What does Harvard not want to see in an application?

[pplar]

By David M. Joseph
20 years interviewing for MIT & 10 years interviewing for Harvard

There are a number of things Harvard does not want to see in your application.

1. An essay about how it is your lifelong dream to attend Yale. (Yes, it happens. People write a ‘standard’ essay and then forget to change the name of the school!)
2. An essay with grammatical mistakes.
3. An essay that is formulaic / cookie-cutter.
4. An essay that is not personal, and doesn’t allow the reader to get a feel for you as a person, what motivates you, what your passions are, etc.
5. A long list of meaningless extracurriculars; i.e. clubs you joined but didn’t really participate in but rather just joined and maybe attended a few meetings.
6. Extracurriculars that are clearly done just for the purpose of making your college applications look better.
7. Letters of recommendation from people who do not actually know you well; a LOR from your congressman or from a celebrity is meaningless unless that person knows you well in an academic or professional capacity, and those sorts of letters will hurt your application as they take the place of a letter from someone who can actually add meaningful information or lend a unique perspective to your application.
8. A list of awards that includes awards from middle school (aka junior high school) or from (gasp) elementary school, unless those awards were in national or international competitions.
9. Exaggerations or false claims about your experiences or awards or extracurriculars.
10. Overuse of the thesaurus; it’s easy to tell when someone uses the thesaurus to try to make their essay sound more sophisticated by substituting words they aren’t familiar with for words that would work just fine!
11. Nonsensical statements. My favorite? An essay that started with the sentence: “The impact of video games on violent behavior has been a controversial topic for many centuries.”

[noles]

By David M. Joseph
20 years interviewing for MIT & 10 years interviewing for Harvard

There are a number of things Harvard does not want to see in your application.

1. An essay about how it is your lifelong dream to attend Yale. (Yes, it happens. People write a ‘standard’ essay and then forget to change the name of the school!)
2. An essay with grammatical mistakes.
3. An essay that is formulaic / cookie-cutter.
4. An essay that is not personal, and doesn’t allow the reader to get a feel for you as a person, what motivates you, what your passions are, etc.
5. A long list of meaningless extracurriculars; i.e. clubs you joined but didn’t really participate in but rather just joined and maybe attended a few meetings.
6. Extracurriculars that are clearly done just for the purpose of making your college applications look better.
7. Letters of recommendation from people who do not actually know you well; a LOR from your congressman or from a celebrity is meaningless unless that person knows you well in an academic or professional capacity, and those sorts of letters will hurt your application as they take the place of a letter from someone who can actually add meaningful information or lend a unique perspective to your application.
8. A list of awards that includes awards from middle school (aka junior high school) or from (gasp) elementary school, unless those awards were in national or international competitions.
9. Exaggerations or false claims about your experiences or awards or extracurriculars.
10. Overuse of the thesaurus; it’s easy to tell when someone uses the thesaurus to try to make their essay sound more sophisticated by substituting words they aren’t familiar with for words that would work just fine!
11. Nonsensical statements. My favorite? An essay that started with the sentence: “The impact of video games on violent behavior has been a controversial topic for many centuries.”

哈哈about 1. 我看到有个油管video，她申请布朗时的Essay说： At Stanford, I will be …. 当然她被拒了。 这个学生后来被Stanford录取了。希望那个学生被Yale录了。

[pplar]

哈哈about 1. 我看到有个油管video，她申请布朗时的Essay说： At Stanford, I will be …. 当然她被拒了。 这个学生后来被Stanford录取了。希望那个学生被Yale录了。

对，有些错误的确是一不小心，却是致命的。