• Dates: 2025-11-25 - present
  • Status: unfinished
  • Importance: 4

I thought it’d be fun to list some tips/hacks from my life. I’ll start with this (outdated?) tip for getting into Harvard.

Science Research for Getting into “Elite” Colleges

In 2011, around 75% of the forty Intel Science Talent Search (STS) finalist high school seniors got into at least one of Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford and Princeton. What a crazy percentage! For some reason, it seems that “elite” universities really valued young scientific researchers. This is the one hack I would’ve recommended back then for a high schooler trying to maximize their chances of an “elite” school admission.

I don’t know if this hack still works. Colleges may not care so much about this anymore, and the hack may now be widely known and competitive to the point of diminishing returns. (Interestingly, it seems the number of applicants is now around 2,500, which isn’t too much larger than it was before.) Of course, there’s also quite a bit of luck involved in placing in the top 40, but placing in the top 300 is still a good outcome.

But my parents’ support for me to pursue one summer of science research back then luckily turned into a great college admissions outcome, in addition to a relatively happy and rewarding PhD later in my career.

Two notes:

  1. The competition is now called the Regeneron Science Talent Search.
  2. If you’re wondering whether being an STS finalist was correlated rather than causal: on the day after the finalists were announced, I got a “likely letter” call from a Harvard admissions officer. So it seems likely related.

Other ones (to be expanded potentially)

  • Choosing among PhD programs (if you have the choice)
  • Choosing PQE, DAC and defense professors