Читать книгу Accepted!. Secrets to Gaining Admission to the World's Top Universities онлайн

60 страница из 68

When you apply to a US college, they generally accept you into the undergraduate program. You can switch to any major you like (with some exceptions) after you are admitted (you don't have to declare your major until the end of your second or sophomore year). Harvard never looks back on your application and checks what academic interests you declared and then scolds you for studying something totally different once you get to college. They actively encourage “intellectual discovery” in the first 18 months as you find your major/concentration of choice.

So what game do you need to play here?

You want to express academic interests that give you the highest possible chance of being admitted, not the academic interest you genuinely want to study after you get in. I wish admissions worked in a way where you got rewarded for a sincere proclamation of your love for economics. As someone who loves economics, I really do. Sadly, this is not how the system works.

This doesn't mean you should go and spend all your high school years on physics and then declare love for art history or psychology. Your optimization is as follows: you want to choose the most niche, unpopular major possible for a given university subject to it being credible that you are genuinely interested in studying it and are qualified from your existing activities to be studying it.