哈佛大学的优秀录取文书大公开，如何才能获取名校的青睐？

2026 Fall 申请季已经进入尾声，ED/EA 放榜陆续揭晓，RD申请也即将截止。在这个申请季的尾声，我们一起来看看获得哈佛青睐的尾声是什么样的。这些文书来自真实的哈佛新生，每一篇都展现了独特的声音和真实的成长轨迹。

01. Claire’s Essay

In my vision I focus on a lone front tooth backdropped by a black abyss; thin lips dance around it in motions forming words, yet I can’t seem to hear them.

In the kitchen behind my grandfather sits his definition of luxury — a now stale and cold Filet-o-Fish from the Beijing McDonald’s. American basketball plays on the television across from where we’re sitting on the sofa; players’ shoes squeak and balls bounce louder in my ears than those words. In this moment, his Mandarin goes in one ear and out the other. I don’t listen the way I do when he’s screaming at my mother, a bitter, blind rage fueled by undercurrents of fear and “I miss you.”

My focus blurs, and the tooth disappears. Basketball fades to silence, and I’m on the airplane home to America. We’re separated once more by an ocean and three thousand unspoken miles. It’s a whirlwind; five years pass, and my few apathetic summers in China are over before I can blink twice.

The last clear memory I have is waking up on my thirteenth birthday to my dad handing me the landline kept for international phone calls: “Waigong has something he wants to read to you.”

It is a poem that he had written about me. Through the phone, I could do nothing but hear his voice, static worsening the Mandarin already slurred by missing teeth. The poem says everything he loved about his granddaughter, everything he saw in her, despite barely knowing her. It is a reflection of last dreams, visions, and hopes of his own.

He was gone not long after that, once more turned to forever.

It wasn’t until I found myself chancely entrenched in poetry because of a mandatory school competition that I began to think deeply about this disconnected relationship. Poetry Out Loud’s anthology introduced me to hundreds and hundreds of poems, and I felt like a hungry child at a buffet. When I discovered “Old Men Playing Basketball” by B.H. Fairchild, I saw tired arms and shaky hands as a pure geometry of curves, hobbling slippers as the adamant remains of that old soft shoe of desire. In words, I was safe to miss my grandfather for all the things that made him human. For the first time in my life, I began to realize that I might have a love for beautiful words that ran deep in my blood, a love that couldn’t be lost in translation.

On that makeshift podium in the school cafeteria my sophomore year, “Old Men Playing Basketball” becomes “Waigong Playing Basketball.” I’m taken back to that sofa in Beijing one more time, where he takes my small hand into his tremoring one covered by gray-brown patches of melasma, where he tells me, “You are a gift, a wonder. You are a hu die.” Butterfly: my Chinese name. Born to one day fly.

But it is no longer his voice I hear. It is my own— crisp and clear, raw and strong. The poem becomes the glass wand of autumn light breaking over the backboard, where boys rise up in old men. I see the whole scene this time, not just tooth and abyss. I hear every word.

Perhaps I will never be able to know my grandfather beyond his love of basketball and poetry, or hear his voice read me another poem. But when I am stirred by beautiful lines or liberated by my pen on paper, I know I am one of two same hearts, forever bound together by the permanence and power of language.

I am a vessel in flight, listening, writing, speaking to remember histories, to feel emotion, to carry forth dreams and visions and hopes of my own. My grandfather becomes an elegant mirage of a basketball player, carried by a quiet grace along my trail of spoken words floating upwards toward heaven.

有些文书告诉你一个人是谁，而 Claire 的文书向你展示了她是如何成为这个人的。

这篇文书的出色之处不仅在于“鱼到大学新生”的隐喻，或是她将移民和生物学这两个招生官经常看到的主题联系在一起的故事，而在于她如何让这些熟悉的主题变得个人化。她描述不适感时的从容自如，以及她用诚实捕捉语言障碍带来的尴尬和孤立的方式，令人印象深刻。

一个不够深思熟虑的作者可能只会简单地说“学英语很难”。但 Claire 向我们展示了“如何难”——她通过《海绵宝宝》重播、文字游戏和对标注图表的迷恋，运用创造性的幽默自嘲,同时揭示了自己独特的技能、缺陷和优势。这正是招生官想看到的：用一种成熟的反思方式，让故事在屏幕之外生动地呈现出来。

她不只是谈论韧性，而是向我们展示韧性从何而来，以及艺术和科学如何成为理解世界的方式。她的写作生动但不过度，像“语言在我舌尖上像鱼一样滑溜”这样的隐喻之所以真实，是因为它们来自真实的生活经历。当她在结尾写下“你会找到属于你的水”时，这句话落地有声。这不只是一个巧妙的结尾——它是一个安静而慷慨的提醒：成长不必声势浩大才能真实。

02. Barry’s Essay

I woke up one morning to the usual noise in the kitchen. “That plate of porridge is mine,” my brother yelled outrageously at my sister, “leave it or else I will beat you up.” Food scrambles and fights were order of the day in the family I was raised. The size of one’s meal would be determined by one’s age. You had to fight for food at times, or else hunger would eat you alive. Living with ten siblings in a polygamous family is not the definition of tranquility. However, I have learned more from this revolving door than I could have been taught in solitary silence. Beyond chaos, there is a whisper that teaches the benefits of unselfish concern.

My mother was a teacher, but her salary could not sustain the big family. Almost every day, she would wake up early in the morning before work and go to the fields. My parents were shadowy figures whose voices I heard vaguely in the morning when sleep was shallow, and whom I glimpsed with irresistibly heavy eye-lids as they trudged wearily into the house at night. We sat together as a whole family on special occasions. After a bumper harvest, my parents would sell their crops in the neighborhood. I vividly remember my mother counting proceeds from the crop sale, her dark face grim, and I think now, beautiful. Not with the hollow beauty of well-simulated features, but with a strong radiance of one who has suffered and never yielded. “This is for your school fees arrears,” she would murmur making a little pile. “This is for the groceries that we borrowed from Mr Kibe’s store,” and so on. The list was endless. We would survive at least for the present.

My father instilled in me the importance of education. I would see the value of education every time I shook hands with him; the scratches and calluses from the field in his hands were enough motivation. After every award I received, he would firmly shake my hands as a sign of profound pride. My tacit prayer was to ease his pain one day. Unfortunately this was never to come true, he died on 5 February 2016 in a car accident, only a week before I received my IGCSE O LEVEL results and I had attained 14 straight A grades, standing out to be one of the top performers in the country. After my father’s death, his brothers took everything that he had acquired.

Inevitably, circumstances forced me to take a break from school in January 2017 and bear my share of the eternal burden at home. I had to take care of my mother whose health was deteriorating. I would spend the day doing household chores, and the nights were times of intensive study. It was on my mother’s deathbed when I was fully convinced that she was a seasoned fighter. “Barry,” she called me, “I am not going to die till you finish school.” In order not to disillusion that extraordinary faith in her voice, I assured her that she was going to live. Unfortunately, she succumbed to death on the 15th of March 2017. I “died” with her. My belief in the God she had ardently prayed to till the time of her demise was shaken.

Already laid waste by poverty and pain, I went back to school through the generosity of strangers. School became a battleground for victory. I came back to life determined than ever before. I out-performed the country boys who mocked my struggle. I went on to win accolades in the National and Regional Mathematics Olympiads and was awarded the Higher Life Foundation Scholarship that was going to pay my fees throughout high school.

Today, I am an epitome of a black, double-orphaned, African boy who lost everything he ever valued, but refused to give up on his dream.

一个粗心的读者可能会误以为 Barry 这篇关于在一个十几个人的混乱非洲家庭中成长的文书写得很差。毕竟，它确实带有一些“未完成草稿”的特征：比如非惯用语的表达，像“我的兄弟yelled outrageously”而不是“yelled in outrage”；或者那个看似无法忽视的蓝色波浪线，谷歌文档在“I came back to life determined than ever before”下面插入，提示作者补上省略的“more”。

但这样的指责忽略了这篇文书的巨大优势：它的细节观察力如鹰眼般敏锐，情感细腻入微，以及诗人般的遣词造句能力。大多数作者会比 Barry 提前一句话结束开头段落，满足于简洁地陈述“我从这个(忙碌的家庭)学到的东西比我在孤独的沉默中学到的更多”——一个对文书主题的简洁总结。但 Barry 知道，最好的说服性写作是把这种清晰性作为基础，在此之上构建能以简单事实陈述无法做到的方式打动读者的句子。

幸运的是，Barry 文书的其余部分至少和开头一样有效。无论是用克制的轻描淡写传递父亲去世的消息——这种克制比最尖锐的葬礼哀号更响亮地传达悲伤，还是在旁白中停顿下来，注意到母亲在平凡地计算家庭开支时脸上的美丽，我们在阅读时都能感受到 Barry 的思维，感受到他的存在——他的智慧指纹清晰可辨，即使在数字页面上。

03. Isabelle’s Essay

Breakfast after church is a Sunday staple in my family. We’re not allowed to eat beforehand, so right after Mass ends, my sister and I race to the bagel shop only to inevitably wait in a long line. Often when we reached the cashier, we’d find they were out of plain bagels. It was a perennially difficult decision: pick from an assortment of non-plain bagels, or wait another 20 minutes for new plain bagels.

People’s bagel choices tell you everything about them, and I was a plain bagel girl through and through. Even when faced with 20 extra minutes of hunger, I decided to leave the sweet bagels for the adventurous, the savory for the straightforward, and the “everything” for the indecisive. I came for plain bagels, and I would get them, no matter the wait.

After a long wait, the warmth of the freshly-baked plain bagels radiating through the paper bag assured me my patience was worth it. Being a plain bagel girl means knowing exactly what you want—no more, no less. It means that I’m in control of my decision-making and always end up satisfied.

In senior year, my teacher graciously brought bagels to our class. Upon approaching the bag, however, I found there were no plain bagels left. Instinctively, I retreated. But my teacher stopped me and advised that I break from my comfort zone. Reluctantly, I chose an egg bagel, preferring its odd yellow shade to the surrounding sweeter variety (who wants a french toast bagel anyway?). My first bite introduced me to a new world: this sweet and savory egg bagel flawlessly balanced the worlds of the adventurous and the straightforward.

My willingness to try an egg bagel didn’t lead to a phase of food experimentation, but it did make me see that I could be more spontaneous than my plain bagel self might allow.

Before high school, you could never spot me on a dance floor; I much preferred to watch from the audience. But in my freshman year, I joined the dance department of my school’s annual production of S!NG on a whim.

As soon as I tried the first move, I knew the decision was worth it. I enjoyed diligently practicing routines and adding my own flair, satisfying my tendency to prepare thoroughly while also fulfilling my desire to explore the realm of dance. Eventually, I excelled so much that the directors chose me as their successor—a position that has strengthened me as a dancer, leader, and person. Though I relished my newfound sense of spontaneity, my plain bagel girl roots helped me to effectively manage others’ dancing. I tirelessly choreographed and re-choreographed each step and count of a routine, no matter how long the detailed revisions took. During practices, I analyzed the dancers' movements and refined them to what could only be described as plain bagel perfection.

Sometimes the moments when I thought I needed to be in control to be successful were when I needed to be more spontaneous. In my first year being director, I was unfamiliar with managing a multitude of variously skilled dancers. Shedding my fear of being an inexperienced leader was difficult, but I soon learned to open myself to others’ advice about describing moves and maintaining the beat. Together, through sometimes spontaneous practice sessions and spurts of inspiration, we worked to adapt the choreography to accomodate all dancers.

I revel in the contradiction that is my simultaneous meticulousness and spontaneity: my egg bagel epiphany. I can count on myself to prepare thoroughly to optimize my potential, no matter how long it takes. But I can also trust myself to make the most of the unknown and stay true to myself while doing so. It’s what makes me multidimensional; it makes me a young woman no longer defined by her bagel choices but rather by her versatility and what she can do with it.

作为一名申请文书顾问，我经常建议申请者，最好的个人陈述是将意想不到的创意选择与非凡的自我意识结合起来。Isabelle 的文书在一句话中完美概括了这种方法：“人们对百吉饼的选择能告诉你关于他们的一切，而我彻头彻尾是个原味百吉饼女孩。”

用百吉饼偏好来浓缩性格特征的趣味性，邀请读者更好地理解 Isabelle 对一致性和控制的吸引力。只有当一个完美的鸡蛋百吉饼挑战了她的“原味百吉饼”本性时，Isabelle 才重新评估逃避自发性的代价。凭一时冲动加入学校的舞蹈演出，她发现了与常规“共事”和“对抗”的令人振奋的新方式。当她最终被任命为项目总监时，她利用自己的“原味百吉饼顿悟”来平衡完美主义倾向与真正领导力所需的适应性。

Isabelle 的故事展示了一种不断发展的自我认知，这将很好地服务于她的抱负。她写作充满活力，从平凡中挖掘隐藏的意义。“我决定把甜味百吉饼留给爱冒险的人，咸味留给直截了当的人，而‘everything’留给优柔寡断的人。”她如何解读这种意义感觉真正个人化，为她的申请带来了一种多维度，这是成绩、考试分数和课外活动永远无法捕捉的。

04. Jinna’s Essay

It’s terrifying how much we can get from Amazon nowadays: groceries, clothes, books, and crises of faith are all just a click away.

After Audible thanked me for listening to The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court's Assault on the Constitution by David Kaplan and The Brethren by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, I wanted to cry, scream, and march to Washington to shake answers from Chief Justice John Roberts.

My emotional whirlwind burst from the dichotomy between reality and my expectation of it. Growing up, I knew the judicial branch as the apolitical arbiter of constitutional law and the bias-blind defender of civil rights. With fear across the nation rising as fast as the global temperature, I was sure the best way to change the failing status quo was through the courts. I dreamed of becoming a lawyer to advocate for justice and to help my country prosper. My ambitions sprouted from the ideals of public service ingrained into me at school and at home, and my goal hinged only upon the judiciary’s mandate to protect our freedoms. My dream was purposeful and straightforward.

But 37 hours of audiobook rewrote all my beliefs in the judicial branch.

The Supreme Court: apolitical arbiter and bias-blind defender? No. Rather: potentially politicized, petty, proud, and irrational. Partisan politics dance about the Justices’ Conferences. The Constitution and personal biases govern rulings. Most rights supposedly afforded by the Constitution are interpretations, not explicit clauses, of it. For example, Chief Justice Warren Burger manipulated case assignments, so Justice Potter Stewart tattled on him to Woodward and Armstrong in retaliation. The right of the judiciary to strike down laws deemed unconstitutional is derived more from Marbury v. Madison than from Article Three. Justice Harry Blackmun based his majority opinion in Roe v. Wade on the rights of the doctor to practice. Stare decisis is optional, as is judicial restraint.

I felt sick. I had worshipped the courts as the perfect forum for change, always upholding truth, equality, and scholarship; I saw them as the eventual birthplace of solutions to gun regulation, climate crises, gerrymandering, immigration, and social inequality. I did not want to acknowledge courts could be anything but perfect.

Desperation drove me to keep listening, but with every new case I covered, the clearer it became that I had worshipped an impossibility. After finishing Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine, I finally admitted that, prior to these books, I had known nothing. Perhaps that epiphany should have terrified me, but it did quite the opposite.

It was liberating.

Socrates once wrote that true knowledge was in knowing that you know nothing. I couldn’t agree more: once you know you’ve hit wisdom rock bottom, you can be reckless with your curiosity because you only have everything to gain.

Since that epiphany, I have been gleefully chasing infinity. Even if my capacity to learn is finite, my curiosity is not. The history of the courts, the ethics of judicial restraint, the politics of judging, the rhetoric of opinions, the intersectionality of all of the above and more… there is so much to explore.

For the record: I purchased those audiobooks on a whim. I was not looking for anything more than a fascinating nonfiction read. But they have plunged me into an exhilarating, all-consuming, fully unpredictable adventure, one that stretches back to our nation’s founding and far into our future. While these books initially upset me by revealing the imperfections of the judicial branch, they showed me a whole undiscovered history and future at my fingertips. Rather than smothering my dreams of public service, they fanned the flames; now, my dream of public service is fueled by my passion to serve and to learn.

And I’m ready to chase it.

Jinna 的文书是知识好奇心、个人反思和真实声音的杰出典范。从聪明而引人入胜的开头到深思熟虑的结论，Jinna 巧妙地带领读者踏上一段发现、幻灭和重新找到目标的旅程。这个叙事由对美国最高法院运作方式的深入探究驱动，不仅展示了他们对正义的热情，还展示了他们质疑长期持有的信念并从这种不适中成长的意愿。

让 Jinna 的文章特别引人注目的是，他们能够平衡复杂的思想与可亲、发自内心的讲故事。对《最危险的分支》和《九人》等书籍的引用不是为了给人留下深刻印象，而是为了展示对复杂问题的真诚参与。他们的声音自信、偶尔幽默、始终如一地反思。

Jinna 的文书还捕捉到了一个有意义的转变。他们没有固守理想主义，而是拥抱复杂性，展示了韧性、适应性和对学习的渴望——这些都是招生委员会非常看重的品质。最后传达的信息——幻灭让位于对公共服务更深刻、更扎实的热情——既有力量又令人振奋。

总的来说，这是一篇令人难忘、智力丰富、情感共鸣的文章，清楚地反映了作者的成熟和潜力。

05. Emma’s Essay

The first bridge I ever built was made of paper and glue.

My 8th grade physics teacher tasked my class with building a bridge out of two pieces of paper. Instead of focusing on the paper, I applied layers and layers of glue, strengthening the paper each time. The following week, the bridge successfully held 22 pounds, setting the highest school record in 12 years.

Two years later, I began building bridges of a different kind.

The car that brought me from the airport drove away, and I stepped through the doorway into the tiny apartment in the small city of Troyan, Bulgaria. The walls were covered with my stick- figure paintings and childhood pictures.

I laid my eyes on the wise woman in front of me and leaned down to pull her into a hug – not so tightly that it would break her, but enough to show my love. Raising her wrinkly hands to wipe my tears of joy away, my grandmother mumbled a row of Bulgarian words of affection and smiled. I didn’t understand, but I smiled back.

Since she lives 1247.092 miles away from me, my grandmother is not always there to give me a hug when I need it most. Nevertheless, her heart of gold transcends physical distance and has taught me more than anyone about kindness, empathy, and compassion for others. Although she can’t walk me through the intricacies of Bayesian statistics or neuroscience for my upcoming test, she tries her best to understand my ambitions and goals, and contributes in other ways – whenever I have an important test coming up, she prays, lights up candles, and keeps them lit until I’m done.

I could purchase plane tickets to trek the distance that separated our homes, but two other gaps were harder to traverse: my aging grandmother’s health was deteriorating and I didn’t speak Bulgarian.

I sought to create bridges to close these gaps.

My grandmother suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that presses her body from every side, deforming her joints, and arching her back. She is the smallest person I know, but yet for me, the greatest.

I wished that I could show her the world and take all her pain away, but the only thing that I could do for her was building a bridge that would connect her to the knowledge she wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. I spent countless hours researching healthy meals to create a detoxifying and anti-inflammatory nutrition plan for her that would be easy to cook. The research paid off – the pain in her joints subsided.

When my grandmother and I “talked,” emotions flowed between our souls like stars fly through space. Words would only describe what we feel – but not show. It was like listening to a song, but not paying attention to the lyrics, only to the pain and passion in the singer’s voice and the flow of the melody.

In 2017, I decided that I finally wanted to learn Bulgarian. With a flashlight under my blanket, I started learning the Cyrillic alphabet and Audio CD’s with Bulgarian day-to-day conversations talked me to sleep. I surprised my grandmother by writing her a letter – written without Google Translate for the first time. Phone calls became much more frequent, and we grew closer together, but I wanted to go one step further. I moved to Bulgaria for a semester the year after in order to see her happy face when we could finally sing the song of our conversations – with the lyrics.

Seeing the influence my bridges had on my grandmother inspired me to build more. After I came back to Germany, I learned that bridges could be built between anyone.

In March 2020, my best friend’s mother confided in me that she was overwhelmed with the task of coordinating her children’s schoolwork at home during quarantine. It occurred to me that a platform for building bridges from younger students to older ones could take the load off of parents during this time. I quickly found that bridging these two groups of students leads to a higher learning efficiency since younger students often feel more comfortable studying with students that they can identify with. Soon, my startup was connecting a high-quality and often entirely subsidized learning resource to a socioeconomically diverse population of students from all over Germany.

I hope that by building bridges, we learn to better appreciate each other’s differences in order to create a more empathetic and connected world – together.

My bridge made of paper and glue eventually collapsed after holding 22 pounds. But my next bridge is always stronger than the one before. Above all, I will continue connecting others, and I am excited to see what bridge I will build next.

这篇有力的文书的趣闻、个人叙事写作、线性结构，以及“将逆境转化为机遇”和“身份与自我反思”的闪亮主题，都是制胜的特质。Emma 以一个很好的钩子开始，清楚地阐述了主要文书主题——搭建桥梁——以及她在这方面的第一次成功和创造力。她有动力继续搭建桥梁。

然后 Emma 进入一个深刻个人化的轶事，关于故事锚点——她的祖母，她患有痛苦的疾病，住得很远，说着不同的方言。通过生动的意象和详细、有创意的散文，Emma 让读者更接近她的祖母，在我们心中唤起真实的情感。我既同情又共情她祖母的挣扎，当得知 Emma 第二次成功搭建的桥梁让她们更紧密联系时,感到真正的快乐。

Emma 的个人品牌得到了极好的展现——同情心、善良、求知欲、寻找问题、建立联系——这些都是大学校园高度重视的特质。Emma 展示了她祖母的积极强化和情感如何成为她的“顿悟”和搭建更多桥梁的催化剂——她的创业公司。最后，Emma 的内省和个人成长熠熠生辉。她意识到将人们和知识联系在一起以建立一个更好、更有同理心的世界的力量——搭建桥梁是她身份的一部分。

这篇文书令人难忘有两个原因。首先，Emma 关于故事锚点——她祖母的轶事——是独特的，深深地触动了我们。Emma 分享了她真实的声音和生动的细节，展示了她们之间的深厚联系和彼此的爱；我喜欢祖母在 Emma 考试时点蜡烛和祈祷的细节。通过“帮助”祖母，Emma 的性格完整地展现给我们，这很令人愉快——“展示而非告诉”。

其次，Emma 捕捉到了她从克服逆境到影响世界的成长之旅和自我反思，这两者都是鼓舞人心和有道德的，让我们充满希望。我知道这不是 Emma 和其他志同道合的学生将搭建的最后一座桥。

读完这 5 篇哈佛录取文书，你会发现它们的共同点：不是完美的语法，不是宏大的主题，而是真实的声音和独特的视角。Claire 用“鱼”的隐喻讲述移民经历，Barry 在混乱的家庭中捕捉情感细节，Isabelle 从百吉饼选择看到自我认知，Jinna 展示思想的成长与幻灭，Emma 用祖母的故事串联起“搭建桥梁”的人生主题——每一篇都在用自己的方式说：“这就是我，一个独一无二的申请者。”好的文书不需要你拯救世界，它只需要你诚实地、生动地、深刻地讲述属于你的故事。

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