<p>I am going to say something that may sound mean, but it isn’t:</p>
<p>As things stand, you have no chance whatsoever. It doesn’t have anything to do with your grades or your test scores. (Well, maybe a little to do with them, not much.) What’s completely off is your whole attitude. If the only thing that is making you work hard in school is your desire to get into a name-brand college, and you would stop working hard if you didn’t have a chance to do that . . . well, the name-brand colleges are desperately trying to avoid accepting people like you. They do wind up accepting a few of them, but usually it’s only people whose grades, test scores, and b.s. abilities are so good that they can successfully impersonate a disinterested genius. I don’t think you are going to come across that way.</p>
<p>You need to be working for yourself, not for Harvard (or Dartmouth, or Duke, or anything like that). The best way to qualify for Harvard is to be the kind of person who needs to learn as much as possible about a few things, and to learn it well, because there are things you care about so deeply that you just have to understand them thoroughly, and because your personality doesn’t give you any other choice. And also to show the capacity to transfer that passion and those skills to other fields, and a desire to go out into the world and to do things with what you know.</p>
<p>Make yourself into that kind of person, and I promise you your grades will improve, and maybe you will qualify as a decent applicant for a top college, although perhaps always a long-shot. More importantly, though, if you make yourself into that kind of person you will be much, much, much better off even if you don’t wind up getting accepted at some super-selective college. That attitude, and those skills, will make you a great student anywhere, and give you the tools to succeed coming out of any college. It won’t matter whether you went to Harvard or SUNY West Podunk. And if you don’t have that attitude and those skills, Harvard would be a waste of your time, and you a waste of its faculty’s time.</p>