50 Successful Harvard Application Essays

A
L
I
.
D
UISWIN
Invisible Neighbors
My community encompasses a broad spectrum of racial, religious, and economic diversity. I became
more acquainted with what this really means last summer, when I volunteered with my school
UNICEF club at the Sacred Heart Organization five miles from my home, helping to distribute school
supplies to low-income families. I was appalled to see the lines of people wrapping around two city
blocks; I had never imagined there were so many underprivileged families in my community.
While checking eligibility documents and registering families with schoolchildren, I had the
opportunity to chat with two Guatemalan mothers in their early twenties, recently arrived to the States
with two children each. Their husbands worked as day laborers two hours away in Stockton. With a
fragmented family stretched across northern California, these young mothers went to their limits to
make ends meet. I could only imagine their anxiety as they arrived at the center the previous night,
with only a thermos of hot soup to keep themselves warm. They spoke of several young delinquents
who made catcalls and verbally harassed them in the early morning, yet they continued to sit on that
bench, determined to wait out the fear and cold in order to obtain essential supplies for their families.
I took special care to pack extra crayons and colored pencils into their children’s backpacks, as I
could only vicariously experience their plight.
This fleeting experience—this conversation with aspiring, ambitious immigrants—juxtaposed the
extremes of privilege and need in my community. It also led me to reevaluate my perception of the
American Dream as humble, modest gains rather than miracle stories, such as striking an overnight
rags-to-riches jackpot. As the son of middle-class skilled immigrants, I enjoy the relative comfort of
a warm, supportive family with plenty of amenities to indulge in. However, I have realized that
poverty and ambition lie only a few miles from my home. Thus, I feel proud to help disadvantaged
community members improve their temporal circumstances through hard work, perseverance, and
above all, hope.
As I consider a future career and my role in society, I will never forget these unseen people whose
reticent needs are so inadequately addressed. One major issue concerning our nation is affordable
health care for minority groups with limited access to medical facilities, mainly due to economic
hardships. The state of California now mandates vaccinations for schoolchildren, stressing the dire
need for maintaining public health. Seeing such a predicament in my local community has further
piqued my interest in the fields of pathology and immunology as I hope to one day discover cost-
effective treatment methods that would be accessible to all impoverished communities—not just in the
United States, but internationally as well. This would be a testament to my dream of furthering
UNICEF’s goal of improving the welfare of women and children mired in poverty worldwide.

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REVIEW
Al’s essay takes the form of a personal mission statement, relating his hopes and goals to the reader.
His essay is heartfelt, and it is clear that he is earnest in his concerns. But the overly ambitious scope
of his writing is detrimental to the effect he is trying to achieve. In the space allotted to him, Al muses
on the American Dream, poverty, vaccinations, affordable health care, and the plight of immigrant
laborers. It’s a lot of material to cover in such a short essay and none of these subjects receive a great
deal of attention.
There’s the seed of a terrific story in Al’s encounter with the Guatemalan mothers and it could
have benefited from expansion. This was a formative experience for him, and if he were to
demonstrate why he would have an even more successful essay. What caused these women to tell Al
their story? Why did they stand out from the others he saw that day? Why did their story resonate with
him? A tighter focus on this or a similar moment could have granted the reader insight into Al as a
person that simply isn’t there in the piece as written.
In this essay, Al could have utilized the commonly spoken instruction—“show, don’t tell.”
Integrating this story with the thoughts and feelings it inspired in him would have led to a stronger
essay than the one he managed to produce. Still, the ambition is clearly there, and Al presents himself
as an interesting and intelligent person who would be an excellent addition to Harvard.
—Zach T. Osborn

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