If You Got Into Harvard, Your College Essay Was Probably Pretty Sad

Breaking news: If you got into Harvard, there’s a good chance you wrote a really sad essay, maybe about your parents.

Or so says AdmitSee, a college counseling startup. The group recently analyzed thousands of college essays, and from their findings, we can glean some advice for prospective applicants—and perhaps say something about our peers who already got in.

Specifically, based on what AdmitSee co-founder Stephanie Shyu told Fast Company, we suggest that you call your parents “mother” and “father” if you want to come here. If Palo Alto is more your thing, call them “mom” and “dad.”

Not only are Harvard essays about our parents—they’re also just really sad. According to Fast Company, other keywords in Harvard essays include “difficult,” “cancer,” and “tough,” while our friends at Stanford generally chose to write about their passions, using words like “better,” “happy,” and “improve.”

The bottom line? Harvard applicants, you can be completely void of emotion as long as you have a really padded resume and a tearjerker of a college essay. (Harvard students: That explains a lot.)