“Well rounded class” is still misleading. It’s not this kid who spends 80 hours in the lab and that one who sits under a tree reading French poetry. Or that one does gypsy dance and another plays banjo.
Each candidate can be expected to be open to new experiences, interacting well beyond comfort zones. Etc.
And it’s, “Show, not just tell.” Not just saying so, but seen in the record. Not just what the hs offers or facilitates.
From personal experience, I would disagree with some of this. It’s funny, I think about admissions at Harvard et al as cupcakes. There’s the cake, the frosting, and it needs sprinkles. That makes a whole cupcake, er, class 
I think depth and breadth of experience with ASL as described (including documentary, TED talk, whatever) is a real asset in an application. It might be in the category of sprinkles, but a Harvard class/cupcake needs those.
I also think a love of Boston/Cambridge can be mentioned as a reason for applying. Not alone, obviously, but it is a legitimate reason to apply.
I’ll bite. Why is she doing ED2 at NEU? If it’s really her top choice, why isn’t she doing ED1?
If you think there is a higher chance for admission ED, please understand that applying ED anything will not cancel out otherwise weaker areas of the application. Many…many strong students apply ED something…and don’t get accepted.
@RonaldP66 I know three kids from my community who were accepted to and attend Harvard. I know this is a small sample. I would consider all of them well-rounded - academically strong students with demonstrated commitment to fairly typical HS ECs. While they had focus, none of them had national awards or had done cutting edge scientific research or the like. They are likable, genuine, hardworking individuals that achieved a good balance of life in and out of school. Well rounded, not spiky. Why they got admitted - only the admissions folks at Harvard could tell you for sure.
If your kid has the academic stats to get a serious read, I don’t see any downside in applying to Harvard. My sense from reading on these boards is that Harvard accepts relatively few unhooked students in the SCEA round and defers a good many. Harvard also seems to waitlist quite a bit in the RD round. If your daughter applied in the SCEA round that result might well be inconclusive. Or if a rejection, she could apply EDII to her clear second choice.
If you are comfortable doing so, providing a general sense of her GPA, rank, number of AP courses, test scores (if available), would enable folks here to give you more concrete advice about admissions strategy.
Finally, I think many schools would appreciate the ASL commitment and the reason behind it. It sounds like a compelling topic for an essay. She sounds like a nice young woman and you must be very proud of her.
Thanks for all the help
I don’t believe Harvard or any other tippy top college categorizes people as round or spiky.
They are filling their institutional needs first, and then they are choosing people who fit, who get them, who they feel will succeed academically, who they feel are going to contribute to the campus culture in some way. Maybe they are going to choose a well-rounded kid who does 10 things well, or maybe they are going to choose a kid with a single well-defined interest. Or maybe they are going to choose a kid who managed to achieve high grades in high school, who helped mentor younger kids, and who still worked 20 hours a week all through high school to support a family. I suspect the common element might be that they choose exceptional people.
FWIW, I think I read somewhere that Harvard wants to admit people they believe will be on the cover of Newsweek magazine some day.
Or people who they believe will be anywhere in Forbes’s “The Richest” list…
FWIW, I don’t think H believes any media is the arbiter. They’re building community first and foremost. That starts with the four-year experience. The drives, cross pollination, and more, among students. These colleges know if they gather the right mix of the right sorts of kids, the future successes of individuals will follow. As well as loyalty.
They also admit success and future impact are A LOT more than who becomes wealthy, with a famous name. They understand influence comes in many forms.
You don’t evidence your potential just by being a good kid, not when the competition is so fierce for a slot.
You don’t need fo fill all 10 spaces under Activities. However, it does need to make sense to those reviewers. Not simply friends and family, your GC, or kindly other posters.
Holistic.
Hi - I’m applying to Harvard, as well (good luck to your daughter)! My school is an Ivy magnet school, so many students end up getting accepted here (this year 16 seniors did and I think 14 chose to go, the other 2 deciding on MIT). If anything, I would advise you to look at the papers from the Harvard lawsuit detailing how the admissions process works (I believe that you can find it in the Washington Post) - it sums up the baseline for the application. Also, I think that your daughter has a “story spike”. I spoke to a Harvard alumni interviewer prior (as I am volunteering within his company) and he told me that they do look for people who have won national/international competitions. However, he also said that they like when people go beyond an experience and who have genuine intellectual curiosity (ie. if you volunteer in India for the summer, afterwards, instead of checking something off the the ec list, you learn Hindi, learn more about the culture, etc.) The fact that your daughter learned ESL for her sister is amazing. If she already has good grades, proven EC leadership, and this, she should be fine. Remember to be vulnerable in the essay though - tell her not to be afraid of emoting through her writing. Also, when writing about a “following” I would advise her to be careful about word choice (ie. instead of saying "I have 14 k followers on Instagram state, my work in ASL has reached 14 k people from 7 different countries.) Make sure to be precise about your numbers too.
No one knows what “spike “ will work. ASL is something that was important to your DD and her endeavor to learn it says a lot about her. It’s certainly a good thing. But whether it’s “enough” to distinguish her application at the top schools is doubtful, IMO. But then, I like to say that there is some serendipity in all of this.
I like to cite a personal example. One of my kids wrote an essay that was basically a mini research paper. His teachers and GC immediately rejected it as an effective college essay, and I had to agree. It really didn’t give anyone any info about him. Well, he needed another essay in an 11th hour application and that one with a short opening and ending statement kinda addressed the prompt so he went with it, with me shaking my head no. The essay , the subject hit the AO at that ivy just the right way, and we know because s/he hand write a note do saying on the accept letter. Sometimes an interest, an essay, something hits the right person at the right time.
As others have said, the rest of the application is far more important than the ASL story. Is she one of 1-5 top students in her class? Is she taking the most difficult course and maybe then some at her school? Will her LORs have the right key words with superlatives like “best I’ve encountered”. Are her ECs and essays top notch. Is she submitting tests scores and what are they, and which scores?
A “spike” is not measurable like a “hook” is. One can say those in the athletes pool are accepted at x% , legacies at y% , development z%, URMs n% and compare to the accept %s. No such breakdowns exist for “spikes”.
The 3 kids I personally know from our area currently at Harvard, and the dozen or so I know at Princeton, Stanford and Yale who have no hook, don’t have spikes that I’m aware of either. They are all astoundingly high achievers. One is a debate champion which I believe may be a hook. Every single kid I’ve known in 20 years accepted to Columbia has had a hook, and I know a lot of them. My youngest had a “spike” that may have served him well but he did not apply to HPYSMC. Also, his interest actually had an undergraduate department and major where it would have served the university to have.
So, give it a go, but wouldn’t count on it.
“Give it a go, but don’t count on it” – Advice that should be posted on every single “Chance Me” thread for the Ivies!
There is no reason in the world why your daughter should not apply. The only way she will know for certain if she will get in is if she gets in. No one here can tell you, although there are people with the expertise to make a decent guess.
The most important thing for you to tell her is that she needs to love her safety school. She cannot change her resume now or become “the person that Harvard definitely admits,” but she can write an application that reflects her achievements and aspirations. In other words, her focus shouldn’t be on trying to be who Harvard wants, but on trying to show, to the best of her ability, who she actually is. If Harvard doesn’t think she’s a fit, somebody else definitely will.