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My college application process was BORING! I applied to only one school - the University of Florida. My SATs were within range, I was in-state, and had an incredible GPA. Grad school was the same - I got into Lesley College (now University) through a co-op program and never applied anywhere else.SO, since I have a senior who literally just went through the admissions process, I will share his info instead :)Stats: SAT 1510, ACT 35 (both single sitting)Subject tests: Math 2 and Physics (both 800)GPA 4.0/4.0, school rank unknown but top 5%ECs: Excellent, especially in leadership. Three sport/four season athlete, NMF, US Presidential Scholar contender, etc.Applied to 9 colleges:Safeties:WPI (accepted EA with Presidential Scholarship) - liked it here but they didn’t offer enough money so it was unaffordableUDelaware (accepted EA to Honors College, Trustee’s Scholarship, and athletic recruit) - was one of his top 5 choices, but during his recruitment visit, he sat in on classes and realized it was not a good academic fit (also, his Latin book was stolen while he was there, so there’s that…)Matches:Boston College (accepted EA) Offered great financial aid. Was his top choice from his accepted schools until Yale!Hamilton College (accepted) Originally a top 5 choice, but we never went back for a revisit and it was just too far away from anything.Colby College (accepted) Never visited but others strongly recommended he apply especially because of their very generous financial aid - was the most generous next to Yale! But they didn’t have his major so he would’ve had to study something else.Tufts University (accepted) He liked it a lot, I wasn’t a fan. Acceptance came a day after Yale, so it became a non-issue.Reaches:MIT (deferred EA, then rejected) He was disappointed, but neither I nor his advisor felt it was a good match - he’s VERY strong in STEM but he’s definitely a Liberal Arts kid. Seems they didn’t think he was a match either… Went EA bc he was being considered for recruitment.Princeton (rejected) This was the only rejection that hurt. He had a really good chance (based on his pre-read during recruitment season), and I think he might’ve been admitted EA even though the coaches couldn’t offer support. But he was worried about not being able to apply anywhere else EA because of SCEA, and since it was still a long-shot, he went with MIT and a few other schools. Thankfully, he opened Yale’s acceptance email immediately afterwards so the pain went away rather quickly :)Yale (ACCEPTED) Yale was his original top choice but he wasn’t fast enough to be considered for recruitment, which is what sunk it to #3 in terms of where to apply. However, it was his favorite campus and the only college he applied to that had his specific major (without having to double major or major/minor), so it was a HUGE win! He is DEFINITELY not heartbroken about being rejected to Princeton or MIT! Will AttendSO proud to be a Yale Mom 2022!

In June of 2007, I woke up from patellar tendon surgery with a massive scar, an unlimited Vicodin prescription, and a poorly thought out recovery plan. My knee rehabilitation mostly consisted of seeing if it could bear enough weight to make another trip from the couch to the freezer to grab ice cream.Unsurprisingly, when I got back to campus in the fall and I had to start playing pre-season pickup games against Jeremy, I had quite a bit of trouble.It was clear that Jeremy, now a sophomore, had not spent the past summer watching movies, lounging, and writing a weirdly large amount of opiate-induced poetry.He blitzed people from the moment he set foot in the gym. Dunks, threes, acrobatic layups, steals, blocks — it was all on display. He was a cut above.I watched this warily. I was the returning leading scorer, so I figured I would be the focal point of the team that season.Now here came Jeremy, a man who played my position and was everything I was not: healthy, slender, quick, and loved by all.He was the type of person who was always willing to give a pity laugh to a bad joke, just to make you feel good. I was the type of person who once held a grudge for a month when someone used a joke I told them one-on-one and then passed it off as their own to get a laugh in the locker room.As the pre-season wore on, things got worse for me. I started playing before my knee fully healed, which caused other parts of my body to hurt. Within thirty minutes of every practice I looked like I’d sustained gunshot wounds and was trying to limp off a battlefield. Jeremy ran circles around me.At the end of practice, I would cover myself in ice packs, lie down, and think about how unfair it all was. Jeremy would get up extra shots up with the assistant coaches. I kind of hated him for it.One time a coach caught me staring at Jeremy as he relentlessly honed his step back jumper. The coach invited me to join.“House, you want to get those ice packs off and get some shots up?”“No. I should head over to the training room.”“I heard you’re such a regular in the training room that they’re gonna start charging you rent!”I didn't laugh. Neither did Jeremy. Maybe he wasn’t so bad.After the first few games of the season, my stats were way down compared to the previous year. Plus, I felt groggy and lethargic. I normally had great stamina, but all of a sudden I felt like I was running underwater.Eventually, I realized this was because I was anemic. (This was due to intestinal bleeding. Long story short — it’s not healthy to take 16 extra strength Advils a day.)Soon after my diagnosis, I prepped for a colonoscopy by drinking a foul laxative solution while self-administering enemas on the cold floor of my dorm’s bathroom. I was absolutely sure that Jeremy was getting a workout in somewhere, which made everything worse.Through all my health issues, I kept playing, but poorly. My confidence faltered along with my stamina. I felt like more of a carnival sideshow than a high-level college basketball player: "Behold the anemic and limping man as he tries to keep pace with some of the world's best athletes!"My struggles started making me bitter and jaded off the court. I started lashing out at those who were closest to me, which meant my coaches and teammates. Jeremy, with his endless enthusiasm, prodigious statistical output, and shameless belief in a higher power, was a natural target.I was never cruel or a bully. I was just prone to saying antagonistic things on long bus rides when I got bored:“Yo Jeremy, why do you think God cares about this basketball team more than little kids in the Middle East getting their limbs blown off by tomahawk missiles?”“I never said that.”“But it’s sort of implied, right? I mean, why would he let that happen to them and also care if we win basketball games? Seems like a dick of a God.”“House, theology is complex.”“Lotttttta kids getting bombed is all I’m saying.”Jeremy would just laugh, shake his head, and tell me that I should come to bible study sometime if I really wanted to hear his side of things.^^Jeremy on the bus, taking my lame insults in stride.^^I am not proud of my relentless straw-manning. There was just something about Jeremy’s religiosity that was odd to me at that time.Like, what was up with those fervent pre-game prayers? “What a weirdo,” I thought, as I sat in the locker next to his and visualized myself hitting a game winning shot, which was totally different.Inevitably, no matter what either of us did before the game, Jeremy would go out and dominate and I would hobble around in his general vicinity, miss shots, and curse myself.When the buzzer sounded after a blowout loss to Yale in early March, my junior campaign mercifully came to an end. I dedicated the following summer to getting in the best shape of my life.I was feeling good, but I still had to compete against the new crop of freshman. They were the first official recruiting class brought in by the new coaching regime, and they came in with a lot of hype. Every guard was faster, stronger, taller, and more energetic than me. I cursed their bouncy legs, wide smiles, and the fact that they would undoubtedly eat into my playing time.Of course, none of them were faster, stronger, or taller than Jeremy. He arrived on campus a man possessed. He could shoot a lot better now, and he was somehow even quicker. He'd appear out of nowhere to steal passes and block shots that no Ivy-leaguer had business blocking. His defensive instincts had us so wary that some people got scared to pass the ball anywhere near him.During one pre-season practice, I pulled a freshman aside during a water break to sort through a mixup we’d had on the court."Hey, you were supposed to swing it to me. What happened?”“Bro... Jeremy was right behind you.”He looked like he’d seen the Babadook.So, despite all the work I’d put in, I was still worlds behind Jeremy. This could have been fine. It should have been fine.I wish I had been visited by the ghost of Drew future --“You’re healthy, you’re a starter on a division one basketball team, and you’re about to graduate from one of the best schools in the world. Calm down.”Drew past didn’t see it that way. He got bitter, caustic, and reclusive.When the regular season began, Jeremy was rightly made the focal point of the offense. I was holding onto my starting spot, but barely. Just as I feared, the freshman were nipping at my heels and my minutes were way down from the previous year.I met with the head coach to discuss what I could do better.His biggest issues was that I had “no presence.”“What do you mean by that?” I asked.“No presence. No vitality. No oomph. House, you need to have presence.”“I still don’t get it. I’m doing my best. What should I be doing? Who has presence?”“Jeremy.”Oh. So “presence” meant “be more like our best player and once in a lifetime talent who will one day have the nerve to wave off Kobe freaking Bryant.”To be fair, coach could have really put me on blast. He could have said “we need someone who doesn’t bitch in a passive aggressive manner after every practice, thinking we can’t hear him through the vents even though our offices are right on top of the locker room.”A few weeks later, we played against Boston College. They were a top 25 team in the country. We were supposed to get smacked. When we played BC my freshman year, they gave us such a vicious beating that our coach didn’t even have the energy to yell at us afterward. All he could muster during his post-game talk was, “I’m throwing that film in the dumpster. See you on the bus."This time was different. We won the game and Jeremy embarrassed the highly touted NBA prospect he was matched up against. He unleashed a barrage of crossovers, step back jumpers, and acrobatic finishes that had kids in their student section scratching their heads in bewilderment, like, "I want to hate this nerd but this is pretty damn impressive."I know what the crowd was doing because I had plenty of time to survey them from the bench. I only played a few minutes, and I didn’t contribute much. It took all the willpower in the universe to smile and cheer from the bench as the Jeremy show unfolded.After the game, our locker room was pandemonium. The win was the most exciting thing to happen to our program in a long time. But it was my nadir.That night in my dorm room, I had my first brush with suicidal thoughts. When I closed my eyes, all I could see was my body falling from my 18th-floor window, splattering onto Cowperthwaite Street.I had devoted my life to basketball, and now I was nothing better than a benchwarmer.I understand that this is melodramatic drivel. It was the ultimate first world problem, like a king complaining about an ill-fitting crown. I was a Harvard student with a loving family, loyal friends, and every door in the world just waiting to be opened for me, yet I still complained about sports. I get it.But depression doesn’t care about the objective severity of a situation. It is a greedy and malignant beast.The suicidal episode passed, but my malaise stayed around.Up through the start of league play, I was trotted out with the starters, but unless I did something extraordinary in the first few minutes, I was benched. From that point on, I didn’t know when my next chance would come.It’s difficult to overstate what that kind of uncertainty does to a once proud athlete. All my neuroticism got ratcheted up to eleven and my pregame rituals got increasingly bizarre. (Think spending five minutes in the locker room making sure the Nike signs on my socks were perfectly aligned.)The Ivy League season rolled around, and I played terribly over the first three games. That’s when all the pressure and stress came to a breaking point. I started to cope by not caring.All the stressing out suddenly seemed like a waste of time. Whatever I was doing, it wasn’t helping me hit open shots, and it certainly wasn’t convincing the coaches to play me. From that point forward, I decided to try something new.The night before our first home game against Princeton, instead of mentally running through the first few minutes of the following days game, visualizing future Drew hitting shots and making great plays, I just chilled out and played video games with a friend. We drank a few beers and played a gamed called “Columns” on a Sega Gensis I had purchased off eBay.^^The night everything changed^^I passed out and woke up with the controller still in my lap. After shootarounds, scouting reports, team meal, and a nap, I was at the center court of Lavietes Pavilion, waiting for tip-off.This time, things were different.I made my first shot, and every one thereafter. (It was only five in total, but still.) I was tenacious on defense. I called the right plays and made the right passes. It ended up being far and away my best game of the season up to that point. We lost, but I was finally proud of my performance.It wasn’t anything close to what Jeremy did against Boston College, but for me, it was like getting a breath of fresh air after being held underwater to the point of passing out. I played the majority of the game and contributed in a meaningful way to a big win. It was all I wanted.From that point forward, I stayed loose and happy off the court, and produced big numbers on it. Even with my slow start to the Ivy League season, I ended up being voted second-team All Ivy League by the coaches.The most exciting part was that Jeremy and I tore it up together. He was clearly better than I was, but I stopped resenting him for it, and even embraced his alpha dog status. I even remember approaching him during a close game and saying, “Take us home, man!” or some such inspirational gobbledygook. And I meant it!Maybe you’re thinking that I doth protest too much. That you can’t just flip a switch in your life and become Mr. Equanimity because you started playing a Tetris knock off before games and hit a few jump shots. But, unless you’ve gone to the depths of despair and dug yourself out, you don't understand the newfound joy you can experience. Considering the dark thoughts I was having, it really felt like a new lease on life.Jeremy continued to steal the show for the rest of the season, and I was happy to be his trusty sidekick.To Jeremy’s credit, no matter how bad I was on the court or how much of a dick I was off it, he never lashed out at me. He was always encouraging and kind.Basically, he was my polar opposite: a picture of stability, calm and empathy no matter what storms raged around him. Our team still sucked, but Jeremy and I established ourselves as a fearsome, highly productive backcourt. I was proud of that.****All the outgoing seniors gave speeches at our year end banquet. When my speech was over, I took a second to savor the moment. I looked at the room, full of teammates, their parents and friends of the program. They were smiling, applauding, and laughing. I felt a deep inner warmth.Years later, I would learn that Jeremy’s favorite bible verse is Romans 5:3-5:“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”I don’t know if you can call finding success after hitting rock bottom, playing video games, and drinking before games ‘perseverance,’ but, ya know, close enough.If you liked this answer you’d probably like the book I just published! It’s got a lot more stories about Harvard, basketball, and life in general. I’d be thrilled and grateful if you read it.

Dear student, BC stands forBritish ColumbiaBreast CancerBook ClubBuilding and ConstructionBaja CaliforniaBirth ControlBoston CollegeBusiness CenterBar CodeBaptist ChurchBefore ChristmasBankruptcy CourtBoard CertifiedBefore ChristBirth CertificateBorder CollieBackward CompatibilityBig CountryBody CountBudget ConstraintBlack CanyonBroome CountyBlack Cat