“We are educating, or we are trying to educate whole people who aren’t just disembodied intellectuals,” she says.

McGrath Lewis says that the admissions office can guarantee a class of students who can obtain all A’s in their courses—this, she says, is not a difficult task to accomplish.

However, McGrath Lewis says she keeps in mind the 25-year reunion books sitting on a shelf over her desk, what she calls the first returns of her work.

“We are looking for people who use their talents for others,” she says. “The hard thing is to admit people who will be contributors.”

“[Involvement in high school extracurricular activities] shows evidence we care very much about here, which is ambition and motivation and the ability to get up in the morning and exercise the talent,” she adds.

Unlike its neighbor MIT, Harvard’s admissions office is less willing to bank on the “folder,” admissions shorthand for a prospective student, with only the promise of “untapped potential,” McGrath Lewis says.

“The person who simply reads books, who doesn’t have much to show for it, will have a hard time distinguishing themselves from the [applicant] pool,” explains McGrath Lewis. “We are a little bit more like people from Missouri. We are ‘show me’ kind of people.”

Students choose to come to Harvard for a variety of reasons which include its reputation for academic excellence. But for many undergraduates, the rich extracurricular scene enables them to develop academically and to pursue the outside passions that made them stand out in the competitive applicant pool.

Professor of Education Richard J. Light says an emphasis on extracurriculars has resulted in a campus where students “enthusiastically rush from activity to activity.”

Some of these students are often willing to put their extracurricular responsibilities ahead of their school work and when they do, they elicit mixed responses from professors.

“Almost half of my faculty friends think that students haven’t kept their eye on the ball,” Light says. “The other half would say this student followed her passion.”

President of the Undergraduate Council Rohit Chopra ’04 says that Harvard students are aware that they have finite time to devote to their academic and extracurricular activities.

With this time trade-off in mind, students often choose to participate in the endeavor they find most rewarding, he says.

While at times this activity is academic work for a small class with a great professor, Chopra says it is often outside of the classroom that students feel most fulfilled. “This sort of created this dynamic where in many ways extracurriculars are a good threat to academics. It sort of taught Harvard we need to reinvent ourselves if we want a good extracurricular and a good academic scene,” says Chopra.

A Threat to Academics?