Friday, March 30, 2018
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
FW: college essay
Haran Kumar, Admitted to Harvard 2022
I wrote this essay last semester and was accepted into Harvard University, Early Action. All students admitted EA receive a personal letter from the admissions department, explaining exactly why they admitted us (flattery is a powerful tool to increase yield) and why they think we should attend. My admissions officer specifically cited his appreciation of the "maturity and candor" of my essay as a reason that I was admitted.
Don't try to copy my essay or try to artificially create experiences like the topic of my essay. However, think about areas of personal growth that have occurred over the past few years, and highlight a specific story that describes part of how this change in yourself occurred.
Below is the essay that got me into Harvard — I hope you enjoy.
I'm a socialist living in a former slave state. Don't get me wrong. Missouri sits at the forefront of progress: it's the first state to force cities to lower their minimum wages, the state with national recognition for police abuses towards people of color, the state leading the charge to bring back coal. What's not to love?
More than these retrogressive policies themselves, I was always saddened and intimidated by the people behind them. Living in an affluent suburb, though, I was insulated from the most zealous of the right. Rural Missouri was nothing more to me than flyover country, to be viewed through the filter of a television's glass or car's fastened window. Thus, I was apprehensive when I heard that my debate team was heading to the Parkview Invitational in Springfield, smack dab in the center of the state.
From the outset, the tournament did not seem promising. First, the captain warned us that the tournament would be "super lay." For the uninitiated, "lay" is debate lingo for "avoid debate lingo." "Super lay" means "speak slowly and avoid multisyllabic words." Your math teacher is lay; your six-year-old sister is super lay. The second bad omen was the captain's advice to avoid our case about curtailing religiously targeted surveillance, as many of Parkview's judges probably held anti-Muslim sentiments themselves. As a person of color, this warning did not bode well for the weekend.
Despite our expectations, the first few rounds were surprisingly normal. Yes, we had some lay judges and some bad opponents, and yes, we lost some rounds we totally deserved to win. But every tournament has those. This was not some inhospitable alien world; we might as well have been in St. Louis the whole weekend.
Then came the last round. The judge was a former college debater, so we deduced that he wouldn't be one of the "super lay backwoodsmen" of whom the captain had warned. Given our assumptions about the judge's political predisposition, we instinctively reached for the religious surveillance case, which would provide a strategic advantage against Parkview opponents. With just a glance, we knew that this team would make the thinly-veiled racist argument that surveilling Muslims based solely on their religion is necessary to prevent terrorism. I was already claiming victory over these unexpecting bigots, ready for an easy win.
When I heard them speak, I was befuddled. They brought up an argument we had never considered: given the intelligence community's history of circumventing civil rights legislation, it would probably skirt any anti-discrimination legislation; but our plan's temporary erasure of the public memory of abuse would yield a setback in the struggle against capitalism; and the only true resolution of racism would come from upending capitalism itself, the ultimate cause of all social stratification.
Although we vehemently disagreed with them and argued that, pragmatically, the plan would be a net improvement over the status quo, they were simply better debaters than us. Every argument we made was met with three more compelling counterarguments. Just minutes in, I knew we'd already lost. It was no surprise that the judge's ballot reflected our decisive annihilation.
Parkview defied my expectations: I met revolutionary communists instead of backwards bigots; I met the best opponents I'd ever encounter in my four years of debate, not the worst. My preconceptions about Central Missourians could not have been more wrong. I had no right to pity them and no reason to fear them; if the Parkview Invitational hosted a single bigot, it was yours truly.
In my countless hours of debate, superior opponents from both sides of the aisle have made me question my political beliefs. But Parkview removed an entire lens through which my worldview had been filtered. That day, I learned how easy it is to hold unfounded prejudices: if we hope to rid the world of hatred, we must first take a good look in the mirror.