Harvard's Additional Essays 

Additional Information: Do not feel obligated to fill this space, but some students have used this opportunity to tell us about challenging circumstances in their lives such as illness or other difficulties that may have affected their grades. Any information that can tell us more about the person behind the test scores and grades can be helpful.

There’s a lot that’s special about Harvard. This essay isn’t one of those things. Harvard is giving us a very straightforward optional essay prompt here. The key thing to understand with any optional essay is this: If you submit an essay here, you are asking the admissions committee to take EXTRA time with your application. Do. Not. Waste. Their. Time. Every word we write under this prompt has to justify itself.

This is not the place to sneak in an extra extracurricular, or a story that wasn’t quite good enough for the main essay. Harvard tells us what they want to see here: “challenging circumstances… that may have affected [your] grades.” If your grades are perfect, it’s hard to imagine there being a need for you to complete this essay.

If your grades do have a blemish or two--more than an errant A-, a set of poor grades all connected to one issue--maybe we do write this essay. The magnitude of the challenge will define how much weight this essay carries. If you overcame a sniffle during an AP exam, that doesn’t say much about your character, and the essay won’t matter much. If you survived a serious car accident and only returned to school after many months of excruciating rehab--this essay could be the most important one in your entire application.

When writing, be as direct as possible. Identify the challenge, and why it was so challenging. Show us the impact it had on your academics. Then show the steps you took to get back on track. That last part is important! If the circumstances described here still apply to you, and would continue to impact your academics at Harvard, think carefully about how you frame them. We don’t want the adcom thinking “maybe this person should have taken another year or two before applying.”

Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard? (150 word limit)

We’ve got to be really careful here. To contribute to Harvard’s student body, and particularly to the diversity of that student body, you have to bring something to the table that is rare or unique. However, If you claim something as distinctive, and it’s actually very common in the application pool, it can backfire and reveal the extent to which you haven’t engaged with the world yet (through reading, exploring, etc.).

One straightforward way of going about this is focusing on life experiences that revolve around “something about you is different from others.” Let’s say you’ve been ostracized, marginalized, subdued somehow, outcast, excluded, or the like… it’s pretty hard for someone to argue with your case that there’s something distinct about you.

Is there a version that isn’t “negative”? Like, what if you’re quirky, and you know it, and everyone around you knows it, and you’ve never been made to suffer on account of it… sure, there’s a case to be made here. But, still, we need to see “proof” of this thing manifesting somehow. In other words, to use that tired old writing adage, “show don’t tell.” This goes for something like “intellectual interests” in particular. Show us that your version of an unusual intellectual interest is going to be a value-add to the Harvard community by showing us how it has been already in your high school community.

It’s a much harder case to make (and usually a weaker one) to say simply “hey so I’m interested in this weird thing, and man, trust me, it’s gonna blow the doors off the Harvard campus, just you wait!” It goes down better if you can say “so, I like this bizarre thing that everyone in my class thinks makes me a total lunatic. But lemme tell you this story. One day when I blah, this thing happened, and then everyone’s lives changed one day later. They still think I’m from planet Mars, but they’re also waiting for the next occasion when I XYZ.” If we see it in action, we’ll be able to imagine it impacting Harvard that much more. See how that works?

Is there something you do, by example, that is a part of you, that has impacted others throughout your life, that you intend to carry through in college… BECAUSE it has become an important part of who you are? Be careful not to be presumptuous here, and to assume that you possess something (a trait, a belief, etc.) that others simply MUST adopt because … well, that would make you seem unbelievably arrogant. A good version of a contribution is something someone made that YOU benefited from, that you are paying forward.

Describe a time when you strongly disagreed with someone about an idea or issue. How did you communicate or engage with this person? What did you learn from this experience? (150 word limit)

This is a very practical essay prompt. Harvard is all about intellectual ferment, and they want you to prove here that you can hang.

We want to reassure the adcom that you will be respectful and collegial on campus. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to behave that way in the example you provide here, however. “I was horrible and learned from it” can work. Similarly, the outcome of the disagreement can go any way. Maybe you convinced them, maybe they convinced you, maybe everyone kept their exact same position the whole time.

The most important part of this question is what you learned. So long as something about the disagreement changed the way you think, the way you communicate, or both, you’ve got a good topic for this essay.

Briefly describe any of your extracurricular activities, employment experience, travel, or family responsibilities that have shaped who you are. (150 word limit)

Briefly describe… yeah but, how, and to what end? If an extracurricular activity, as described on your activities lists or as a resume bullet, tells us everything we need to know about that experience, then great, skip that one. Find a bullet or list item that doesn’t NEARLY capture everything that’s cool about the experience.

Suppose you’re the captain of your volleyball team, but your achievements – while impressive in their own right – are still exactly the kind of things that we would expect a high school volleyball captain to have achieved. There’s little to be gained from elaborating on THAT one here. If, however, you overcame a physical injury in spectacular fashion, or an emotional obstacle against all odds, and ascended to captain level, that is PRECISELY the kind of story “captain of volleyball team” does not adequately convey. That experience shaped you in a way that deserves an explanation.

This is your opportunity to REVEAL something about your appetite for challenges, your risk-seeking nature, your fearlessness, your self-awareness, your unusual perspective, your unusual skill sets (and skill gaps). This is the place where you can “signal” meaningful indications of future success to the adcom. It begins with picking the right stuff to talk about.Then take a look at our SPARC framework and explore those facets of the experience.

How do you hope to use your Harvard education in the future? (150 word limit)

The big challenge with this prompt is avoiding a trite response. The reality is that many successful Harvard applicants are already on a well-trod high-achieving trajectory that ends up somewhere extremely predictable like finance, law, a PhD, or medical school. Even the details are likely unremarkable--in our relatively small slice of the total applicant pool, we still see multiple people each year looking to work at the same trendy companies post-graduation. It’s likely that your career goal by itself will not pique the adcom’s interest.

However, we can be creative with the role Harvard will play in that career. Imagine your future without Harvard. You’ve achieved exactly what you want, but without spending any time in Cambridge. Now compare that to a version of you that is in exactly the same position 20 years from now, but slouched around Harvard Square a bit. What makes “Harvard you” different from “generic Ivy you”? What can “Harvard you” do that “other you” can’t? What special tools does that version of you have, and how will you use them?

Top 3 things your roommate might like to know about you. (150 word limit)

This is a tricky one because the temptation is to write about three things you want “the admissions committee” to know about you. And so, we more often than not see forced, unimaginative first drafts. If you’re gonna live with someone (for only one year, mind you), a person who may or not be a friend, a person you may or may not interact with much AFTER first year… What would you want him/her to know about you? Well, you’d have to have a reason this person would want to know this, otherwise… what’s the point? Think of it this way, if your roommate were to NOT KNOW this thing about you… something could go wrong. (Rather than… it would be a missed opportunity.) Play with that version, see if it reveals something deeply personal.