I would be perfectly content if I were to meet Dave Grohl, the singer of the band Foo Fighters. Of course the situation would have to be a bit more contrived than just bumping into the man on the street; it would happen at a concert. The Foo Fighters would be playing my favorite songs by them – “Everlong” and “Times Like These,” “All My Life” and all the rest, with enough time between songs for the band’s amazing front...

(The Harvard supplemental essay is optional and allows you to write an effectively unlimited amount about anything you want. I wrote about the adversity I have experienced in my life and how I have come out from it) We sought to escape the torrents of blood drowning my country. The echoes of the screams of lost friends and family chased us to this land of America – I need to make that much clear. Unlike so many others, we were not...

If you're applying to a top school, grades matter far less than people think. These colleges could fill out their incoming classes several times over with valedictorians. What they want are good...

Have fun in your high school classes. Joke around with your teachers so that you can connect more. It's all well and good to just focus on doing well in a class and get a recommendation just based on how well...

Thanks to Harvard having the largest endowment of any university in the U.S., I will be attending for free. Harvard is very good about giving out financial aid; I would recommend using the financial aid calculator that they have on their website, as it provides a good estimate of how much aid you can get and doesn't require too much information. The calculator also provides a good demonstration of the high thresholds to which your parents' salaries can reach while still getting a large amount of aid from the school. Something which I would recommend starting early would be...

I had interviews for the four Ivies I applied to (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia) as well as MIT. The Yale interview was pretty bad; I had to go way out of my way (I live in Connecticut, and the interviewer asked me to meet him in a random, remote, hole-in-the-wall coffee shop in Manhattan) and when I got there the interviewer was late, ended up cutting the interview off early, and also seemed like he didn't really want to be there. I didn't really get to express myself as I would have liked, which may have had a negative...

I've taken a very unorthodox approach to the college process. Any sensible person can see what a flawed, ridiculous system it is, and I didn't bother to pad my resume with whatever the usual cookie-cutter ivy stuff is. I took classes that I found interesting and I worked hard because I wanted to succeed for its own sake; I wasn't going out of my way to impress a college, which is what I saw among the other top students at my school (they also had a lot of parental pressure to get into top colleges, which thankfully I didn't have...