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HBS is like a Venture Capital fund. They make 900 bets a year, and hope that 5% of them will go off and change the world. They back big-thinking risk takers. Be one of them.In a sentence, you have to differentiate yourself in your essays and interviews.The single biggest skill I learned at HBS was how to make good decisions in the absence of perfect information. If you think about it, the HBS admissions board are in this very predicament themselves. They get to read your essays and then perhaps interview you for 30 minutes, but they'll never enjoy perfect information about you when they make their Yes/No call.And so, when you write your essays and attend your interview, do not hold back on how aggressive and world-altering your ambitions are. Be one of the 5%.

I can get you 95.8% of the way to cost of attendance. You’d be out of pocket about $2,650 a year. It’s a very high risk strategy that honestly doesn’t work that well, but if it does you will have nearly full merit scholarship to Harvard. Up to the challenge?Step 1: Be academically qualified for Harvard.If you have top 10% grades and test scores you and 170,000 of your best friends are academically qualified. Box checked, we are moving on.Step 2: Pick up a phone and dial 1-800-Marines.You do not need to have a detailed plan for the next four years of your life. You don’t need to know your major, what you want to do after graduation or anything. You know you want to be a Marine (note, any service works, you just need to spend three years on active duty).During your last year in the Marines (or Navy or whatever), you’ll need to take the SAT (unless you did well on the test in high school) and you need to get an incredible letter of recommendation from your commanding officer along with the letters of recommendation that Harvard requires. Hopefully, you are still friends with your high school teachers.Step 3: Apply to HarvardTo be honest, Harvard has received a fair amount of lampooning in the past for not really letting any veterans into Harvard College (to the contrary, veterans have been welcomed at HMS and GSAS for a long time). In 2009, there were two veterans at HC. In 2012, that number doubled to four. You get the idea. Hilariously, one article on Veterans at HC ended up only locating a veteran of the Israeli armed services, a South Korean who took a year off for mandatory military service and… drum roll, a lone undergraduate who worked as a mapmaker in the U.S. Army.Like I said above, this strategy works for almost no one, but for the sake of argument let’s say you get in.Step 4: Apply for the Post-9/11 GI Bill.This is easy, you do it online and it takes like ten minutes. Then you need to go to student financial services and say you want to be on the Yellow Ribbon Program. You would think that because there are unlimited scholarships for this that SFS would just automatically do it for you. No, you need to initiate (unless this changes in the next couple years while you are in the Marines).Harvard’s tuition is $43,280 a year, the Veteran’s Administration will pay $26,970.46 toward that. Harvard will give you a merit scholarship of $5,000 (technically a matching tuition reduction, but who cares). That brings the cost down to $16,309.54. While you are in school, the VA will pay you $28,405 for housing and books. You can use that to pay for the rest of your tuition, and some of your estimated room, board and incidental expense ($19,745). You end up with $2,650 a year that you owe.I’m not going to lie, this strategy is bad, could I perhaps interest you in Columbia? Michael O'Brien's answer to What are some things I can do to make myself look more appealing to Columbia University?Good luck.

This is a fairly recent scientific development that I believe most people haven’t heard about:In November last year, a Chinese researcher He Jiankui of Southern University of Science and Technology of China claimed he helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies using the CRISPR technology, sparking widespread backlash from medical and bioethics experts.(CRISPR/Cas9 — or CRISPR — is a tool that allows researchers to attempt to control which genes get expressed; to delete undesirable traits and, potentially, add desirable traits more quickly and precisely than ever before. )While the work has not been published and verified in a peer-reviewed journal, he claimed at a conference in Hong Kong that he had altered the DNA of twin girls born in December (at the embryo stage during IVF) to make them HIV-resistant. He deleted two genes whose deletions could have a health benefit: CCR5, without which people can’t get HIV and PCSK9, which leads to low levels of bad cholesterol and a much lower risk of heart disease.CRISPR is error prone and can introduce new and potentially harmful mutations. Kiran Musunuru, a gene-editing scientist at the Perelman School of Medicine in Pennsylvania, saw the genetic readouts on the embryos and recognized that the girls may be made up of a mosaic of differently edited cells. Others have commented that the work hasn’t been sufficiently investigated to confirm whether it worked or was safe. Other scientists have remarked that the work was sloppy and not done correctly.This bombshell announcement has sparked intense debate about whether there should be CRISPR babies at all. What if CRISPR could be used to replace broken genes? What if it could be used to create humans with superhuman qualities, ushering a new era of genetic inequality? What if CRISPR introduces new, unknown undesirable health issues?He’s clinical trial was halted but the government seems ambivalent about the way forward. Meanwhile, scientists at Harvard Universities are pressing ahead with sperm DNA-editing with the hope to create IVF babies with reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease. It looks like scientists have opened a Pandora’s box and unsure what to do with it.