List or Describe: A question on the first essay.

Izzygirl400
Fri, 14 Dec 2018 18:19:02 +0000

Hello! Congrats to everyone who got in last night and good luck to all those who were deferred. I am a current Senior about to apply regular to Harvard. While reading over my essays,I realized that I may have messed up with the prompt:

Your intellectual life may extend beyond the academic requirements of your particular school. Please use the space below to list additional intellectual activities that you have not mentioned or detailed elsewhere in your application. These could include, but are not limited to, supervised or self-directed projects not done as school work, training experiences, online courses not run by your school, or summer academic or research programs not described elsewhere. (Optional – 150 words)

The thing is that I wrote a creative description of the one activity that I did that fit this prompt. However, now that i’m looking at the prompt again I am wondering, since it says list, if they want me to just list it with minimal description? Would I be penalized for not totally following the prompt? Should I keep my current description, which is very creative and compelling? Thanks!