Successful harvard application essays

Successful harvard application essays

The second edition of 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays follows the same format as the first: Editors of the Harvard Crimson student newspaper present essays from successful Harvard applicants and offer insightful comments on the strengths, weaknesses, and missed opportunities in each piece. Grouped into loose categories, such as "Memorable Moments" and "Influences," the essays /5(9) Here's the COMPLETE application that got me into every school I applied to, including Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton. See my Common App, personal essays, and recommendation letters, and learn strategies for your own college application 10 Successful Harvard Application Essays | With the top applicants from every high school applying to the best schools in the country, it's important to have an edge in your college application

My Successful Harvard Application (Complete Common App + Supplement)

With the top applicants from every high school applying to the best schools in the country, it's important to have an edge in your college application.

In our edition, check out ten of our newest Harvard application essays and profiles from students who made it in. I am standing behind my high school when a snowball pelts my side with a thud and splatters across my jacket, covering me with a fine, successful harvard application essays, icy dust. They must have been waiting all afternoon for an unsuspecting student to walk by, and perhaps for emphasis, one of the boys looks me in the eye and raises a grimy middle finger.

Quickly, Successful harvard application essays mold a handful of snow into a sphere with cupped hands and cock my arm back. I played softball for eight years, and my athletic strength was always my throwing arm; in fifth grade, when my coach asked me to throw the ball from third to first, I hurled the ball with such force that the catch knocked him off-balance.

However, my body had other ideas. After consulting more doctors than I can remember, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is characterized by chronic widespread pain and extreme sensitivity to touch. Agonizing muscle cramps mocked me constantly, preventing me from walking longer than five minutes without growing exhausted. The pressure above my eyes sneered at me whenever I attempted to read or write.

Even after I found medications to temper the headaches just enough so I could return to school with sporadic attendance, sharp pains gnawed at my body with haughty derision if I even thought about returning to the softball fields and the activities I loved, successful harvard application essays. For months I tried to ignore the cruel obscenities fibromyalgia hurled my way, steadfastly believing the pain would soon subside and I would achieve everything I had planned for myself if I simply disregarded the taunting aches and worked doggedly to catch up at school.

But when softball season arrived, it became apparent that while determination and intelligence could preserve my GPA in the face of fibromyalgia, there was no personal attribute or skill that could heal my body and allow me to join my teammates on the field.

In doing so, I kept in mind the schoolyard aphorism that there is strength in numbers. I successful harvard application essays not face fibromyalgia alone, successful harvard application essays, but with mathematics by my side.

Baseball is a game of statistics, successful harvard application essays, and if fibromyalgia threatened to steal the sport I loved through physical deterioration, I would outsmart this insolent illness and reclaim ownership of baseball through intellectual pursuits. I began a mathematical research project, analyzing the effectiveness of current baseball statistics, as well as deriving my own. Fibromyalgia forced me to redefine my goals and personal standards for success.

This baseball project was my first step toward reclaiming my life and laying the foundation for victory over my illness. As calculations replaced pitching drills, my passion for baseball was channeled into a burgeoning love of science and math. Hours I had previously devoted to softball became filled with scientific journals and books, successful harvard application essays, and summers I used to spend at athletic camps were devoted to research at local universities.

Baseball provided a link to my pre-fibromyalgia successful harvard application essays at a time when I desperately needed one, and through baseball I realized that if I wanted to beat fibromyalgia, I could not simply hope it would disappear overnight. So when that taunting rascal waves his middle finger in my direction, my cheeks do not flush with angry humiliation and my legs do not run away, but my hands mold a snowball and my successful harvard application essays pulls back.

As I follow through with my throw, pain radiating up my arm, I know instantly that I will pay for this exertion in the morning. Sarah's story opens with a vivid anecdote of being pelted by a snowball that brings the reader to the scene of the crime with detailed sensory descriptions. She skillfully ties the story to her talent for athletics, which in turn leads to her struggle with fibromyalgia and howin the face of physical limitation she redirected her passions to science and math.

The story comes full circle and ties together nicely at the end with the conclusion of the snowball scene, which leaves the reader feeling victorious and vindicated for Sarah, as well as proud of her determination.

Sarah manages to cover a lot in this essay. The personal statement is an evident combination of overcoming obstacles and discovering academic passions, and also discreetly includes résumé- worthy accomplishments, such as her own mathematical research project on baseball statistics and summer research at local universities. What is important about her personal statement is that she goes beyond the résumé and gives the admissions officers a look at her character and personal struggle.

Even though her essay is a bit long, Sarah does not waste a word and ensures that every detail she includes contributes in some way to the overall message she is trying to convey about herself.

Rather than simply evoking sympathy for her situation, Sarah weaves humor and a cheeky attitude throughout her narrative. Her vivacious and tenacious personality shines through in her colorful and descriptive language, painting a clear picture of Sarah as a determined person who doesn't let a chronic illness successful harvard application essays her and instead finds another passion.

I look over at the digital clock at the front of the bus just as the time changes to The engine begins to rumble, the seat begins to shake, and the bus slowly pulls onto Route 6 and heads toward JPA—the Jay Pritzker Academy—near Siem Reap, Cambodia. The bus is alive with chatter. They medevaced me to Bangkok when I got dengue fever. Today, I find myself unable to join the conversation.

I stare blankly at the blue cloth seat in front of me, trying to gently coax my knotted stomach out of my throat. All I can think about is the empty seat beside me and the uncomfortable feeling of entering uncertain territory alone. My friend and co-teacher, Shahriyar, is in the Angkor Hospital recovering from a serious bout of amoebic dysentery.

I visited him yesterday. He was lying in bed with his summer reading in his right hand and an IV in his left, successful harvard application essays. Successful harvard application essays pale and exhausted, he weakly lifted his head and greeted me.

Are you coming with me? I try to take my mind off Shahriyar and look out the window at the world around me. Everything is so much different than it is in Deerfield, yet it all somehow feels very natural to me. In the past, Shahriyar and I had always taken turns leading the class, giving each other a few moments to rest and rehydrate while the other taught. A part of me is afraid to do it.

As I think about the challenges I will face, successful harvard application essays, I realize how easy it would be to turn back. Knowing my co-teacher has become seriously ill, nobody would think less of me if I went home today.

As I sit in my seat, planning my trip home, the bus slows nearly to a stop and then turns onto a narrow red dirt road. The mess of worn-down concrete buildings and mopeds gives way to miles of flooded rice paddies stretching as far as I can see. Every few hundred yards I see boys and young men working barefoot in the fields. The bamboo huts that dot the landscape make me think back to my visit to the house of one of my students, Dari.

I remember looking into his room and seeing a wooden table on his dirt floor. Close by, a bamboo shelf was filled with books, successful harvard application essays.

The globe he had won for being on the Honor Roll was proudly displayed on the bookshelf among his prized possessions. Smiling ear to ear, he told us that JPA was the best thing in his life. I realize that it really is too late to go home. I remain seated, deep in thought, successful harvard application essays. I look up and see Deidre looking at me. In essays about community service, it is easy to fall into the trap of self-aggrandizement— emphasizing your own personal sacrifices and good deeds and in the process making yourself look like someone more interested in self-service than community service.

This seemingly straightforward story arc is enlivened by choice details and images—the off-hand conversation about dengue fever in the first paragraph, for example, adds a good jolt of surprise, and the descriptions of the Cambodian countryside are vivid and well-executed.

And as the admissions office gets deluged with successful harvard application essays and more applications every year, this spark of sincerity goes very far indeed. The language barrier was like a tsunami, gurgling with strange and indistinguishable vocalizations. I bolted up in surprise, my head colliding gracefully with the underside of the table. Yelping in pain, I noticed that the entire class was staring at me. That boy, Jack, came to visit me during my lonely recesses.

It was rather awkward at first—I could only stare at him as he rambled on in English. But it was comforting to have some company. From there, our friendship blossomed. Our initial conversations must have been hilarious to the hapless bystander. Jack would speak in fluent English while I spurted sentence after sentence of Mandarin. It was like watching tennis—rallies of English and Mandarin back and forth. But I learned quickly, and in no time I was fluent.

Jack also showed me the ropes of Western culture. Today, I volunteer at a community service agency for new immigrants where I work with children. I do it because I understand the confusion and frustration of dealing with a strange and sometimes hostile environment; I remember how it feels to be tangled up in an amalgam of unfamiliar words and sounds.

And so I teach them; I give seminars on reading, writing, and speaking skills as well as Western culture, history, successful harvard application essays, and sometimes, a bit of social studies. But I strive to do more than just that. I try to be a friend—because I remember how Jack helped me. I organize field trips to the science center, the museum, and the symphony: double-whammy trips where children can have fun while improving their literacy skills.

Through successful harvard application essays experiences, I try to understand each of successful harvard application essays as unique individuals—their likes, dislikes, pet peeves, background.

Everyone needs a guiding light through the lonesome process of adaptation, a friendly bump to lift them from the dark shroud of isolation, successful harvard application essays.

My hope is that, one day, these children will also feel compelled to do the same, helping others adapt to an unfamiliar environment. With this, we can truly create a caring and cohesive network of support for the children of our society.

Lucien's essay depicts a personal connection with his community service activity and provides the why to an extracurricular that probably shows up college application.

He starts off with an endearing anecdote of meeting his first friend in Canada and connects the encounter to his current passion, then delves even deeper by concluding with self- reflection and a bigger goal for society that he hopes to achieve.

His personal statement gives the reader a glimpse at his background and assimilation into a new culture, successful harvard application essays, and how his qwn experience as an immigrant motivates him to help other immigrants adapt to life in a new place. The strengths of this essay lie in the vivid and charming recounting of his first encounter with Jack, successful harvard application essays, his first friend in a foreign new environment, and how he uses that story to explain his passion for volunteering, successful harvard application essays.

He connects his community service to a bigger goal at the end of the essay that leaves the reader feeling inspired, and alludes to his thoughts, hopes, and dreams. There is a tone of humility and humor as he depicts how he met his first friend by bumping his head under the table, and makes a motif out of the head bump by referring to it again later when he's talking about helping other immigrant children.

He modestly credits his noble deeds at the community service agency to meeting his first friend, and humbly successful harvard application essays his hope that his own good deeds will inspire others to pay it forward. He does a good job of exhibiting his accomplishments in community service without sounding like he's bragging. Lucien could also make the essay more memorable and distinctive by including anecdotes of his experiences at the community service agency where he gave seminars and organized field trips.

He denotes his volunteering responsibilities in list form, which can seem a bit impersonal and résumé- like. For example, he mentions how he tried to understand the people he helped, but does not include how he goes about doing this, or whether learning about those unique individuals contributed to his experience.

My successful Harvard essay (animated version)

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Here's the COMPLETE application that got me into every school I applied to, including Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton. See my Common App, personal essays, and recommendation letters, and learn strategies for your own college application  · To help, this completely new edition of 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays showcases the exact approaches, both conventional and creative, that won over admissions officers at Harvard University, the nation's top-ranked college. From chronicling personal achievements to detailing unique talents, the variety of topics covered within these /5(24) The second edition of 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays follows the same format as the first: Editors of the Harvard Crimson student newspaper present essays from successful Harvard applicants and offer insightful comments on the strengths, weaknesses, and missed opportunities in each piece. Grouped into loose categories, such as "Memorable Moments" and "Influences," the essays /5(9)