Application Essay Sample:Harvard University

A few months ago, I looked in the mirror and saw, as usual, a youngish face, which I perceived as about twelve, maybe thirteen years old. Bt this time I realized a deeper reason for that perception: I actually identified myself, my mind and personality, with the boy I was at that age. So, I struggled with the question, “How do I differ from that seventh-grader?” distinguishing between my thoughts then and my thoughts now perplexed me: I recalled a similar way of working, intellectual capacity, and motivations. Yet the problem gnawed at me because I knew something fundamental had changed in me. After all, I was looking on that seventh-grader as a distinct personality. But why did I? What distinguished him from me? I realized eventually that the difference between that seventh-grader and me was that, since seventh grade, I ad gained an outlook, a way of examining the broader world I had never considered bore. The separation was clear: bore the spring of tenth grade, I had lived but had never really examined life. Nigel Calder’s Einstein’s Universe finally ignited my mind with ardent inquiry.

Calder’s lucid but mentally taxing explanation of Einstein’s theories forced my perspective to dilate many times over. Instead of thinking in feet and miles, suddenly my fifteen-year-old mind was trying to consider millions of light years, curved space, hopping from star to black hole and back to Earth. Naturally, I was not entirely successful, but more important, the experience plunged me into a new realm of thought, visions of the vast universe floating in my mind. At first, thinking of the astronomical expanse, I delved into the obvious questions of ultimate meaning, an exceedingly elusive goal. Yet because of this errant speculation, my mind was still churning with my new view, an extremely expanded perspective about life on earth which impelled me to find out about the universal principles of existence.

Now, more than ever, I gravitated toward science. Bore reading Einstein’s Universe and undertaking my mental voyage, I had been interested in science because it was tidy, neat. Suddenly, that interest was ablaze with a passion for truth, knowledge, and not just in science. The hazy ideas that history was a study in human failure and triumph, that literature laid bare the human experience, and that science, science would reveal unifying principles of our chaotic, swirling existence burst from mist into light. In the eleventh grade, the logic of evolution, the wonder of genetics, the grand design of physiology all seemed the more magnificent because they were natural consequences of chemistry. That year, inspired by the potential of biology for finding truth about man, I made my career choice: genetic research, the area in which I think I could make the greatest strides in doing the higher good as human being, contributing to society. My physics teacher this year has taught me an even greater principle: science merely describes the real world and cannot be mistaken for absolute truth.

Ultimately, experiencing Einstein’s Universe incited me to contemplate truly for the first time to reevaluate my fundamental belis and form those which have made me more confident and peacul than ever. Recently, I looked in the mirror at a yougist face, still a boy’s, but now that face conceals a vision more expansive than the seventh-grader ever imagined.

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