<p>francisvdahlmann, </p>
<p>1) You don’t even know if your numbers were keeping you from being accepted. </p>
<p>2) Let’s assume your numbers did keep you from being accepted. You say that you encouraged the adcoms to look past your numbers, so let’s assume you convinced your reader to pause before tossing your application in the reject pile. Let’s say your reader must either keep his admit pile the way it is (thereby wait-listing/rejecting you), or accept you at the expense of another application in the admit pile (Candidate X). Candidate X has great numbers. What makes you think that your EC’s or personal qualities are more worthy of acceptance than Candidate X’s? Great numbers and great ECs/personal qualities are not mutually exclusive. Many candidates – certainly more than the 2200 admits – have both.</p>
<p>The cause of your frustration, I think, has more to do with the competitiveness of candidates in recent years. It is already difficult enough to discern the difference in potential among great candidates with perfect or near-perfect test scores. Missing that score hurdle spells disaster for candidates who are not URM/legacy/1st-gen/etc, even if the rest of your application looked very much like those that were admitted. </p>
<p>If I were you, I would find comfort in being fairly sure why you were not admitted. I, on the other hand, felt that my application was strong on every count I could think of, and still received a wait-list letter in the mail. I have to deal with the fact that I probably couldn’t do anything more with my capabilities to get accepted, and that my wait-listing had more to do with Harvard shaping its class.</p>