So clearly I go here, and I was psyched about getting in. I actively avoid the H-bomb. But to reinforce why I shouldn’t let my status as an admitted student give me too much of an ego boost, let’s consider how personal qualities have factored into Harvard’s admissions process in the past.

Rewind to 1922, when President A. Lawrence Lowell started getting nervous that too many Jews were attending Harvard. He tried quotas, he tried limiting scholarships for Jewish students, but only one strategy stuck—shifting focus from an applicant’s academics to his character.

This new process allowed admissions officers to look for indicators that the applicant belonged to a group of “undesirables,” which became code for Jews. If evidence showed that an applicant belonged to this category, he or she was generally rejected. The year after Lowell instituted this policy, Jewish enrollment plummeted from around 20 to 8.2 percent.

Harvard currently frames its applicants’ interests, activities, and personalities as marks of future success, and while I do believe a diverse community with myriad interests is important to a school’s environment, the roots of this process are pretty arbitrary. It was not created as part of some genius method to determine value in a human being.

Additionally, plenty of deserving students don’t go, or oftentimes even apply, to top colleges for reasons completely out of their control. To state the obvious again, acceptance letters or their absence does nothing to determine a person’s worth.

We should love Harvard for the experiences we’ve had here, not the ego boost it gave us in a congratulatory email. Let’s discard notions of the "Big H" as a part of us that is so powerful it can be likened to a bomb. Let’s not limit ourselves to comments that strangers wrote about us before we were even old enough to vote.

Rachel C. Talamo ’18, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Weld Hall.