essay寫的好，哈佛也沒跑，主頁菌只能幫你到這兒了……

如果說成績靠刷、履歷靠拼，在申請學校的過程中最難靠蠻力搞定的估計就是eaasy。真誠、真實、精彩都比不上打動招生官。

而且，你永遠想不到什麼樣的內容能打動他們，比如來自Quora網友My-Ngoc To申請哈佛時提交的一篇以「bra」為主題的essay竟然幫贏得了offer！而且在正式郵件上招生官還給他手寫了：「I really enjoyed reading your bra essay!」

原文如下：

I remember the first time I wore a bra. I came home from school in the fifth grade, and my mom handed me a white cloth to put on beneath my shirt. 「You』re a big girl now,」 she said, 「You need to wear this.」 From that moment on, my life was forever changed.

That same year, I was taught that the sun would someday die, and I, feeling the pressure of the contraption beneath my shirt, realized that my childhood, too, would eventually dissipate just like the sun.

The first bra paved way for a second, and then a third, and then, by the fourth bra I had advanced to the Lady Type, the ones that my mom wore.

With every new bra, I cast away the former. Somewhere in the dark abyss of my closet, there is a heap of abandoned bras, tiny, worn-out filaments that had once shone so brightly in their days of use, but had faded away into old, neglected remnants of days long gone. They sit against a corner of the universe and gather dust like dead stars— without life, without luster, without vigor.

With every new bra, I felt the unmerciful hand of change push me further down a path with which I had no return. The bras no longer had the simplicity of the first; they came equipped with more folds and stitches and frills and patterns that were designed to counteract the growing complexity of my responsibilities.

Sometimes, when I found myself too big for the current one, I was either unable to or unwilling to get another because of the implications behind the transition—if every new bra meant the death of another star, then the adult world was nothing to me but a lifetime of darkness. I tried so hard not to kill any more stars, but my resistance was not enough, and I found myself adding layer after layer to the ever-increasing pile of bras. With this mindset, I prepared myself for the end, for the moment in which my entire universe would be engulfed by the black hole forming in my closet.

But I was saved.

I learned that life does not occur linearly, but in cycles: New stars can arise from the ashes of former ones, and the darkness of death is replenished by the light of birth. Thus, what is created is only a reinterpretation of the past in a form that is fitted for the present. In wearing a new bra, I was not casting away my old self but reorienting myself to accommodate to changing times.

Change, as overwhelming as it feels, is only natural—the pile of bras will only get bigger. Though it is hard to accept the existence of the bra in my life, I realize that I cannot live without it, for, as we grow older, things tend to droop more easily, and there is nothing more reliable than a bra to give us the inner support necessary to have a firm hold on life.

雖然題材不能「套路」，但多參考前人的essay還是很有幫助的，這裡主頁菌就給大家推薦一些網站：

1、在addmitsee上檢索被哈佛錄取學生的共享信息

https://www.admitsee.com/blog/5-amazing-harvard-admissions-essays

2、Ivyapps

https://ivyapps.org/heres-essay-got-harvard-mit-princeton-yale/

3、apstudynotes

https://www.apstudynotes.org/harvard/

最後，再分享一篇來自Quora網友Yehong Zhu（studied at Harvard University）的essay，她選擇的話題是「描述意見正式或非正式的成就或事件，標誌著您在文化、社區或家庭中從童年到成年的過渡。」

I was in 9th grade the first time I stumbled upon a copy of Newsweek. What caught my eye was its trademark title: white type, red highlight, a connotation that stories of great consequence lay beneath. Such bold lettering gave me a moment』s pause, and I was prompted to leaf through its glossy pages.

To my surprise, I was instantly hooked.

A new world unfolded before me. Biting social commentary. World conflicts that weren』t dumbed-down. Piquant reviews of best-selling books, controversial exposés of political figures, tantalizing tidbits on pop culture, full-page spreads of Technicolor photographs.

And the prose was elegant, sharp, mesmerizing. It radiated sophistication and IQ. As I scanned the credentials of the authors, my only thought was, wow. The articles were written by worldly, ambitious people who were experts in their fields, people with PhDs and MBAs from world-class institutions, people who could write brilliantly, who got paid to give their opinions, who walked with a purpose and ran in the direction of their dreams. People I knew- then and there- I』d like to one day become.

This is what education looks like, I told myself. I was young, I was impressionable. Like a child standing on the outside of a candy store, nose pressed against the glass, I hungered to be a part of that cerebral adult world. So I read that magazine from cover to cover. Twice. And with each turn of the page I felt my small-town naiveté break into smaller and smaller pieces.

I remember that day as an incredibly humbling experience. I had an awkward, self-conscious epiphany: that I actually knew next to nothing about the world. There I was, cream of the crop of my middle school, fourteen years of 『smart』 outwitted by a thin volume of paper. I was used to feeling gifted, to getting gold stickers and good grades, to acing every elementary examination placed in front of my cocky #2 pencil.

I wasn』t used to feeling like I』d been living in the Dark Ages.

At the same time, however, I struggled with another realization, one that was difficult for me to define. I felt…liberated. I felt as though I had taken a breath of fresh air and found it to be bracing and delicious, like it was the first breath I』d ever taken and I』d never known that air was so sweet.

Talk about a paradigm-shift: somehow, reading Newsweek had rekindled my natural intellectual curiosity; it had, briefly, filled a hole in my soul that I didn』t know existed.

It had also sparked something within me- a hint of defiance, a refusal to accept complacency. One taste of forbidden fruit and I knew I could never go back.

Although reading a news magazine seemed like a non-event at the time, in retrospect it was one of the defining moments of my adolescence. That seemingly unextraordinary day set a lot of subsequent days in motion- days when I would push my limitations, jump a little higher, venture out of my comfort zone and into unfamiliar territory, days when I would fail over and over again only to succeed when I least expected it, days when I would build my dreams from scratch, watch them fall down, then build them back up again, and before I knew it the days bled into years and this was my life.

At 14, I』d caught a glimpse of where the bar was set. It always seemed astronomically high…until it became just out of my grasp.

Sadly, Newsweek Magazine went out of print on January 1, 2013. Odd as it may sound, I』ll always be indebted to an out-of-print magazine for helping me become the person I am today.

希望大家的essay都能正中招生官的下懷~

END

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