Some of the materials that come into the office’s mail room can’t be stored in filing cabinets. On a set of shelves across the hall from the file room, all of the supplementary materials submitted by this year’s applicants—from music CDs to a knitted hat to a bottle of homemade hot sauce—are stored, carefully tagged to identify their creators. “A lot of kids write books, more than you’d think,” says Manager of Records Operations for Admissions Ian Anderson, gesturing casually at a shelf stuffed with these literary efforts. Anderson keeps some of the most unusual submissions from past years in his office—including homemade soaps decorated with pictures of Memorial Church and John Harvard.