So you are applying to Harvard? Congratulations. It feels silly even explaining Harvard. Everyone kind of already knows about it, but Harvard is an Ivy League school located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard has been the school of choice for Nobel Prize winners, presidents, supreme court justices, and a surprising number of comedians. It’s also one of the hardest if not the hardest school to get into with an acceptance rate of just 3.13%. This means if you are applying to Harvard, you need to take it extremely seriously. Don’t believe one Ms. Elle Woods, it’s hard. With such a low acceptance rate, your application needs to be flawless and part of that will be the writing supplement. This is how we believe you should approach it for your best shot at Harvard.
Harvard has a very wordy supplement. There is only one essay, but they give you a lot of options on how to tackle that essay. Once you open the supplement, it will look like this:
You may wish to include an additional essay if you feel that the college application forms do not provide sufficient opportunity to convey important information about yourself or your accomplishments. You may write on a topic of your choice, or you may choose from one of the following topics:
- Unusual circumstances in your life
- Travel, living, or working experiences in your own or other communities
- What you would want your future college roommate to know about you
- An intellectual experience (course, project, book, discussion, paper, poetry, or research topic in engineering, mathematics, science or other modes of inquiry) that has meant the most to you
- How you hope to use your college education
- A list of books you have read during the past twelve months
- The Harvard College Honor code declares that we "hold honesty as the foundation of our community." As you consider entering this community that is committed to honesty, please reflect on a time when you or someone you observed had to make a choice about whether to act with integrity and honesty.
- The mission of Harvard College is to educate our students to be citizens and citizen-leaders for society. What would you do to contribute to the lives of your classmates in advancing this mission?
- Each year a substantial number of students admitted to Harvard defer their admission for one year or take time off during college. If you decided in the future to choose either option, what would you like to do?
- Harvard has long recognized the importance of student body diversity of all kinds. We welcome you to write about distinctive aspects of your background, personal development or the intellectual interests you might bring to your Harvard classmates.
If you plan to submit an additional essay, please select a prompt from the list below. If you do not intend to submit an additional essay, leave this question blank. (There is then a drop-down list of the prompts.)
There are two important things to note before diving into this supplement. The first is that they say it is optional. We want to push against this. Their acceptance rate is about 3%, you want to take every opportunity to show why you are special and they are giving it to you here. They say this is optional, but every student we work with who applies to Harvard does this question.
The second thing you need to note is that they do not give you a word limit. This doesn’t mean you should write your own East of Eden here. It’s better to think of it as a second Common App essay. Try to limit yourself to the same word count. Most of these essays should be somewhere between 500-650 words. If you are a little shorter or longer, don’t beat yourself up, but it should be somewhere in that area.
Ok, so now that you know 1) you have to write it and 2) about how long it should be, it’s time to look at the prompts. If one of the prompts really speaks to you, great, however, we usually suggest forgoing the prompts completely. In the question, it says, “You may write on a topic of your choice.” We love this.
If you chose to do a prompt, you have to answer that prompt fully and stick to the prompt. If you chose your own, you have a lot more freedom. We also aren’t huge fans of a lot of the prompts, especially the prompts that ask “what would you do?” Writing about the future or hypotheticals is tricky and if you aren’t a strong writer it can seem rambly. Choosing your own topic affords you much more creativity and control in this essay.
You might be asking yourself, “ok, but what do I write about?” You can approach the chose your own essay prompt the same way you approach the “choose your own topic” option of the Common App. We have written about how we usually approach the Common App essay before, but essentially, we push our students to tell an everyday story that reveals something about their character.
We have our students start thinking about this kind of essay by brainstorming personality characteristics that they want to highlight. If you are having issues thinking of characteristics, ask your friends to describe you. You will probably get words like “caring, adventurous, thoughtful, brave” etc. These are great things to write about. Once you have some words that you feel capture your essence, try to brainstorm a story that highlights 2-3 of those qualities.
For example, if your words are “thoughtful and caring,” you could write an essay about giving advice to a friend, driving your brother to the airport, or throwing a friend a surprise party. These might not sound like big enough stories, but they are if you do them right.
Something we see often with students is they want to tell their biggest story. This happens a lot with Harvard specifically. Their prompts tend to encourage it, but it’s still not what we suggest. If you look at the prompt list, the first one is to describe “unusual circumstances in your life.” This one is kind of a minefield. Unusual is subjective. Maybe your most unusual thing is that your parents are divorced and live in different states, however, someone else might live in a different country than their whole family. Their story thus becomes more unusual than yours. Prompts like this can sometimes become the “trauma Olympics.” Someone will always have a wilder story than yours. If the whole point of the essay is “this is the craziest thing that ever happened to me,” you are setting yourself for someone else’s story to be like yours but crazier.
This is why we often push students to talk about their daily life or small moments. These stories allow you to talk more about yourself and less about the situation. In stressful, life-changing moments, people tend to act the same or at least similarly. If your essay is about something more mundane, you have more room to write about the specific actions that you did and why they are unique to you..
Once you have your story, make sure it has a beginning, middle, and end. Once you have that, don’t be afraid to get creative. If you do this essay correctly, the reader should walk away thinking you are unique and possess positive personal qualities.
The Harvard supplement is only one question, but it will likely be the longest supplemental essay you will write during this process. Give yourself enough time to brainstorm what you want to write about and time to do some drafts. If you are still feeling nervous, reach out! This is not an easy prompt and we get that, but we believe in you!
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