Official Ivy Essay Thread

<p>I'd like to take the liberty of naming my thread "official" since I've been haning around and haven't found anything else relevant to this particular part of the app. Everyone I talked to agreed that essay is about one of the most important components of all you can send in. and the thing is, essays give you a chance to present your personality to adcoms more than any EC list or even recommendation letters can.
So what are we going to do with this thread? As to me, I'm going to post the essays that ACTUALLY got through the cruel process and helped their authors to a seat in the Ivies. I can't start opening essay threads in every Ivy box, so this one is intended to every Ivy-bound, not restricted to Harvard. However, since my collection is really small and can run out any minute, you're here to help. Help the rest and help yourself too. *Please post the successful essays that you have access to, as well as the tips (and tricks) you know, in exchange for those from others:) * Special thanks to current Ivy students who are willing to share their work which adcoms deemed excellent;)
Moreover, if you have an essay that you took so much pains to compose, but which you can't get reliable opinions from proofreaders, you can post it here to receive comments from other CC members too. I will be only too pleased to give you any help I can.
Much appreciation:)</p>

<p>This one is from one of my fellow-highschoolers, who is working on Asian Studies in Harvard. She spent some time in Germany, as she pointed out below. SAT I around 1300; I'm inquiring about her SAT IIs. She's the pioneer over here, cuz before her admission people had regarded Harvard too big to even think of applying.</p>

<p>"As my teacher drew a cylindrical with sticks on it on the blackboard, all I could do was stare up at her with my dark-brown eyes and a sympathetic frown. “Dein G-E-B-U-R-T-S-T-A-G?” (Your birthday?) she asked. She also pursed her lips, which, in later retrospect, must have been an attempt to mimic the blowing of candles. Still, I was clueless about what she wanted from me and turned nervously round to my father for help. – It was my first school day in Germany, and my form teacher had just resorted to her last means to communicate with me. Her smile, mixed with desperation, as she asked my father to be our interpreter is still vivid in my mind even years after this incidence. She little knew that I had never had a birthday cake before when I was still in Vietnam. Vietnam could not have been any more different from Germany, especially over ten years ago. Miraculous, therefore, was the speed with which I mastered to break the language barrier and mingle with my peers. By the time my classmates had learnt half of the ABC, I was already interacting, thinking, and dreaming in German, as a ‘German’.</p>

<p>Years afterwards, and thousands of miles away from ‘my’ Germany, back in Vietnam in 8th grade, I found myself in an all too familiar situation. 32 pairs of eyes stuck on me as I struggled to read aloud a history text and bungled the intonations, mispronouncing every second word. The new teacher must have looked even more discouraged than my dear old German teacher that instant. My conception of Vietnam had long faded into a mishmash of facts and clichés. Only a week ago, on the airplane, I was more worried about the absence of the ‘Backstreet Boys’ than about coming to a land whose language I hardly spoke. Amid the culture shock and the unendurably sultry climate I mourned the days I was without much effort the best in class. I was stunned by the gigantic workload that Vietnamese students had after school, at the ‘extra-study’ movement out-of-school, the rigid school regulations, and the mechanical memorizing in certain humanities subjects. I was a year behind in physics, seven years or more in Vietnamese literature, and it seemed as though I had never had <em>real</em> math lessons. It was clear that this time I would not adjust to the new living conditions as naturally as I did when a child with an unshaped mind.</p>

<p>Accustomed to the non-chalant learning philosophy in the German classroom, I found myself misplaced in the midst of my study-oriented Vietnamese classmates. Night-study became a frequent must in order to complete my schoolwork and my social life was reduced to 5-minute talks between lessons. Giving up never weighed on my mind; choosing how to go on was a much more difficult decision. If I continued to adopt the perfunctory study habits of my friends, I would be forever one step behind may I spend twice as much time and effort on every task. Experimenting with new study methods, on the other hand, was ill-timed: By the end of the one-term trial period I needed satisfactory study results to stay in class.</p>

<p>If there was only one significant concept I learned to value in the Confucian-based Vietnamese education, it was persistence and self-motivation. Lack of talent or, as in my case, unusual life circumstances are never excuses for bad performance in school. German students are divided into different learning groups as early as 5th grade, and only a small fraction study beyond grade 10 to enter higher education. Meanwhile, Vietnamese students grow up with the motto ‘If you give your best, you will come out as a winner.’ I took the risk. I dropped my extra-classes, and studied independently at home over my pile of books. Admittedly, it took me at first even more time to absorb information than having a teacher in extra-class explain everything. However, I often understood and retained more than others through inquiring deeply into the subject matters. Once I had accumulated enough verbal, practical, and intellectual foundation I was able to shorten my study hours and allow myself more time to pursue personal interests. Results so far have been overwhelming. After the first year, I was already in the upper third of the class. Another year, and I would outdo hundreds of co-applicants and get into Vietnam's top senior high school.</p>

<p>Until now, 8th grade has been the most emotionally and physically intense year for me. It is at the same time the most rewarding one - the period of change that characterized my last 3 years in Vietnam. Having had the chance to test and confirm my abilities so early in life, I feel confident and eager to conquer new challenges to come.</p>

<hr>

<p>Copyright (C) HAO Forum: <a href="http://www.hn-ams.org/forum%5B/url%5D"&gt;www.hn-ams.org/forum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Hi, this is an essay I've been working on so any thoughts or comments would be greatly, greatly appreciated</p>

<p>"Eva Peron consumed my seven-year-old mind. Actually, I was not obsessed with the deceased wife of the 1950’s Argentinean dictator, Juan Peron; I was obsessed with her reincarnation in the film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita. As portrayed by Madonna, Eva was young, attractive, and dead from ovarian cancer at the age of thirty-three. It was this last part that piqued my interest in Evita because, at seven, I could not accept that God would ever let anyone die so young.
I discovered Evita during a time of spiritual crisis. I know, I know, seven-year-olds are not generally plagued by questions of religious faith, but most seven year olds do not have to contemplate…never mind. I truly did want to believe in an Almighty reigning over heaven because the thought of an afterlife comforted me. Moreover, such convictions would put me closer to the societal mainstream in a town in which the majority of kids attended religious education after school. Unfortunately, I was too much of a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately second grader to commit myself to some guy who refused to even pop in for the occasional, “Hello.” Without a Creator and the accompanying promise of an afterlife, death remained a mystery to me, bone chilling but riveting. Death was an unavoidable metamorphosis, and it was not magnificent like the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Death was the part that came later, when that pretty little butterfly plummeted to the earth on a frosty winter morning.
This is why the concept of dying young seemed impossible to me. The butterfly did not die during summer; it died during winter. If death were an ending with nothing more beyond it, then every creature should be given a substantial amount of time on Earth. That this duration of time varied from species to species did not bother me as I figured that the species with lesser life spans had just drawn shorter straws at the dawning of the Universe. They were not being cheated of anything but, rather, were getting what they had coming to them in the ultimate sense of the phrase. Nor did it concern me that some people lived longer than others because asserting a difference between seventy-eight and seventy-nine was like drawing a distinction between infinity and infinity plus one.
Then along came Evita. That Argentinean flameout threw a wrench into my elaborately constructed philosophical system. Thirty-three was just too young to die, especially for a woman who had spent her entire life mamboing her way through melodramatic musical numbers. It was clearly unfair that Eva had been robbed of a good forty years of life for the crimes of singing too much and having a few too many costume changes. Still, something about Evita’s death was alluring. Death was gripping, transfixing when accompanied by a reprise of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” And Madonna-Eva looked so alive as all those peasants bowed before her peaceful corpse. Maybe death wasn’t scary; maybe it was just another step in the progression through life.
George taught me how foolish all these hopeful thoughts were. George wasn’t a relative or a friend. George was a longhaired guinea pig – my guinea pig – and a non-entity in my family’s life until he caught pneumonia. Suddenly he was a crisis, a lost cause needing to be saved. At my urging, my parents put George on an aggressive course of intravenous antibiotics. Tragically, despite the best efforts of the local veterinary community, George perished. And I was the one who found the body.
I was just going over to George’s cage to check on his water when I noticed that he wasn’t moving. Unsure what to do, I opened the cage door and lifted him to see if I could wake him from his slumber. I had to wait for my parents’ confirmation to believe that George was dead. Confirmation in hand, I became inconsolable. Not only because George was gone, but also because Andrew Lloyd Webber had lied to me. Death didn’t really come with songs sung in voiceover and dead things were clearly different from living things. Death really was the horror that I imagined it to be. Suddenly, I lost hope for divine intervention to save my forty-three year old father from colon cancer.
Don’t worry; we gave George a funeral fit for, well, a guinea pig. We buried him in our finest shoebox in the best plot in the backyard. My sister and I hovered over his grave sobbing and singing songs from Evita as hymns to send George off to nothing.
George wasn’t the only thing laid to rest that night. Any hopes I had for God followed that guinea pig into the ground. Now He, Evita, and George non-exist together. And my father survived through his own power. Amen."</p>

<p>wow jessgill...that was a very good essay. Well written, and quirky as well. But remember, it may be risky, what if the admissions officer is a devout Christian? Harvard is in the New England area, and that area is heavily christian...</p>

<p>i kind of agree with you littleone, that's the big thing i've been worried about with this essay</p>

<p>Jessgill </p>

<p>Nice Essay!
IT seems to be a little informal...which might be the style your are going for...but you might also want to think about adding some more "big word" vocab.</p>

<p>If you guys need examples, buy "100 Successul College Application Essays". It's really good. After each essay, there's a brief review. It also has a chapter on what to do and expecially, on what NOT to do.</p>

<p>"big word" vocab is just the thing that could ruin a perfectly good essay like this. it sounds pretentious and is often misplaced. simpler is almost always better.</p>

<p>Don't worry about vocab. Instead, worry about structure. The main idea in the piece is that you're exploring how your early exposure to death affected your faith. But when you spend too long talking about other things and don't come back to that main idea often enough, we lose a sense of direction. There are so many ideas introduced (Evita, your religious community, George, your father's cancer, God, etc.) that we lose track of what you're talking about.
In fact, less is more. If I had a recommendation for you, Jessgill, it would be that you use just ONE idea—one conceit, one example—throughout the narrative. Start off by talking about the specific example, and then move to the general. Don't keep switching back and forth between examples and the meaning behind them: it just makes us lose any sense of pacing. Then at the end of the piece, once you've presented your director's message, tie it back in subtly to the example, and you have unity and good structure. As it is, it's just too much all at once, and that makes it hit your readers less effectively than such a meaningful exploration should. When you're writing something so short as a college application essay, you don't have room to get complex and add lots of different ideas. The simpler your essay is, the tighter it will feel, and less likely it is to get in the way of its own powerful message.
Just my opinion, anyway. You can of course think I'm full of **** and ignore me.</p>

<p>WOW, i lovedher essay...especiaLLY the first paragraph, totally captured my attention.</p>

<p>Jessgill, i liked your essay, and it's on a very different topic too. but somethings in there may be too colloquial? like "i know, i know..." =)</p>

<p>hehe I'm a little too shy to post the beginnings of my essay just yet... still working the kinks out........ but jess i think your essay is great. i'm jealous...</p>

<p>Sozo--I would agree with conwoman here. The #1 flaw in application essays is the presence of "big words" that just don't fit. It makes the writer's anxieties obvious.</p>

<p>I'd agree, sunglasses. 95% of kids can't use so-called "SAT words" and pull them off.</p>

<p>That Schrodinger's College Applicant (on that link) one is really, really good. I'd heard OF it before, but I'd never read it myself until now.</p>

<p>OMG, I didn't expect such a big turnout:) My phoneline is working strangely these days, so it's kinda hard to catch up. I promised to help you what I could w/ your essays. Of course I'm none of these Harvard-educated editors that cost you $99 for proofreading, but I hope it helps.
Jessgill's essay:
Central theme: yes (I think death is a bit sinister for a theme, but you worked it out all right)
Captivating opening: yes (particularly big deal, if you don't want adcoms to doze off reading your essay, and go on dozing while they read MINE:D
Biggest drawback: it doesn't tell adcoms many good things about YOU. Where's the part that implies you're intellectually potential/versatile/devoted to community/bla bla? Remember the essay is about your only chance to do so.
As to your religious inclination, well, I myself don't give a damn (mind you, most VNmese like me, if you don't mind the word, are atheists. We don't follow any particular religion regularly, as a matter of fact). I just hope these Ivy folks are religion-tolerant.</p>

<p>You might find this one and some of the next familiar. Sure, cuz it was published in "50 Successful Harvard Essays". But then not everyone has the book. I myself can never have one, and I wouldn't mind at all if you have the book and will post a sample inside for us poor kids;)
This one is written by Uyen-Khanh Quang-Dang, who attended a public high school in Santa Clara, CA. She is a talented yound lady, who has just graduated from Harvard Medical School last year and who was a former president of HVA - Harvard-Vietnamese Association.</p>

<p>Wendy</p>

<p>I was walking down the hallway, my shoulders sagging from the weight of my backpack nearly bursting with books on the way to a student council meeting, from the worries of the canned food drive, from all the thoughts which cluttered my brain just moments before. I sank into a deep thought about the two names, Wendy and Uyen-Khanh.</p>

<p>My parents, my grandmother, and all my peers at the Sunday Vietnamese Languages School know me as Uyen-Khanh, my name as written on my birth certificate. Yet I was a wholly different person to my “American” friends and teacher – I had always been Wendy. Even some of the award certificates I received read: “Wendy Quang-Dang.” </p>

<p>Wendy is an invented name bestowed upon me by my kindergarten teacher who decided that Uyen-Khanh was too difficult to pronounce. In fact, it became so convenient that I began to introduce myself as Wendy to avoid the hassle of having to slowly enunciate each syllable of “Uyen-Khanh” and hear it transformed into “won-ton” or “ooh-yenkong.” It was especially hard on substitute teachers, who would look up from the roll book, flustered and perplexed as they tried their best not to completely destroy my name. Wendy also greatly decreased the looks of terror and embarrassment as people would struggle to remember how to say “Uyen-Khanh” two minutes after we had been introduced. </p>

<p>But at that moment standing alone in the hallway, I decided that I wanted to be known to all as one person: Uyen-Khanh. Wendy had served me well for the past eight years since kindergarten, but it was time I let go of a nickname and recognized the name written on my birth certificate. </p>

<p>I took me over three months of consistent persistence and patience to erase the name so many had known me by. Letting up on my determination to brand Uyen-Khanh into everyone’s memory for even just a second was not a possibility if I wanted my mission to be successful. This meant pretending not to hear someone calling me unless it was some form of Uyen-Khanh. I would interrupt people mid-greeting and stand my ground when my friends would glare angrily at me and whine, But I’ve always known you as Wendy!” My philosophy was that people must respect my wishes to say Uyen-Khanh. By the end of those three long months my resoluteness had paid off and I was richly rewarded by the sound of Uyen-Khanh pronounced smoothly and effortlessly by my closest friends. </p>

<h2>I was thirteen years old born and raised in San Jose, the second largest Vietnamese populated city in the United States. A first generation Vietnamese citizen of this country, English was as native to me as the language of my ancestors, Vietnamese. I grew up a “true American,” as my grandmother would call it, for I did not just adapt to the all-American lifestyle, I lived it. When I decided to shed the name casually given to me in kindergarten, it seemed to some that I was “going back” to my true heritage, believing that being called Uyen-Khanh would somehow make me more Vietnamese. The truth was I was more “American” then ever when Uyen-Khanh replaced Wendy. Being born and raised in San Jose as a first-generation Vietnamese citizen made me who I am, a Vietnamese-American. Uyen-Khanh was just the name I was given at birth, and it was simply time to acknowledge it.</h2>

<p>(C) Copyright Harvard Crimson</p>

<p>This is an analysis from the Admissions:</p>

<p>Uyen-Khanh’s essay falls squarely into the “identity” category, as the writer tells the story of defining her American identity by deciding to force her friends to call her by her given name, Uyen-Khanh, rather than a long-held American nickname, Wendy.</p>

<p>The writer expresses the difficulties she experiences and the persistence necessary to change the way she is viewed by her peers and teachers while stealthily squeezing in several allusions to her life as a busy student (“student council meetings,” “Vietnamese Language School,” and “canned food drives.”) There allusions are so well integrated that her essay doesn’t lose its flow or sense of direction, in fact, they show that she is very much the “true American” she says she is in the text.</p>

<p>This essay’s greatest strength is in its style. Neither flowery nor over-written, the essay is simple and straightforward without bring formulaic or trite. Uyen-Khanh efficiently tells the story of her name and links that to her identity as a Vietnamese American person at once deeply appreciative of her Vietnamese heritage, but every bit an American. She does a good job of moderating her stance so that what could have been an angry treatise shows her to be firm and compassionate. It shows her to patiently refuse to yield when friends try to revert to her nickname, but at the same time allowing them time to get used to pronouncing her given name. All together this is a solid essay with a good tone, pacing and language. </p>

<p>There are few weaknesses to speak of in Uyen-Khanh’s essay; if anything she may have missed some opportunities to further expand on her description of herself as a Vietnamese American. Every college essay is a compromise of thoughts and space as one tries to strike a comfortable balance between self-promotion and reflection. Ultimately, this essay reflects numerous good choices and results in a success.
_ Jason M. Goins</p>

<p>This is an analysis from the Admissions:</p>

<p>Uyen-Khanh’s essay falls squarely into the “identity” category, as the writer tells the story of defining her American identity by deciding to force her friends to call her by her given name, Uyen-Khanh, rather than a long-held American nickname, Wendy.</p>

<p>The writer expresses the difficulties she experiences and the persistence necessary to change the way she is viewed by her peers and teachers while stealthily squeezing in several allusions to her life as a busy student (“student council meetings,” “Vietnamese Language School,” and “canned food drives.”) There allusions are so well integrated that her essay doesn’t lose its flow or sense of direction, in fact, they show that she is very much the “true American” she says she is in the text.</p>

<p>This essay’s greatest strength is in its style. Neither flowery nor over-written, the essay is simple and straightforward without bring formulaic or trite. Uyen-Khanh efficiently tells the story of her name and links that to her identity as a Vietnamese American person at once deeply appreciative of her Vietnamese heritage, but every bit an American. She does a good job of moderating her stance so that what could have been an angry treatise shows her to be firm and compassionate. It shows her to patiently refuse to yield when friends try to revert to her nickname, but at the same time allowing them time to get used to pronouncing her given name. All together this is a solid essay with a good tone, pacing and language. </p>

<p>There are few weaknesses to speak of in Uyen-Khanh’s essay; if anything she may have missed some opportunities to further expand on her description of herself as a Vietnamese American. Every college essay is a compromise of thoughts and space as one tries to strike a comfortable balance between self-promotion and reflection. Ultimately, this essay reflects numerous good choices and results in a success.
_ Jason M. Goins</p>

<p>I like that she still made a meaningful essay, but at the same time didn't write a billion words and was straight to the point. That's what I'm having difficulty with right now (Still shortening my 870 word essay...)</p>

<p>Please...I'm doing my job. Where are those who did get admitted? We need your help. Thanks in advance:)</p>