Undergraduate / "Thoreau"---Describe an intellectual experience (Harvard Supplemental Essay) [2]

"Describe an intellectual experience (course, project, book, discussion, paper or research topic) that has meant the most to you."

I do not believe I can be understood completely as person, much less a scholar, without shedding some light upon the literary idea that has affected my academic self most profoundly. It resounds as clearly as ever to me today, as I consider the meaning of an undergraduate education as it relates to my ongoing search for a particular field of extended study.

The idea took shape over a century and a half ago, in Concord Massachusetts. Henry David Thoreau, in the conclusion of his celebrated philosophical work Walden, elaborates upon the inherent motive behind his foray into the wilderness that resulted in a year-long stay in a primitive cabin on Walden Pond: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Ever since I first read excerpts of Walden roughly a year ago and exposed myself to the reflections of Thoreau, I've recognized that a fundamental program for living exists in the sentence above, a program beautifully applicable to my own life and especially the method in which I approach the academic world I exist in.

The crux of Thoreau's argument insists on self-reliance, an isolation which he achieved by venturing away from civilization and making his home amongst the wildlife in "the woods" surrounding Walden Pond. Through solitude and introspection he achieves a sense of "deliberateness", a continuous confrontation of basic human notions like greed, hunger and mortality. To Thoreau, this contemplation culminates in revelation; through a deliberate existence any man can discover himself, his purpose in life, and several innate truths which ought to govern the manner in which he pursues his vocation.

I've come to realize, as I conclude my time at ----, that I've found my "woods." However, unlike Thoreau's, my woods is not populated by the squirrels and pines and minnows of a New England forest ecosystem. Instead, books, essays, problems, and articles inhabit it and give it life and inherent significance. In my woods, one which is littered with the diversity of academia, I can confront the same "essential facts of life" that Thoreau does. I can observe the natural world exquisitely modeled in figures as I work through a Calculus exercise, just as I can come face to face with my own mortality through examining the dying struggle of a fictional protagonist in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych. I find that I'm forced to acknowledge the dichotomic tension that exists within myself between realism and idealism as I follow Don Quijote and Sancho Panza on their ridiculous adventures through 17th-century Spain. Even in Economics, a field which I at one time anticipated to be the most superficial, I've scrutinized the nature of greed and its devastating human consequences. My "woods," simply put, is schoolwork; in my own analysis and investigation, I find the same solitude, the same introspection, and the same self-discovery that Thoreau does as he observes the reflecting surface of the water of Walden Pond.

What will be my ultimate purpose in life? This final piece to my Thoreauvian puzzle, vocation, remains tantalizingly unclear to me as I progress deeper and deeper into the "woods" of a more deliberate academic lifestyle. However, I have faith that as I keep grappling with the complexity of the world around me through my studies in novels and textbooks alike, my vocation, my innate calling, will become clear and attainable. Until then, I see my undergraduate education as my expedition into the most diverse and abundant "woods" a scholar could imagine.

--Feel free to tear into it. Thanks!

Undergraduate / 'Christine's poison' - Common App Personal Essay [3]

Hi there,

Here's the essay I plan to use for the common application. I'm planning to apply to Harvard under Restricted Early Action. ANY critique or advice or edits are GREATLY appreciated!

Regarding the prompt that best fits the essay: I've been debating which prompt to choose. I'm stuck between these two, so any advice would really help:

1)Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you. (Christine's death being the experience)

2)Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence. (Christine being the person)

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Christine

Poison, to me, had always been the blend of foreign chemicals in that little green bottle with skull-and-crossbones plastered on it in my morning cartoons. I would laugh at the characters that got sick after they accidentally took a swig from the telltale vial instead of their glass of milk. I laughed because even though I was aware that actual poison was real and dangerous, I could never imagine encountering it within the limited sphere of my suburban childhood. However, when my mother informed me one summer morning with heartbroken solemnity that my Aunt Christine had passed away, I felt closer than ever to a poison that I had never known could be so devastating: alcohol.

I couldn't perceive the blunt reality of Christine's death at the age of forty, even after I watched her casket lowered into the earth at the local cemetery a few days later. She had never failed to radiate a playful vitality at our family occasions, where she was the star slugger in nearly every kickball game and the uncannily lucky gambler in boisterous rounds of "Left-Right-Center". She wore a magnetic smile that weathered brilliant Easter mornings and gloomy autumn afternoons alike. How could someone with so much love for living die?

My parents tried to tell me that Christine had long battled an addiction to alcohol, a fight that she eventually lost when her vital organs failed as she slept one night. It couldn't be. Alcohol only made her and Grampa and Auntie Lisa and Uncle Mike louder and happier at the family Christmas party; it didn't kill them. People died in car accidents and cancer wards, not in the kitchen over a few glasses of wine. No matter how frustrated or confused I became, however, I couldn't change the fact that I was never going to see Christine again.

As I've grown increasingly educated about alcohol's effect on the body and the mind in the six years since Christine passed, her life away from the four or five family gatherings per year has begun to materialize in my imagination. I imagine countless days and nights she spent alone and distraught, where alcohol was her only companion. I can likewise picture the helplessness she felt when the pull of her dependence became too great to overcome during her attempts at sobriety.

Even though Christine passed away six years ago, she still lives with me in the lessons that her life has taught me. She reminds me to observe moderation so that no addiction to substance may poison my life the way it did hers, and she urges me to enjoy and embrace the life that I've been given because it may be snuffed out a bit too early. I only knew Christine for the first eleven years of my life, but she has become a martyr to me whose cause will remain with me forever.