50 Successful Harvard Application Essays

part
of it, and every single 
bisous
reminds of that fact.
Someone pushes me into the pool and my shriek is swallowed by the water. I surface and swear my
revenge, glaring all the while at Pierre, the obvious culprit, who is grinning unabashedly. Then he
yelps and falls as he himself is pushed in as well. The whole team eventually follows us into the water
to start the day’s warm up, and a small smile, fond and content, flits across my face before I join them.

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REVIEW
There is one sentence in Danielle’s essay in the past tense: a brief reflection on her stunted French
four months prior to the scene described. The breezy dismissal of those worries in the rest of the
essay has a certain 
je ne sais quoi,
admittedly; however it makes for a strange personal statement.
Persuasive essays as a form are often easier to grasp and consider when they are declarative (“Pick
me because of this.”) or contemplative (“Let us think about this lobster and convince you to pick me
because of my prescient observations about said shellfish.”). This is neither. There is no reflection as
to how she felt before her experience in France; there is sparse description of her interiority in
general.
But this refusal to engage with the standard mechanisms of personal statements makes Danielle’s
essay stand out. It seems alternatively attractive because of its refusal to conform to a seemingly
prescribed formula and disappointing because of its reliance on long chunks of hapless dialogue in
order to create an interesting plot.
The essay’s strength is its tone: Danielle writes just casually enough to allow a reader to enjoy the
essay, and creates a refreshing read, maybe because of, rather than in spite of, its lack of angle. But it
is a risky move, and one that could backfire. The safer path, for Danielle, would have been to write
about something more concrete. Her willingness to try something different worked for Danielle and
produced a high-quality essay.
—Christine A. Hurd

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