S4E29: How to Approach Harvard's 2025 Supplemental Essays for Admissions Success

[Music] Hello and welcome to the Admittedly Podcast. My name is Thomas Khalil. I'm the former Director of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid for Mile Monitor, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In this podcast, I don't promise easy answers for quick fixes, but I will use my decades of experience to help you achieve your education goals. Now let's get started. [Music] If you're applying to Harvard, you're going to have to fill out their writing supplements. So let's break it down. The supplement includes five required short essay questions, each with 150 word limit. They want to ensure that every student has the same opportunity to reflect on and share how their life experiences and academic and extracurricular activities shaped them. How they will engage with others at Harvard and their aspirations for the future. The continued focus is on considering the whole student in the admissions process and how they have interacted with the world. Number one, Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a student body with a diversity of perspectives and experiences. How will the life experiences that shaped who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard? So I get a lot of students that say to me, "Listen, I don't know what to say. I had a comfortable life. I went to a nice school. Not a lot has happened to me." Okay, and I get that. What we want to do here is step back because we can define diversity a lot of different ways. Right? How have your perspectives been shaped? How have you challenged yourself? What do you bring? What perspective do you bring that is unique? Is it a cultural heritage? Right? Maybe you grew up in, I have a Greek friend, for example. And it's like, almost like, you know, my big fat Greek wedding. Like, they take their Greekness very seriously, shared food, shared culture, shared stories. These are important elements of who you are and sometimes you're too close to it to even recognize that. So step back, talk to your friends, talk to your family, talk to a teacher. Like, "Hey, how do I, you know, how do I move through the world? What, how are my experiences shaping me and shaping my perspective?" For others, you might have a very clear element of diversity in your life where you're like, "This is really important to me. This influences who I am and how I perceive the world, how the world perceives me." And that gives you an absolute license to talk about that. Number two, describe 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 this experience? Okay, this one's a trap, so be careful. With universities under scrutiny from all sides on a lot of issues and a lot of issues around protests and students causing disruption on campus, you want to be very careful how you answer this. You can strongly disagree with somebody in a way that is polite and civil but also allows you not to back off from deeply held beliefs. The whole premise of university is that you are going to encounter people with very different ideas than you. In the classroom, outside of the classroom, you are expected to disagree with them. You are expected to bring your lived experiences to that conversation. You are encouraged to do so. There's a very big difference between, "Hey, you and I don't see eye to eye on this. Let's discuss and debate and we don't have to agree," by the way. The outcome of this doesn't need to be, "I met somebody I disagreed with them. We had a conversation, I convinced them otherwise." Quite frankly, that's not a story most A/O's believe. The question here is, "What did you learn about yourself and how did you handle this situation?" So very important, I want you to be very careful with this question and I want you to think about it very carefully before you answer it. Number three, briefly describe any of your extracurricular activities, employment experience, travel, or family responsibilities that have shaped who you are. This is a great question. By the way, travel does not mean I went to X country for a week and donated some textbooks and it changed my whole perspective. Don't do that. It's very privileged bias, very colonial leaning. What we want to do is, as you move through the world, what has influenced you? Did having to work a entry-level fast food job? What did that teach you about people? What did that teach you about the value of a dollar? What did that teach you about work ethic, about the importance of discipline? These are things that are really, really critically important. If you have an extracurricular activity that's deeply meaningful to you, talk about it, talk about both good and bad, the influence it's had on your life and how it shapes who you are and what you will bring to the Harvard community. Number four, how do you hope to use your Harvard education in the future? You know, this is great and the key word here is hope. They're not locking you into something and asking you to commit to something. They're saying, what do you hope to achieve? So this can be big picture. It can be very, very specific. I have students that are very dedicated to heart, you know, cardiothoracic preventative treatment and surgery because they had a family member affected and it has absolutely motivated them, driven them. I have students who are focused on business, changing the way business interacts, using engineering to improve the lives of people. These are great aspirational things. They should tie to research, academics or work that you've already done. Don't just pick something out of the blue, but also allow for growth at Harvard. So you can say, I'm really focused on this, but I see this evolving and this is ideally as an idealist where I want to go. So you can have some fun with this. You can be aspirational and think big and dream big on this one. All right. Top three things your roommate might like to know about you. Much like the Stanford roommate essay, this one can be a trap. You want to pick three things that reflect core values about who you are in the context of the application. So it might be intellectual curiosity. It might be activities that you're going to get involved with. And it might just be a really fun fact about you that you don't have anywhere else to put in this application. So have fun with this, but have fun cautiously and make sure you're always communicating something to the admissions officers that they need to know to help you distinguish yourself in a very competitive applicant pool. We spent some time breaking down the Harvard writing supplement. I wish you all the best on it. There are a lot of good tips in here and my question for you is how you like them apples. Stay tuned. We've got a lot more for you. Thank you for joining us today. Please take a moment to subscribe to the admittedly podcast and download this episode. I welcome you to share your thoughts and questions with me. You can find us on social media at admittedlypodcast. I look forward to continuing our journey together.