A persuasive and inspiring essay for successful admission to Harvard - 2025

The Genesis of a Passion: Describe the moment or experience that sparked your deepest interest in a particular subject or field

I didn’t fall in love with physics. I collided with it — full speed, like a marble flung at glass. It cracked me open.

It happened during an otherwise unremarkable eighth-grade morning. Our substitute teacher, a sleepy-looking man in a corduroy jacket, pushed a dusty overhead projector into the center of the classroom like he was wheeling in destiny itself. He drew two sine waves and asked: “What happens when these waves meet?”

I stared. They weren’t just waves — they were dancers. Opposites spiraling toward each other. I remember thinking: They cancel? They amplify? They do both? And then, like a whisper in the dark: What else behaves like this?

That was it. That flicker. That itch behind the eyes when a question grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let go. I didn’t know it then, but I was staring at the idea of interference — a principle that governs not just waves, but sound, light, probability, quantum particles, even decisions.

From there, I couldn’t stop. My bedroom wall became a chaotic constellation of sticky notes — “Constructive vs. Destructive Interference,” “Feynman Diagrams = physics hieroglyphs?,” “Is math the real language of God?” I understand how that sounds. But for me, physics was — is — a fever, a lens, a kind of faith in the intelligibility of the universe.

But here's the twist I didn’t expect: the more I studied the certainties of science, the more I became obsessed with uncertainty.

Quantum physics, in particular, felt like someone handed me the keys to a haunted house and said, “Here, figure out how the walls breathe.” Particles were not where they should be. Light misbehaved like a mischievous child — wave here, particle there. I found myself awake at 2 AM, arguing with Heisenberg in my notebook margins: “Just tell me where the electron is!”

But uncertainty wasn’t a flaw — it was the point. Physics wasn’t about pinning down reality. It was about understanding why you couldn’t. This frustrated me. But it also freed me.

In practice, this looks like taking multivariable calculus not because I had to, but because I needed to decode the language hiding beneath electromagnetism. It looks like debating entropic time asymmetry with my chemistry teacher over lunch, even though we both knew we wouldn’t settle anything. It looks like building a backyard interferometer out of mirrors, lasers, and the unwavering faith that I might see an invisible truth — or at least chase it.

But this passion doesn’t live in isolation. It spills into everything else I do. When I write poetry (which I do — often messily, always earnestly), I find myself structuring verses the way I imagine spacetime curves — bending language until meaning shifts. When I volunteer at our community’s science nights, I use analogies involving Harry Potter spells and boba tea to explain superposition, because if Schrödinger had a sense of humor, surely I’m allowed one too.

Physics is rigorous, yes — but it’s also wildly romantic. It’s Kepler writing that planetary orbits were “God’s geometric plan,” or Einstein insisting imagination was more important than knowledge. And though I don’t consider myself a genius by any stretch, I share that awe. That bone-deep reverence for mystery.

I’ll admit: sometimes I feel like I’m chasing shadows. That I’m trying to wrestle clarity out of a universe that doesn’t owe me any answers. But maybe that’s what love of a subject is: chasing something that keeps running ahead, just out of reach — and running anyway.

So no, there wasn’t a single grand epiphany. Just a projection of two sine waves, a question I couldn’t shake, and a restlessness that hasn’t gone away.

And honestly? I hope it never does.