Get Into Harvard Without Going Crazy

April 14, 2008— -- I walked into my Harvard interview in November 2001 wearing faded blue corduroys and a pilled wool sweater. Slouching back into an armchair -- upholstered, naturally, in buttery leather -- I observed my surroundings.

Acne-scarred teens sat stiffly in ill-fitting suits, their jittery thumbs flipping cellphones open, and shut, and then open again, in what I gathered was a futile effort to stay calm. Glossy brochures advertised 41 varsity sports. I'd never known half of the ones listed even had rulebooks. (Take water polo. Apparently, it is played in aquatic centers that are a far cry from the old watering hole, and a player's feet, oddly enough, are not allowed to touch the bottom of the pool.)

So there I sat. Seventeen years old, and not a drop of water-polo-playing expertise to my name. What on earth was I thinking?

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Probably the same thoughts have crossed the minds of most applicants, prospective students or indeed anyone even toying with the idea of gaining admission to the apex of the American collegiate pyramid: How did I get here and how can I get in?

Almost seven years later -- during which, by some miracle, I managed to be accepted, enroll and graduate from the No. 2 school, according to one magazine's inconsequential ranking -- I have completely revised my beliefs concerning what it takes to be a successful Harvard applicant.

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These days, there seem to be more nuggets of alleged college admissions wisdom floating around than actual Harvard graduates in the world. (Roughly estimated at about 400,000, in case you were wondering.) On March 31, the college announced it accepted 7.1 percent of 27,462 aspiring applicants--roughly one out of every 14 who'd applied. Those odds are, quite frankly, daunting, to say the least.

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So right now, at a time when the realm of successful college admissions seems bleak and impenetrable, I decided it was necessary to pass along some lessons I've learned about the attributes of the perfect Harvard applicant. Aspiring members of the class of 2013 and beyond--and, more important, your parents--take note. Actually, take notes. On a Post-it, if they still make those in paper form.

The perfect Harvard applicant must possess myriad traits that would, to the untrained eye, appear to be polar opposites. They must be at once intellectual and down-to-earth, confident and humble, outgoing and reclusive, athletic and artistic, literary and scientific.

They must be, simultaneously, a bold leader and an easygoing follower. They must consume gossip mags and classic novels with equal ferocity. They must enjoy spending countless hours holed up in the library -- if and only if they spend the same number of hours at a sweaty dorm party afterward in order to forget what they studied.

They must be equally comfortable dining in evening wear at a Michelin three-star French restaurant and wolfing down Oreos and peanut butter as they sit, pajama-clad, on a lumpy and off-kilter futon mattress.

In other words, they must be superhuman.

My roommates and I teased each other mercilessly every time (and there were many, many times) that we failed to live up to this paradigm of utter perfection. It was a running joke to label yourself "the admissions mistake" if you fell short in any area, whether it was the classroom, on the intramural playing field, in the newsroom of the college newspaper or in a romantic relationship.

If it's any comfort, we do grunt and huff and execute frustrated hip-thrusts when we push doors clearly labeled "PULL" -- and then (laughingly?) bop ourselves on the noggin afterward. And while all of this ribbing is in jest, beneath the bravado and the chuckles and the one-liners there is a not-insignificant core of vulnerability. Fretful about failure, we harbor a deep-seated fear that we won't live up to our own expectations and those of the people we love. After all, we won the admissions game. So we have to make good on our potential.

I don't know when it happened, but that pressure abated sometime after graduation. I believe my classmates and I realized we'd spent too long being hard on ourselves, too long setting impossibly high standards at the expense of caring about the kind of person that we already were.

The college admissions process may be, more or less, arbitrary. But that only reinforces the message--oft-cited but little believed--that applicants can't take rejection personally. I see now that an acceptance is neither a declaration of worth nor a stated expectation. It's simply a bed for four years and a chance to learn something between the regrettably short chunks of time you spend in it.

Go ahead, wear a suit to your interview if that puts you at ease. Or read Foucault before bed, but only if you actually like pondering dense and abstract prose about power struggles. Life's too short to do something that you don't love, or waste time posturing as someone you aren't. If I'd learned that lesson earlier, maybe I would have taken a gap year before college in addition to the one I took after, or joined a dance group instead of hiding from the sun in the bowels of the newspaper building. Or even read trashy historical fiction instead of the esoteric philosophers I thought I should be able to quote verbatim.

So to everyone disheartened by the low college acceptance rates this spring, to everyone who plans to hunker down this summer and draft out a foolproof plan to guarantee admission to the college of your choice: Good luck. Not with your application, per se, but with the even greater task of discovering what you love. It won't be easy, but I can guarantee you, it will be worth it.