Benchmark for art supplement's "substantial talent beyond standard high-school level"?

TiggerDad
Tue, 08 Jan 2019 16:13:14 +0000

This is Harvard’s instruction for submitting supplemental materials:

“Supplemental submissions are useful only for applicants with substantial talents beyond standard high-school level accomplishment. Consider carefully whether your supplemental materials demonstrate unusual talent before submission.”

When instructions are like this, are responses really “excessively discouraging” or are they actually being helpful for the applicant to be realistic with expectations? Shouldn’t the applicant consider the potential risk of irritating the Adcoms by not following the instructions? Encouraging for the sake of “feel good” could potentially be a disservice to the applicant.

When my violinist son applied to Princeton, he submitted supplemental materials because we both felt that he had that “substantial” and “unusual” criteria. Upon arriving at Princeton, however, he was very surprised by the level of other musicians who had also submitted the materials. It seemed everyone around him had attended the Pre-College Juilliard since toddler age with the average of dozen competition wins at state, national, and often, international stages before coming to Princeton. There’s even a violinist who had debuted solo with the New York Phil at age 13.

My son has a class with another young man who’s a photographer. He was a winner of scholarship that allowed him to join a photography expedition trip with the National Geographic. The point is that the realistic talent level at places like HYP for those who have successfully submitted the arts supplement is very very high. Being aware of such talent level, I take the supplement submission instructions a lot more seriously.