The book
My Son Got Into Harvard
The story and the method behind it, from a father's point of view.
The book
The story and the method behind it, from a father's point of view.
About the book
I wrote this book in four parts. It starts with where I came from, my own childhood and the things that shaped how I parent. Then it moves into what I see every day as a counselor, the patterns I notice in teenagers who feel lost, even the ones who seem fine on the surface.
From there it gets practical. The five skills I believe every child needs, a year by year playbook for high school, and the full story of how my own son got into Harvard, Yale, and UPenn. It ends with the harder, more personal lessons I wanted to leave every parent with. It's not a textbook. It's closer to a long conversation with a friend who's already been through it.
From the manuscript
I was born in Rewari, a small town in Haryana. Four uncles. Their wives. Their children. My grandfather and grandmother. My parents and me. All of us. One house. One kitchen. One family. My parents and I were given one room, not on the first floor, not on the second, somewhere in between, next to the staircase.
Together in address. Alone in everything else.
A girl walked into my office with her parents. She had scored 95 percent in Class 10. On paper, she was meant for the sciences. By the end of Class 11, she was disheartened, and she had lost her confidence. Within ten minutes of a real conversation, it became obvious: what she actually wanted was to study psychology.
Her marks chose her career. Her marks were wrong.
The journey to Harvard did not begin with a college application. It began in Grade 5. We did not sit down and say, "We are going to get our son into the Ivy League." What we did say was this: if our son has to be successful in the real world, he needs to be a good communicator, a critical thinker, a confident human being.
We started building. Not for Harvard. For life. And life eventually led to Harvard.
I woke up in the middle of the night. No alarm. No noise. Just a thought that hit me so hard it pulled me out of sleep. Shivansh is leaving. I woke up Divya. I told her what I was feeling. And then I started crying. Not the polite kind of tears you wipe away quickly.
I never knew that fathers could cry like that.
From the book
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