Harvard Deferred You: Now What?

Submit a letter of continued interest as soon as possible, ideally within a week of receiving your deferral notification. Upload this letter directly to your Applicant Portal. Afterward, have your guidance counselor email the admissions office to update them concerning all of your awards, publications, accomplishments, and grades since you applied. They should affirm that no matter what other admission decisions you receive, you will choose to attend Harvard if offered a spot.

Important: Harvard explicitly states that you should not reach out to admissions officers directly. As they put it, "Despite what you may hear or read elsewhere, this is wholly unnecessary." All updates should be submitted through your Applicant Portal. Your Midyear School Report must be submitted no later than February 1.

But not just any letter of continued interest. This letter should be one of the most inspired pieces of writing you've ever composed. In it, you need to let your heart write a love song for Harvard and translate that into giving the reader a concrete picture of exactly who you will be as a person on their campus. This includes demonstrating how you will contribute to spaces and organizations on campus and reminding the reader of your academic hook. In reintroducing your hook, the academic niche you spent time and effort carving out in high school to distinguish yourself from others, you want to remind the reader how you can change the world for the better if you have the opportunity to leverage specific academic opportunities at Harvard.

I personally recommend starting the letter of continued interest with something funny or lighthearted. It is naturally awkward reading something from someone whom you, in a sense, rejected. To make the experience as cringe-free as possible for the admissions officer, I wouldn't reference the deferral explicitly or convey any feelings of disappointment.

After a lighthearted and positive introduction, I would then proceed to talk to the reader about something related to your niche, such as a new cutting-edge development or something new that you learned. I would then connect this new piece of information regarding your niche to something currently going on at Harvard and explain how, by leveraging certain opportunities there, you can achieve some goal, and make the reader understand how achieving this goal can change the world.

Afterward, I would paint them a picture of you on their campus. Have fun here. Feel free to write a hypothetical scenario of you making some of the best memories of your life there. You want the reader to feel like by not admitting you, they will be denying you the opportunity to live your best life for four years. Show them you doing activities that have garnered you friends in high school on their campus. Show them how your hobbies or talents will brighten up the days of your Harvard classmates. Present yourself as someone they want on their campus.

To conclude the letter, I would thank the reader for their time and add something to the effect of thanking them for the opportunity to share with them your favorite subjects and hobbies. Finally, I would tell them that no matter what other decisions you receive, you are absolutely resolute in attending Harvard, and that if you are offered a seat, you will immediately accept it no matter what. I would then include a signed signature.

When it comes to bragging about grades, prizes, or publications, please save it. If you made it this far in the admissions process at an elite school like Harvard, then you already have enough academic credentials to be a strong candidate for Harvard. If you did not, then you wouldn't be deferred and reevaluated in the regular decision round, you would have been rejected.

Your guidance counselor should be the one bragging on your behalf. When they do it, it carries much more weight and shows the colleges that there is something beyond those accomplishments to consider. By your guidance counselor going out of their way to share your accomplishments with the admissions office, it demonstrates to them that there is something compelling enough about your personhood for them to be doing this. Given how accomplished you must be to be even deferred from Harvard in 2025, where historically around 83% of Restrictive Early Action applicants are deferred and only about 10% of those deferred students ultimately earn admission, this intangible quality they can infer is what will distinguish you from other overachievers.

If you'd like help writing your letter of continued interest for Harvard or any other school, please schedule a free consultation with us.