S3E11: How to Approach the Harvard Supplement (2024)
Today's question of the week: "How should I approach the Harvard Supplements?”
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Today's question of the week: “How should I approach the Harvard supplement?"
Introduction: In this episode of the "Admittedly" podcast, host Thomas Caleel breaks down the five short essay questions in the Harvard University supplement. With each response limited to 100 words, Thomas provides strategic advice on how to approach these prompts with clarity, brevity, and a focus on personal storytelling.
Summary of Key Points:
1. Diversity and Life Experiences: The first essay asks applicants to highlight what makes them unique. Thomas emphasizes the importance of isolating one or two key experiences or perspectives that define your individuality and how they shape your worldview.
2. Handling Strong Disagreements: This essay requires you to describe a time when you strongly disagreed with someone. Thomas advises focusing on how you engaged in the disagreement, what you learned, and the importance of showing maturity and openness to change, rather than simply "winning" the argument.
3. Impactful Extracurriculars or Responsibilities: For this prompt, Thomas suggests selecting one significant extracurricular activity, employment experience, or family responsibility that has shaped who you are. He recommends going deep into why this experience is meaningful to you and how it has influenced your development.
4. Future Use of a Harvard Education: Applicants are asked how they hope to use their Harvard education. Thomas encourages grounding your aspirations in reality while being aspirational, clearly articulating how Harvard will equip you to achieve your future goals and make an impact in your chosen field.
5. Top Three Things Your Roommates Should Know: This final essay allows for some creativity and personality. Thomas suggests sharing quirks, hobbies, or unique traits that would help a future roommate get to know you better, blending seriousness with light-heartedness as appropriate.
Conclusion: The Harvard supplement offers applicants the opportunity to present a well-rounded and authentic picture of themselves in just 500 words across five prompts. By following Thomas Caleel’s advice, students can craft responses that are clear, concise, and reflective of their true selves, helping them stand out in the competitive admissions process.
Have your own question you want answered? Leave us a comment on social media @admittedlypodcast for a chance to be featured.
About Thomas Caleel:
Thomas is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania. After earning his MBA at the Wharton School of Business in 2003, he moved to Silicon Valley. For three years, he was Director of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid at Wharton. He worked closely with admissions professionals, students, alumni, and professors to curate the best possible MBA class. Thomas has been an entrepreneur his entire life in the fields of finance, agriculture, wellness, and sporting goods. As the founder of Global Education Opportunities LLC, he works as a high-level admissions advisor to help families and students achieve their education goals. Thomas started the podcast Admittedly because he is passionate about demystifying the application process for all parents and applicants.
Related Links
Apply to be a guest: www.thomascaleel.com/apply-for-podcast
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Instagram: @admittedlypodcast
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Let's talk about the Harvard supplement. We have five questions here, 100 words each, so brevity and clarity are at a premium. You don't need to do long build-ups to your points. Make your points, make them clearly, make them succinct, and get right to the meat of the question. The first one, the famous diversity question, your life experiences. This is where you want to talk about what makes you unique. What is it about you that you think it's important for Harvard to know? What kind of community do you come from? What diversity do you have or not have? You really want to just isolate that one or two experiences in your life or your approach to life or how you see yourself in life and communicate that.
The second essay is describing a time when you strongly disagreed with somebody about an idea or issue. How did you communicate or engage with this person? What did you learn from the experience? This is very important. It's very important that you read the questions carefully because it says strongly disagreed. This is not, oh, I think we should have five pages on our report and my teammate thinks we should have six. And we had a little conversation and we settled on five and a half. That is not a strong disagreement. This is something that reveals a side of your character. You can talk about something that you want to study. You can talk about something that is a disagreement with a fellow student, a coworker, or a teacher.
But also be very careful because there is strongly disagreeing in a positive sense where you both get a chance to voice your opinion and you both learn from the experience. And then there's a strongly disagreeing. Okay. Shows an immaturity and stubbornness that really has no place in a Harvard class. So there's a fine line there. You don't need to have won the argument, and I think this is very, very important, right? They're talking about how did you communicate and engage with this person, so you can't just say we disagreed about this and the resolution was I won, okay? You need to talk about how the exchange happened, your role in it, and what you learned if you were wrong and you learned something about yourself in the process that is a perfectly valid and really good example, because most people actually will be writing about how they came out on top.
And this is not an exercise in winning. It is an exercise in how you deal with disagreement, because why are they asking this question? Harvard admits a lot of very diverse, interesting, bright, curious students every year, and you're going to be challenged day in, day out, inside, outside the classroom with views that are viewpoints that you may not have been exposed to and you may not agree to, and there is a place for intellectual discourse. There's a place for learning. There's a place for discomfort, for change and growth, and they want to make sure Harvard is asking: are you a person we can admit who will change and learn and grow and engage in respectful, meaningful dialogue, or are you a person that's going to be more judgmental and immovable? Third question.
Describe any of your extracurricular activities, employment experience, travel, family responsibilities that have shaped who you are. I would urge you with 100 words to stick to one example and go deep. Personalize it. Don't just talk about it. Ask yourself, is what I'm saying already in my activity section or another essay? And if it is, omit it. I think the interesting thing here is that Harvard is giving you wide latitude. It can be anything. It can be, you know, I don't know. Do you have to work after school to contribute to the family household budget? Did you have to drop all your extracurricular activities, like one student I talked to, to take care of your grandmother who was diagnosed with dementia? All of these are valid.
Just as valid as being captain of the football team or editor of the school paper. What you really want to do here is take something that is deeply meaningful to you and explain why. Why did you spend so much time at it? Why is it a passion of yours? The fourth question I love. It's how do you hope to use your Harvard education in the future? And I think it's a question that you should be asking yourself as you're writing your common application in any case, right? Why am I doing this? What do I hope to get out of this? What do I want to do? What is my impact going to be on the world? You don't want to go too high level, right?
We want to be aspirational, but we want it to be grounded in reality and tied to our thought process. So, it's fine to say, 'my interest is in geopolitics.' I love geopolitics. I'm very invested in gender roles and gender equality, for example. And so, I would really like to eventually be either an ambassador or serve in the government or be a member of the UN, and this is the change I want to see, and this is how my Harvard education is going to prepare me for that and give me the skills that I need to make my own difference. Final question, a hundred words again, top three things your roommates might like to know about you. And I think there's a lot of different ways that you can take this depending on your personality.
You can have fun with it and put little trivia bits that you might not have anywhere else that you can talk about them in the common application. They might be more serious. It might be a blend. It might talk about athletics and academics and social life. Whatever it is, you should personalize it to yourself, talk about something that is kind of quirky or unique or fun about you that you would want to share with somebody you're going to spend the next year of your life in very close quarters with.
