How to stand out in a Harvard application

HHarvard's admissions readers can sum up a strong application in one damning sentence, and students who requested their own files have seen it written down. Since 2015, Harvard students have been able to ask for their admissions files under a federal privacy law, and several described what they found in the Harvard Crimson. Most of the comments were kind. One was not: a reader had written, more or less, that there was nothing special in the application, though the ratings around it were respectable.

That sentence gets written about files with good grades, good activities and good letters, and once it is on the page, very little else in the file can argue it away.