Why you didn't get into Harvard

Applying to College Admission Stories
1

It’s that time of year again. Week zero. Most admissions have been sent out and many of you are probably sitting down feeling depressed because you didn’t get into Harvard or Stanford or Yale or MIT or whatever other college you’re convinced you just HAD to get into or else your life will be a life of eternal pain and misery.

Hopefully, this post will be some consolation, because I can at least explain why you didn’t get in. Though, this won’t apply to all of you; only to a large majority. So if you feel like it doesn’t apply to you, I wouldn’t worry too much. It probably doesn’t.

Part 1: You focused too much on what didn’t matter

I don’t know who gave you the idea that studying 4 hours a day every day for 3 months to get above a 2250 on your SAT was a good idea. Because, as you have now found out the very hard way, it wasn’t. It simply didn’t do anything. You tried way too hard for your GPA too. If you had decided to go to bed instead of memorizing 452 french conjugations to stave off the dreaded B, you probably would be a lot healthier, both physically and mentally, and your college status would be just as it is now.

In short, you wasted a lot of time.

The only thing your SAT and GPA did was tell colleges whether or not you are academically qualified to attend their institution. That’s it. It tells them nothing about who you are as a person, or even whether they want to reject you or not. How they deal with your “stats” can be summed up in one very simple flowchart.

Does your GPA or SAT look good enough? If yes: Continue; Else: Throw out the application.

And guess what? Most of you passed that test. All you really need to do was take reasonably challenging classes and get at least 700 or so on each SAT section. That was, honestly, the easy part. It shouldn’t have been the part most of your energy was spent on. Which leads me to the next section…

Part 2: You focused too much on what was irrelevant

Almost every single person on this board seems to think that you need to have saved the world or the equivalent to get into a “top college”. The proof of this is simple, just look at the number of bewildered posts inquiring why their laundry list of extremely intimidating list of extra-curriculars didn’t get you into Harvard.

Guess what? Admissions counselors don’t give a damn how many hours you spent coddling Kenyan orphans for the extremely obvious reason that IT’S OBVIOUS YOU’RE JUST TRYING TO IMPRESS THEM!

Admissions counselors aren’t idiots. They know exactly what you think they want to see and they don’t want to see that because that just makes you look like a boring drone who is only capable of following instructions. No college wants a class comprised only of boring drones who only do what they’re told. What they want to see is evidence that, beneath that robotic veneer, is an actual person with actual thoughts and opinions.

Do you know what being in the key club and national honors societies and who knows what else you’re doing that you think is impressive but requires no thought or effort on your part does? Absolutely nothing. It’s utterly meaningless. You’re better off not doing it. It doesn’t tell anything about who you are but does tell a great deal about what you value (that is, meaningless societies that exist solely to puff up your ego).

So, what could you have done? Well, that will be answered in…

Part 3: You blatantly ignored what mattered

I have just explained why the 2 supposed most important things to focus on with regards to college admissions are actually not that important at all. Well then, I can hear you asking, what should I have done, O venerable Epimetheus?

What you should have done, pitiable pupil, is make yourself an interesting person. You should have had some interests that didn’t revolve around getting into college. You should have enjoyed life and not just during yourself into another clone obsessed with jacking up how you appeared on the surface but completely ignoring what was underneath.

The sad fact is, most of you are extremely boring. And it shows. Despite how amazing your SAT score is, how great your GPA is, the fact that you have more 5s than there are letters in the alphabet, your Mu Alpha Theta presidency, your 234 hours of volunteer work for the Susan B Kormann Scam for the Cure, your overwhelming mediocrity shines through.

What you should have done no one can tell you definitively. But one thing’s for sure. You should not have done what you did.

Juniors, take heed. If any of this resonates with you, I suggest you change your tack as quickly as possible. You don’t want to become another lifeless drone.

If you’re a senior and you were rejected and none of this resonates with you, I am genuinely sorry for you. There are, sadly, a limited amount of spots at top colleges and it is, to some extent a dice roll. Your chances were certainly better than the drones, but it did come down, in the end, to sheer luck.

Good luck with the future, and I hope you learned a valuable lesson from this,
Epimetheus
Harvard class of '17

2

Harvard rejects: at least you’ll never have to run into pompous Epimetheus on your college campus.

Epi: you make some solid points but your pomposity and condescension is probably the most satisfying thing that just-rejected applicants are going to draw from your post. “pitiable pupil”

How about luck, Epi – which you were the fortunate recipient? I often say many of the exact points you do to try to direct top school applicants. But you sure have found a bitter way to deliver that message… sheesh

3

Kharma will take of Epi. Watch this extremely interesting person get rejected by the grad and professional schools, which now matter FAR more than where you go to undergrad. Also, it is easy to fake ‘interesting’ as well…

4

…the only thing impressive about Harvard is the acceptance rate - otherwise, it’s full of pompous lightweights…
(btw I was accepted at MIT, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Northeastern, RPI, and Cornell - guess where I attended?)

5

This was the best post ever.

6

Your disgusting shallowness, ignorance and lack of substance will make you unable to accomplish anything remarkable other than being (hopefully) a Harvard alumnus.

No university in the world has ever had a truly effective way of identifying and admitting the candidates with the highest intellectual ability or potential.

A few examples: Évariste Galois(not a Harvard alumnus, therefore a boring mediocrity) was rejected 4 times (!) by the Ecole Polytechnique, the best university in Europe at that time. Another “pitiable” guy, Niels Abel was rejected by the same institution. Srinivasa Ramanajun sent his mathematical notebooks to English teachers at Cambridge, who concluded that the guy had “some ability”, but far less than Cambridge requires. Only one man(!), G.H. Hardy sensed Ramanujan’s talent and convinced the others to admit him.

All these obscure and mediocre guys I’m stupidly bringing into discussion were some of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived. Ever. To you, they are incredibly boring, and I cannot be surprised.

You define your worth, and others’ worth, based on what some admission officers thought. If you think that a lack of internal values is a sign of a great personality, well, I think the exact opposite. In fact, show me ONE SINGLE accomplished person, in any field, which is known to have defined their worth based on others’ opinions. I just hope you’re not doing that in order to cope with your(maybe justified, who knows) feelings of inferiority.

Sad fact, these admission officers only got a glance of you, and of me, and of everybody, therefore no reasonable person expects them to admit only the BEST, or the great, or the good . Have you ever heard about a Harvard officer being fired for admitting an utter, hopeless idiot? :slight_smile:

7

Come on, that is NOT why one doesn’t get into Harvard. It’s not just that they aren’t interesting and wasted their time on GPA and SAT. Seriously, our whole life/high school career they tell us to get a high SAT and GPA and we hear horror stories of even 2400s not getting into Harvard, so we think “if even a 2400 can’t get in I better not even think about applying with less than a 2300”!

I doubt it’s even about the individual, it’s just that Harvard plays itself as a school that someone can get into with good grades and good ECs but it isn’t. It’s for some arbitrarily extraordinary people. The rest of the “mediocre” people will do fine at other colleges…

8

Yes, that was my intention in making this post (to direct applicants, I mean). I am sorry I came off as too condescending, this board was frustrating me quite a bit. The amount of people here who are clearly only defined in terms of their test scores is staggering, and I was sort of venting.

Classy.

And actually, it isn’t easy to fake interesting at all. It’s next to impossible to fake interesting. If you don’t have any personality there is no way to completely cover it up.

The sad thing is is that most people have personalities, they just get it ground out of them in their quest to get into top schools. I went to a school ranked #1 in the state. It was filled with the kind of people who are on college confidential making posts like “Help! I have a 2360, how do I get a 2400!”. You could make the argument that most of them are only like that on here because it’s a college specific forum, but from my experience most of them are actually just as obsessed with college, to the exclusion of all else, offline.

I concede that point. A lot of people here are fairly pompous (I think it’s a side effect of weighting the SAT into college decisions, you need to be fairly pompous to know all those obscure vocabulary words).

I’ll guess MIT. You sound a lot like my mom, who was also accepted at Harvard and chose not to attend. I’d guess that you applied to NE probably as a safety because you wanted to be in Boston, Cornell as a sort of Ivy safety (that’s apparently in vogue, a lot of people at my school did that), and Yale because it’s Yale. The smoking gun is RPI. RPI is really only good at engineering; if you had no interest in engineering you wouldn’t have applied. You probably dismissed the ivies for being too pompous and NE and RPI because MIT is practically the best in the country for engineering.

That’s a lot to infer out of one post made mostly in frustrating.

As for the rest of your point, you’re absolutely correct. No top school can accept everyone. My original post only applies to a large fraction of applicants who, thankfully for the admissions counselors, make their choices a lot easier.

It’s completely true that top school admissions is a lottery. I even mentioned it in my original post.

Ouch. Thankfully for me I know myself well enough to know that I don’t actually have an inferiority complex. I probably have a bit of a superiority complex though.

Anyways, that wasn’t what I was saying at all. The problem I was addressing was exactly that people put too much of their self worth into top college decisions, and subsequently work their asses off to do what they think will impress the reader. In the process, most of them become boring drones and then end up not even getting into the college that they want. It’s very sad really.

Sigh. Are people even reading my post? I was trying to explain why these people with extraordinarily high SAT scores don’t get in. It has less to do with luck than people think (but yes, in the end it does come down to nothing much more than a lottery).

9

Look, man. The brilliant title you chose for this thread is “Why you didn’t get into Harvard”. I, like many other non-boring people and non-drones around here, did not get into Harvard, therefore I assumed your advice might apply to me as well, so I decided to read your thread. Instead of this bombastic and conceited title, you should’ve chosen a more accurate one, like: “Why drones did not get into Harvard”. In that case, I wouldn’t have bothered to click on it, because I know why drones did not get into Harvard(moreover, I believe they know too). Is reiterating the obvious a skill of yours that you’re proud of?

A few more points:

“The problem I was addressing was exactly that people put too much of their self worth into top college decisions”

vs

“What you should have done, pitiable pupil, is make yourself an interesting person”

“your overwhelming mediocrity shines through”

Oh, really?
People who do all these things(care a lot for SAT’s and grades, lots of APs, EC’s done only to impress etc.) but get into Harvard are still pitiable and overwhelmingly mediocre? :slight_smile:

I know personally two guys who got into HYP this year(one Harvard, one Princeton). BOTH have admitted that they have done some (most, in one case) of their EC’s only to impress Ivies. The truth is: unless you’re some sort of Terence Tao, you also did it, and don’t deny it.

If there’s something pitiable here, it’s the amount of hypocrisy/self-deceit in your post.

“It’s completely true that top school admissions is a lottery”

I, for one, never claimed that(you might have misinterpreted my “only get a glance” thing). I believe the opposite, and I’ll explain later if you’re interested.

“Ouch. Thankfully for me I know myself well enough to know that I don’t actually have an inferiority complex. I probably have a bit of a superiority complex though.”

Maybe you’re right. Just to be 100% sure, google “compensatory narcissistic”. :wink:

10

This is a good post, but probably too late for a mid-year Junior. Maybe it will be read, absorbed by and help a few younger students.

Yes, when I see a kid on CC with 700+ SAT scores across the board repeatedly ignore advice to just stop and move on to more fun and meaningful pursuits, my first thought is I sure hope that kid put some thought in to selecting his safety/target schools.

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I call BS of what OP wrote. If one only has 2250 + “interesting” to speak of without any hooks, it’s worse than a crap shot. All that does is padding the school’s selectivity.

All of those top schools have allocations. There are allocations for people with national level awards/recognitions in humanities, science, engineering. There is allocation for atheletes. There is allocation for URM. There is allocation for potential donors and influential alumni. There is allocation for government officials, both domestic and foreign. There is allocation for various strong ECs, and yes, there probably is even allocation for pure “interesting” too for diversity purpose as OP classifies himself, just like US government provides an immigration lottery. But even that “interesting” category, a lot of times it’s used as a cover to take people with strong connections.

Finally how many of the 30k+ applications fall into each category? For the vast majority without national level awards or other hooks, they are all trying to be interesting and vying for the “interesting” pool because I would classify most EC without strong results into “interesting” since it’s difficult to compare one against another. OP may have gotten in last year, but I would say that’s the lowest probability pool. Just because OP hits the lottory once, doesn’t mean he’s going to hit it if he tries again. It’s like a lottery winner advising other people to buy lottery tickets as the best way to get rich.

I know a few kids getting into HYPS. While they are all normal and rounded and have high scores, none of them is exceptionally interesting. Most of all, they all have strong national level recognitions to speak of.

12

2250 + “interesting” got a friend of mine into Stanford…don’t see why it wouldn’t be the same for Harvard.

EDIT: He was waitlisted at Harvard but that is beside the point.

13

even if “lamepimetheus” had worded his post differently and tried to comply with everyone else’s sensitive points, I’m pretty sure most people would have found another way to criticize him one way another.

Continue on, OP…if people get butthurt and refuse to see your message because of their oversensitivity, that’s their problem. Thanks for the post…and yes, it’s certainly right doing 5435435 ECs during HS won’t get you into a great college. if that was the case why would the common AP have only 10 (or 12?) slots to list your extracurriculars? There should have been an unlimited amount of slots if that was the case.

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@Iamepimetheus If you can show them to me, what did your EC’s look like and what were your test scores? I ask because I want to know how a person could appear as interesting on a college app

15

Wow, folks are really sensitive.

And doesn’t everyone know that they take a pile of legacy students and first-generation college students, put them aside, and then roll dice for everyone else who meets minimal criteria?

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You need grades and scores to get in, that’s obvious. But are you passionate about learning something, for the sake of learning it? Do you love to read? Do you think about something from the moment you get out of bed, and have the idea or passion spinning around inside? Have you taken your passion and acted on it, watched it mold and take shape, marveling at its beauty. And will that passion translate into some viable part of the college community. And are you the kind of person people like to be with: not the jokster or the clown, or the happy guy giving out freebies… Just simply a nice person. Yes, you can be assertive, buy nice, a leader, without That is what they look for. And if you begin the process thinking it is a crapshoot, that this is a random process you’ve already lost…

17

Epimetheus, if you are finishing your first year of Harvard, you’re a young adult who should know there is a proper way to speak to children, especially those you acknowledge are depressed, and this is not it. If you want people to value the content of your message (whether here, at college, on the job, or with your family and friends), I’d suggest you learn how to present it in a more constructive manner. Does your college offer public relations or communication courses? If so, I suggest you sign up for a few of them.

18

@Cirques: your post is almost as ridiculous as that of Epimetheus, and I’ll tell you why.

“But are you passionate about learning something, for the sake of learning it?”

One Princeton admitted student that I know told me(a few months before the application process started) that he’s not passionate about his intended major. At that time, he was improving some already great EC’s related to that major, and I asked him: “Then why you’re still doing it?”. He answered: "Because now it’s too late to change it. " :wink: Furthermore, he believed that high achievers in that specific field(like those who get 8000 lines on Wikipedia) should get a life, because they are very unhappy at root. :slight_smile:

Another guy, who got into Harvard, told me a few months ago: “Had I not bothered with the EC’s, I would’ve spent time better, and would’ve been much happier”. He was talking about EC’s related to his major.

“Do you think about something from the moment you get out of bed, and have the idea or passion spinning around inside?”

Oh, yes. Getting into an Ivy to earn some extra monies, to become the hero of all slavish people around, etc, etc…

Bottom line: stop believing that HYP is God. You talk as if HYP is Karma, they punish you for your sins, and the sin of those who did not get in is not being passionate enough.Actually, they have NO WAY to assess anyone’s passion. They have NO WAY to assess anyone’s intelect. And even if they had, perhaps some things matter more than passion and intelect.

19

All these arguments about good grades, SAT scores, ECs, etc. really don’t consider alot about: “THE Choice” isn’t totally based on you as a student-let’s say you are a number and the college needs so many of each number from each geographical area-PERIOD-you may have everything the college wants/needs BUT and that’s a big BUT you live where there are 50 other students with the same number-That is what it comes down to-sometimes I wonder if it would have been better to move prior to college application thereby increasing “number” chances-Colleges can only accept so many students from each geographical area-also face it-sex and race play a role-there I said it-two students of different sex and/or race with similar stats/Ec’s, recommendations etc. will fare different at the same school based on sex and race-Tech schools that need females give more $ to females-they know the males are coming and they are trying to entice the females or vice-versa depending on what the school requires for their stats-this is The Choice played by colleges.

20

…I guess they don’t teach the term ‘rhetorical question’ at Hahvuhd…