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

Beyond the Classroom: How have you pursued a unique academic or intellectual interest outside of formal coursework?

The Physics of Silence

It started with a lie.

I told my parents I was taking walks to “clear my head.” Which was true. But the truth was heavier than that — I was following echoes. There’s a stretch of road behind our apartment that curls like a question mark into the woods. No cars, no people. Just a strange, cavernous silence that felt… designed. Manufactured, even. I remember once stopping in the middle of that path, clapping my hands, and listening — not to the sound, but to its collapse. The decay of noise. I didn’t know what to call it back then, but I felt, almost painfully, that the void had texture.

I was thirteen, and unknowingly conducting my first unsupervised experiment.

Later, I learned the words: reverberation, acoustic decay, low-frequency attenuation. These weren’t just concepts — they were keys. I began slipping them into searches late at night, hoarding PDFs from obscure journals, digesting lecture series on architectural acoustics and quantum phonons like contraband candy. I wasn’t chasing grades. There were none. Just a sense of awe so loud it hummed behind my ribs.

In practice, this looked like madness. I built a Helmholtz resonator out of my dad’s old whiskey bottle. I tested it in the bathroom (bad idea — my sister filed a noise complaint to my mom). I once tried to measure echo decay in our stairwell using an online oscillator and a stopwatch. Was it precise? Absolutely not. But it felt right. I could sense the science vibrating just out of reach, like a radio station fading in and out — and I kept twisting the dial.

Some things didn’t work. My experiment with a homemade parabolic microphone ended when the dish caught fire. I tried modeling sound waves using a slinky, a balloon, and a cat (don’t ask). But failure, I found, was the best kind of teacher: honest, unsentimental, but strangely affectionate — like physics itself.

I understand how this sounds. But chasing sound isn’t just an eccentric hobby. It’s my gateway to systems thinking. Sound is physical, yes, but it’s also profoundly psychological. It’s culture. It’s memory. The reason Gregorian chants stir something ancient in us isn’t just because of their melody, but because their overtones resonate with the geometry of basilicas built centuries before microphones — the past carved itself into the architecture of silence.

And maybe I’m wrong, but I believe that in understanding these relationships — the seen and unseen, the heard and unhearable — we come closer to the marrow of how the world works.

This interest has never fit neatly into syllabi. None of my classes covered why Tibetan singing bowls calm the nervous system, or how NASA engineers design soundless chambers to test spacecraft. So I built my own curriculum. I cold-emailed professors of psychoacoustics; some replied, others didn’t. I started a blog (two readers, including me). I volunteered at a local radio station just to listen to how professionals sculpt air into meaning. My most unexpected breakthrough came during a church service — not from scripture, but from the cadence of the organist’s phrasing. There was a pattern, mathematical but emotional, and it lodged itself in my notebook as a question I haven’t answered yet.

But maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the goal isn’t to arrive, but to listen better — to find signal in noise, order in reverberation. I don’t want to "master" acoustics the way one masters a test. I want to inhabit it. To collaborate with it. To one day contribute to how we build spaces — libraries that hum with clarity, hospitals that soothe through silence, classrooms that carry not just sound, but understanding.

Pursuing this passion outside the classroom hasn’t just shaped what I want to study. It’s shaped how I think. When I walk into a new room, I don’t just look — I pause. I listen. Every space tells a story. And for the past five years, I’ve been learning how to hear it.

So yes — maybe it began with a lie. But I think some of the truest things begin that way.