And this year's turnout, about 300 students, was somewhat low, Miller says. He often packs the entire room, drawing closer to 500 eager prospects.

Questions about admissions, and about Harvard in general, spill out of the designated lectures and into summer school entryways. Questions like "are the courses really this easy--to which we usually reply, no," says summer school proctor Jeffrey R. Kling '92.

Kling has a friend who works in the Admissions office. She once came to visit him and sat on the steps outside of his Thayer Hall entry. Some of Kling's proctees got wind of her vocation.

"They were so excited," he remembers. They made a joke of their Harvard aspirations, he says, but their sarcasm only loosely masked a genuine desire.

Later in the summer, Kling's friend was hospitalized. His proctees found out about her illness after she had been released. "She was where?" Kling recalls them saying when they learned she had been sick. "You mean we could have sent her flowers?"

The immediacy of college--students live, breathe, eat and sleep it when they're here--encourages Harvard stantly sniff out the competition. Warning: this can be painful, or at least anxiety-inducing.

"I really realize what I'm competing against to get in here, " says Patel, who hails from Georgia. "Everyone's really intelligent."

"My standardized test scores discourage me from applying to places like Harvard," says Sunik Divakaruni of Baltimore, Maryland. He says he's asked the bona-fide Harvard students he's encountered about their scores--"what range it's in, what they got."

Usually, he gets stonewalled. "I think it's a personal thing." he explains.

SAT curiosity is so common that many proctors don't find it remarkable at all. "Occasionally you have a student ask about your board scores," Mark W. Jacobstein '92 says casually.

"The SAT hysteria was rampant for about the first two weeks of school or so," Kling recalls.

But Jacobstein says that when he proctored last year, the students were far more open about their ambitions. "I had some students who continued to call post-summer," he says.

Some proctees are, indeed, mellow about the prospects, says Milan G. Chheda '93. But a few are intense. "They're so serious about it, it's kind of hard to laugh at it," he says. "It's scary."

Students have asked Kling if he has applications--"no, I don't," is his emphatic response. He refers them to the admissions office. Copies of Harvard's latest application and viewbook--same required essays, same publicity photos, different cover--recently arrived at Byerly Hall. They probably won't last long.

"They've been disappearing like hotcakes as soon as they arrived," says Caitlin J. Anderson' 95, who works at the admissions office.