What Top Universities Actually Select For

Every September a parent sends me a spreadsheet. Average 9.80. Two olympiad medals. Cambridge C2. Piano. Volunteer hours, counted to the hour. And underneath, the question: what else does he need?

I don’t blame them. I was that kid. In Suceava I swam and I solved problems and the entire logic of my life was that if the numbers were good, doors opened. Then two boys a year above me got into Harvard, so I applied too, and got in, and for about ten years I assumed the numbers had done it.

They hadn’t. It took working the other side of the process — nine years at Upgrade, hundreds of files, the 25 essays we picked for the book — to see it. The numbers got me to the line. Something else got me across.

The Bac reflex

Romanian families treat admissions like the bacalaureat. Accumulate points, clear the threshold. Which makes sense; it’s the only system anyone here has ever been through.

But selective admissions isn’t a threshold. It’s a person, usually tired, reading your file at 11pm and asking one question: who is this going to be at thirty, and do we want to have been part of it?

And at that level, almost everyone has the grades. That’s the part nobody in Romania says out loud. At Harvard, at Oxford, the 9.80 is not a differentiator, because a third of the pile has a 9.80. The medal isn’t either, once you’re in a pool where medals are common. These things are necessary. Above the line they go quiet, and the actual selection begins.

What they’re reading for

Something you did that nobody assigned. That’s the core of it. Not a grade, not a prize, not a summer program with a certificate at the end. A thing you started because you couldn’t not start it, and kept doing after it stopped being convenient.

When we chose the essays for Study Abroad, this was the pattern, and we didn’t go looking for it. The ones that worked all had a moment where the writer decided something without permission. The ones we cut read like an activities list turned into paragraphs. Well written, sometimes. Empty.

This is brutal for Romanian students and it is not their fault. Twelve years of “what’s on the test?” produces superb test-takers who freeze at “what do you want to do?” I’ve watched it happen in the first session more times than I can count. Bright kid, perfect record, and when you ask what they’d work on if nobody was grading it, a long silence. Sometimes the parent answers for them. That’s its own data point.

Second thing. How you think, not what you know. When I arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2010 I expected solemn people discussing Kant. What I found was people arguing — about everything — and changing their minds in public, which I’d never seen an adult do at home. That is the room admissions officers are staffing. They read essays for the shape of a mind. In interviews, the kids who do well aren’t the ones with answers; they’re the ones who say “I don’t know, but here’s how I’d find out,” and then, right there, start finding out.

Third, and this one is almost mechanical: the story has to match the record. Every year there’s the sudden philanthropist, a student who discovers a deep love for helping others in July of grade 11. Readers have seen forty thousand of these. What they want is a thread running back years, where the essay and the activities and the teacher’s letter all point the same way and nobody planned it.

A digression about the word “passion”

I’d ban it from applications if I could. Not because it’s wrong but because it’s been used so hard it means nothing. Every essay is passionate about something. What readers actually respond to is closer to stubbornness. Did you keep going when it got boring? Did you go back after it went badly? Passion is a feeling. Stubbornness leaves evidence.

Anyway.

What they don’t select for

The perfect profile, because there isn’t one and trying to build one produces a file that reads as manufactured. The padded résumé; fifteen activities at two hours each is zero activities and one anxious parent. The invented interest, bought in the last year, which is the uncomfortable part, because it means you can’t fix this in grade 12. Which is why I tell parents of ninth graders, and they never like it: stop optimizing the spreadsheet. Let the kid be wrong about something on his own time.

The better question

“What else does he need” assumes the file is a bucket and the job is to fill it.

Try: what has he done that nobody asked him to do?

If the answer is a long list, the application is mostly writing. If the answer is nothing, that’s the work, and it isn’t the SAT.

I’ll say one more thing, for the parents who write to me, because I owe it to them. This isn’t only about getting in. A seventeen-year-old who has learned to act without being told will be fine in Boston or Delft or Bucharest. The ones I actually worry about aren’t the ones Harvard rejects. They’re the ones Harvard takes who have never once decided anything for themselves.