vs that percentage chance in early admissions. So many kids and adults miss when they only focus on scores, quartiles, and who’s got better awards than the next. We all love our kids and believe in them, that they are special. And tens of thousands of those kids apply to tippy top colleges.

Some posters say, apply early to the top choice. Fine. The savvy approach is not to apply blind, based on assumptions. If you truly don’t care where he attends, why this thread?

And I didn’t say magic formula. There is none. But there are ways to ensure a kid puts his best foot forward. The choice is yours how to approach this.

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The “magic formula” is very location specific, which this thread seems to ignore. For a kid living in a homeless shelter on the South side of Chicago, the formula is very different from a kid going to HS in Chappaqua NY or Atherton CA. The kid with a fantastic profile from Stuyvesant HS in NYC (but who is in the second quintile of students there overall) is wasting an application fee- the kid with the same profile who has been homeschooled in rural Wyoming and thus has no other students to be compared to- has a strong shot.

Again- OP- your HS is going to have a wealth of data which will help you decide if you are spinning your wheels or not.

It’s between you and your son as to whether Harvard fits. If it were my kid, I’d be encouraging MIT. My son (tone deaf and not at all interested in Life Sciences) had several bio/music friends there. Personally- I think it’s a better fit for the path you have described. Fantastic orchestral opportunities for undergrads; world class research opportunities for undergrads; great connectivity with Boston’s device/pharma/medical start-up communities.

But that’s me.

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The top schools, incl MIT, will look for evidence the bio interest is legit. (You don’t just get to say, “I think this would be cool.”) You don’t get there with music awards, claiming to be writing a novel (or even self-publishing) and saying an award winning bio teacher inspired an interest, but no corresponding action outside class. Afawk, his kid isn’t going for performance or composition. If he were, we could have a fine conversation about how the filmmaking works, how to fine tune the rest. Right now sorry, but what OP has shared makes it seem that, beyond music, his kid does what interests him and only that. There is NO magic formula implied in my saying that. It’s the very real downside of the notion “passions” win in admissions.

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My oldest pretty much did what interested him, but we did nudge him to use those interests in the wider community and he discovered that was interesting/fun/rewarding too.

A music kid might be giving concerts at the senior center or helping younger kids. Someone interested in biology might be doing research in a lab or doing one of the biology oriented events at Science Olympiad. One thing a lot of colleges are looking for are evidence that the kid “plays well with others”. Your kid is doing some of this sort of thing, but he may need to do more especially in light of what Harvard is currently saying they are looking for. http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/16/01/turning-tide-inspiring-concern-others-and-common-good-through-college-admissions

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@mathmom Yes, I am aware of the new trend Harvard is spearheading. He did perform regularly at local senior centers. He is also volunteering teaching kids Karate. He also do tutoring and picking up trash at his school for the NHS requirement.

@lookingforward I bet to differ on that you need to have done something big in Bio to get into a bio program at MIT. They are looking for kids who have the capacity to learn, not what they have already known. I read somewhere that the most popular major the feeds into medical school is not math, not physics, not chemistry, not biology, but MUSIC!

@blossom As far as I know, there have been kids from his school who have gone to MIT and Caltech. Thanks for the tip.