On My Admissions File

This time last year, I thought the day I received my Harvard acceptance letter would be the happiest day of my life. My YouTube feed was cluttered with college decision videos that were invariably the same: good news brought screams, bad news silence. It seemed like an acceptance letter was sure to make me stupidly, deliriously happy.

Yet opening my status update turned out to be a muted affair; there were no jubilant hugs, no jumps for joy. I was checking the applicant portal on my phone; it was 7 a.m., and I had just climbed out of bed. I squinted at my screen in the dark, leaned back into my chair, and took a few deep breaths. Then I drew the curtains, texted a few friends, and left the house for a clinic appointment.

I couldn’t feel ecstatic about my acceptance because it didn’t feel real or comprehensible. I had always been told that for international students like me, admission to U.S. colleges is a “crapshoot”: Harvard admits only a handful of Singaporeans every year. I now knew that I had won this lottery, but I didn’t know why — or what it said about me.

When I learned that I could request to view my admissions file, I seized that opportunity. Amid the whirlwind of settling into life at a new college in a new country, I hoped that the comments on my file would help me make sense of my place here.

Just like my acceptance letter, my file arrived quietly — I stumbled upon it on my.harvard before I received any email notification. Opening it was also less exciting than I thought it would be. Much of the first page was too cryptic to understand; I didn’t know what “SSR” or “OA decile” meant, and I couldn’t figure out which rating corresponded to each category (though I could deduce that the worst rating I received must have been for my non-existent athletic accomplishments). I spent 20 confused minutes Googling “artificial intelligence in college admissions” before discovering that “AI” actually referred to the Academic Index.

I also couldn’t help but think that some of the comments, while flattering, were clearly undeserved. I laughed when I read that one of my teachers thought I could be “the Prime Minister of SGP one day,” referring to Singapore, or that my alumni interviewer had compared my exit from debate to “an Olympic athlete retiring at the peak of his powers.”

My admissions file might have explained why Harvard liked my application, but it left me with more questions than answers. That night, as I lay in bed perusing the file, I felt that familiar, gnawing hollowness I had experienced in the days after receiving my acceptance letter. I felt, without really knowing why, that the person they wrote about in the file and admitted into the college wasn’t entirely me.

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My Common App essay was about debating. I had spent seven years replaying recordings of my old rounds, hoping that one day I would deliver that elusive speech met not by feedback but by applause. But even though I had started out hoping to become more informed and articulate, I slowly became preoccupied with superlatives: I wanted to say and win everything.

And so I left. I wrote about how I managed to accept that I had said and won enough and how I successfully separated my sense of self from my performances in this game. At the end of the essay, I recalled how I had told a younger debater that I never managed to win the national championship, adding, “and that’s alright.”

I remember being quite pleased with the essay. If the task of a college application was to dredge up my entire past and package it nicely into a 650-word blurb, I was sure I would do well. But after I sent in the application, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I had told all the truth but told it slant. I felt that with every layer of linguistic polish I applied, I was concealing some part of myself I didn’t want the world to know about.

It was when I saw my admissions officer compliment the “maturity” of my writing that I finally understood what unsettled me about my Common App essay. While it was true that my self-esteem no longer rose and fell with every debate win and loss, I had not yet become the self-assured, clear-eyed individual I sought to portray. I didn’t care about speaker points anymore, but I still defined myself based on what I achieved: numbers on a report card, titles on a resume.

In fact, I had made the same mistake with my college application as I had made with debate. Just as I had perused speaker tabs and jotted down feedback years before, I requested to view my admissions file because I wanted to see how well I had done in the college admissions process, believing that it said something about my worth.

I forgot, once again, that it’s just a game. Debate judges can only comment on an eight-minute speech, and admissions officers can only review what I put on the page. My admissions file could show me that I had done a good job on the 650-word assignment of marketing myself, but it could not tell me about all my flawed complexity. Reading my file felt empty because I was searching for something it could not provide: I wanted to know why Harvard admitted me, but I hadn’t told Harvard who I was in the first place.

In retrospect, this fact was easy to forget. Colleges claim they can assess each applicant holistically; Harvard’s application page boasts that “when reading an application, we get to know the person behind the numbers.” But personal statements still require a narrative arc. It is satisfying to read a complete essay about a complete person, even though we are all works in progress.

I thought I wrote my application essays for the admissions committee, but now I’m beginning to realize that I was also writing for myself — I was telling myself a story that I wanted to hear and needed to believe. I was not yet the self-possessed person I wanted desperately to be, and my way of dealing with that dissonance was to craft an essay in which my metamorphosis was complete.

Yes, I got a good grade for that story. But there’s always more to the story.