What's considered a Harvard hook?

exultationsy
Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:37:55 +0000

According to the terminology on this forum, winning IMO is an accomplishment, not a hook. Hooks are the personal qualities you can’t change that might make a difference between candidates with equivalently good applications. Sports recruiting is also included. It seems to me like it belongs in a different category than legacy/donor/first gen college student/faculty brat/URM/being Liam Neeson, but together they represent the sum total of things this forum calls “hooks.” (Some colleges include graduate school legacy, but Harvard doesn’t.) The letter might help, but won’t likely help any more than if it were written by a professor at Yale. Letters of recommendation matter almost entirely by content rather than by recommenders’ credentials (which is why the answer when people are like “will a vague letter of banal good things about me from my congressman help?” is always “nope”); a professor who’d once worked at a top college might be able to more convincingly argue that you’re going to be a great college student, based on what he’s seen of other great college students, than a high school teacher, but that his experience with great college students was at Harvard, not Stanford, is unlikely to make them view it all that much more favorably. Maybe a little, but not a ton.