50 Successful Harvard Application Essays

H
ANNAH
U
MANSKI-
C
ASTRO
I am sitting on the end of a cafeteria table. My company is a familiar face: a new library book. At the
table behind me, my classmates are laughing. When I attempt to join them, they all fall silent,
avoiding my questioning glance. Tears well up in my eyes. “Why is this happening to me?”
This was a common scenario throughout my grade school experience, though it climaxed in fifth
grade, in a small class of only seventeen kids. The fifth grade was the year everyone was obsessed
with conformity. I never did fancy Follow the Leader. Maybe it was because I lived in an apartment
complex, and did not own clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch. Maybe it was because I was the
bespeckled girl whose nose was constantly lodged in a book. I loved school, and I loved reading;
thus, I became an easy target.
Sometimes, I wondered why they bullied me, why they purposely excluded me from their
conversations and their company, when they did not even know me. Now, I understand that they acted
the way they did because they did not know me. They did not comprehend how much I valued my
education. They did not know that because the post office was losing business, my dad was working
fewer hours, and that every penny he made he stretched to pay for our food, the bills, and my school’s
tuition. They did not know that my mom could not work because she was taking care of my baby
sister and my aging grandmother. Above all, they did not know what an education meant to my mom,
who left her home country of Costa Rica before she graduated from college so that she could earn
enough money to support her parents.
“Cariña,” my mom would say, “an education is the most important gift your father and I can give
you. We make sacrifices so that you and your brother and sister can have a better life, and make a
better future for yourselves. With an education, you can be whoever you want to be. You can achieve
your dreams!” It was a philosophy etched in my heart.
How could I best fulfill my dream? Despite being labeled an outcast by my classmates, I decided to
take the initiative. I reached out and became an active participant in my school community. By taking
advantage of the opportunities my school had to offer, I discovered my strengths and passions. In
addition, I developed a keen sense of fairness, and an ability to identify and reach out to others who
are feeling left out. These experiences helped me grow into a confident young woman, unafraid to
stand up for what I believe in, ready to do whatever it takes to fulfill my dreams. Wherever I go in the
future, I shall strive to listen and learn from all my experiences, without forgetting who I am.
REVIEW

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The five-hundred-word limit is Hannah’s greatest foe. Her aim: to communicate a tale of bullying, to
explain the extra-bullying hardships she had to face, and to weave it all together to produce an
optimistic, press-on-regardless mind-set. It’s a feat to do one of those effectively in five hundred
words, and this multitasking tale is strong and focused in spite of that barrier.
The present-tense opening establishes her alienated suffering. It is hard for her to ascertain exactly
what she should be conforming to other than a disdain of education, and she concludes that it is her
peers’ ignorance of her home life that preempts the bullying. As a study in form, the introductory
veneer of a knowledge-loving young girl behind a library book pitying her bullies for their
uncompassionate ways shows that the crux of the essay is not this love of education—a seemingly
perfect desire for admission into Harvard—but the even more empathic love for fellow human
beings, most notably her family. And though Hannah does not have enough space to communicate
years of struggle, the crafting of her sentences lends the piece some urgent candor.
The end of the essay does have a rushed, vague feel. We don’t know what passions she has
developed and how she reached out and “became an active participant.” However, this seems more to
be the effect of a writer who thought what she wrote before was too negative, and thus the positive
recompense must be illustrated in Technicolor. For the young woman who had an uneasy high school
career and internally created pressure to succeed for her family, she traces the ravine and the ascent
for the reader to follow. Her empathic capacities to make others identify with her plight are on
display, just as she claims she strives to do.
—Christine A. Hurd

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