“到底怎样才能写出好的Essay？”
美国著名大学约翰霍普金斯大学的招生老师，阅卷无数，经验丰富，总结出了一些essay写作要义，相信能给同学们一些帮助。另外还有两篇今年被JHU录取的学生文书，真正的干货，不容错过！
作为JHU的招生官老师，他们最想通过essay看到的是：
What makes you tick?
What you are passionate about?
Why Hopkins is the perfect place for you to live and learn for the next four years of your life?
那么如何才能把这些信息准确的传达给招生老师呢？
不要试图面面俱到。
Focus on one topic！不需要把你高中每天那点儿鸡毛蒜皮都写进去。只要把对你影响最大的那部分精心呈现出来即可。
不要重复列出已经知道的信息。
如果你在essay里把我们已经在申请表里见过的课外活动再写一遍，那么很遗憾，你浪费了通过essay展现自己另一面的大好机会。
开头很重要。
一篇让人印象深刻的essay，往往有一个“抓人”的开头。录取老师每天都要读上千篇essay，开头写的好你才能脱颖而出。
语言自然。
用你自己的语言讲述自己的故事，这样最打动人。文字生动流畅即可，不要过于华丽也不要让人觉得你在掉书袋。
做你自己。
如果你是个有趣的人，那么essay也可以写的有趣一些。如果你平常严肃正经，那又何必假装幽默呢？
仔细修改校对。
自己修改校对之后，最好再让别人帮你改改，如果能让老师帮你修改是最好的了。拼写错误，绝对不要出现。
说了这么多条条框框，你可能有点儿蒙圈了。
不着急，这里有两篇被JHU录取的学生的essay，每篇后面都附有一段点评，同学们不妨阅读一下找找感觉。希望这些essay能给大家带来一些启发。
以下文章均来自 JHU Class of 2020 的学生。
Just Keep Folding—Jodie
Having explored the myths from ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, my curiosity was piqued in eighth grade by a simple legend from Japanese lore. If you fold one thousand paper cranes, the gods will grant you one wish. I took it as a challenge. My previous forays into origami had ended poorly, but I was so excited to begin my quest that this detail seemed inconsequential. My art teacher loaned me a piece of origami paper and, armed with an online tutorial, my quest began. Like an early prototype of the airplane, I ascended towards my dreams for a glorious moment before nose-diving into the ground. The first crane was a disastrous failure of wrinkly lines and torn paper. Too embarrassed to ask for another, I turned to my stack of Post-it notes. By the third attempt, I ended up with a sticky pink paper crane. Holding that delicate bird, I was flooded with triumph and elation.
The first two hundred cranes were all crafted from Post-it notes. Armed with a pack of highlighters, I decorated each piece of paper individually. I folded cranes at home, between classes, and in the car. My fingers were permanently sticky from the glue I scraped off every square. Slowly, my collection grew: first ten, then fifty, then one hundred. Before the task could become monotonous, I started experimenting. How small was it possible for a crane to be? Smaller than a golf ball? Smaller than a dime? Small enough to sit on the end of a pencil? Any size was attainable. I could make a crane smaller than almost any arbitrary form of measurement. Soon I could finish a crane in fifty seconds or with my eyes closed. Anything square and foldable became my medium. Paper towels, candy wrappers, and aluminum foil joined my vibrant menagerie of carefully folded paper. I was unstoppable; that wish was as good as mine.
By six hundred cranes, the increasing demands of high school academics caused my pace to slow. I despaired. I wouldn’t let this be another ambitious project that I couldn’t finish.
My cranes mattered to me. As an outlet for expression, they served as a way to defuse frustration and sadness, and a source of pride and joy. Their creation allows me to bring beauty to the world and to find a sense of order in the bustle and chaos of life. There is a lot of beauty to be found in tiny things. I’m reminded that little gestures have a lot of meaning. I have given away cranes to my friends as a pick-me-up on bad days, and I have made cranes to commemorate people, such as the dark green crane I made the day my grandmother died. They are a symbol of hope to remind me what I have accomplished.
So, I pushed myself to keep working and to keep folding one crane at a time. My determination paid off, and in the summer after sophomore year, my passion was reinvigorated. One month before the end of junior year, I folded my thousandth paper crane. As I leaned over the open drawer brimming with origami pieces in a multitude of sizes and colors, I felt a rush of satisfaction and triumph. Not only was 1,000 cranes an achievement in its own right, but I proved to myself that I can finish what I start.
The world is filled with big numbers. College tuition, monthly rent, and car prices deal in the many thousands. Those figures are incomprehensible to someone who has never interacted with anything so large, and I wanted to understand them. A thousand will never simply be a number to me: it is hundreds upon hundreds of hand-folded cranes combined with years of effort.
So what did I wish for? It turns out, I didn’t need the wish. I learned I have the power to make things happen for myself.
招生官点评：Jodie的文书最让人印象深刻的，不是成功叠完了一千只千纸鹤，而是从这件小事中，我们了解到了她的坚持、善良和关怀。这篇文书还让我们看到，她对万事怀有好奇心，并愿意去尝试，比如她会去试着看千纸鹤到底能叠到多小。这些品质凸显出来，让我们觉得Jodie的加入会对JHU大有益处。
Growing Strawberries in a High School Locker—Seena
One day this year, as I was walking by my perpetually empty locker, I was struck by an idea. I cannot identify what sparked its conception, but as my idea started to grow, thinking of possible solutions and analyzing and assessing feasibility issues began to consume me. My father calls this a “designer’s high,” and it was very familiar to me. I’ve experienced it often while collaborating with my robotics team, and in the hours I’ve spent with my father on design concepts for his prefabricated homes. Still, nothing I had worked on before was similar to the feeling this “out of the box” idea had triggered.
Growing strawberries in a high school locker seemed fairly simple at first. Despite knowing that this is not the typical habitat for strawberry plants, I knew from my green-thumbed mother that strawberries are among the easiest fruits to grow. Many students and teachers became interested in my project, yet were skeptical of my botanical prowess and quick to conclude that a plant could not possibly receive its basic necessities in a locker, which didn’t have proper ventilation, was hot and humid, and was shielded from both sunlight and any source of water. Still, I was determined to make this work. The unfriendly habitat and logistical obstacles did not deter me.
My horticultural roots stem from my mother and elementary level biology. It wasn’t until this year that my knowledge expanded beyond this casual level into a realm where biology, chemistry, and physics found beautiful, synergistic intersections. I was determined to apply what I had learned and got to work.
Due to the lack of electricity and direct sunlight, I decided to use a solar panel paired with a light sensor on the outside of my locker to power a strong, blue LED light, which is best for photosynthesis and plant growth. A friend taught me how to solder and helped me create the solar panel setup, which turns on the blue light only when it is dark outside so the plants experience the proper light cycles. I also set up a system to slowly water the plants automatically. This involved a series of drip bottles—which another friend had for his old, now deceased, pet guinea pig—arranged to drip into each other and then onto the soil.
Having addressed the issues of light and water, I focused on the need to circulate air. Leaving the door closed would provide essentially no circulation and would create a hot and moist environment, making the plants more susceptible to mold. After experimenting with various designs and a 3D printed prototype, I came up with an extension of the latching mechanism on the inside of my locker, which I called the “strawberry jamb.” The jamb, which I cut using our school’s CNC router, sufficiently boosts airflow by allowing the door to remain ajar about two inches while still maintaining the integrity of the existing locking mechanism. I made a beautiful wooden box, emblazoned with the laser-cut engraving “Strawberry Fields Forever” and provided proper drainage onto a tray inside the locker to avoid water damage to school property. The strawberry plants are now growing in my partially open locker providing a topic of conversation and much commentary from students walking by.
What began as a seemingly improbable idea fed my passion for creative thinking and mechanical engineering. This project not only allowed me to practically apply isolated academic principles I had studied, but it also pushed me to traverse multiple disciplines to creatively solve problems. Furthermore, it’s uniqueness beckoned for community input and collaboration, allowing me to access resources to achieve fiscally responsible solutions and ultimate success. For me, it was invigorating to propel a project that many deemed impossible into the realm of possible. I intend to continue to explore and invent because only then are new realities possible.
招生官点评：Seena的文书充分展示了他在机械工程方面的兴趣，然而他全篇又是从一件小事入手——在柜子里种出草莓。这件小事体现了Seena的这些特质：创新精神、幽默感，以及最重要的，团队合作的热情。Seena通过细节告诉我们，他是团队合作者，这比干巴巴地说出要好得多。从他的叙述中，我们可以推断，Seena会是一个字实验室勤勉工作、在宿舍和室友和谐相处的人，而这正是JHU寻求的人才。
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