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

Mentorship in an Interest: Describe a time you sought out a mentor or taught yourself a complex skill related to one of your interests

I’ve always been terrible at asking for help. Maybe it’s pride. Maybe it’s fear disguised as independence. Either way, it’s a lonely superpower—being the kid who’d rather spend five hours unraveling a bug in Python than shoot off a five-second message to someone who might know the answer.

But I remember the moment this changed. Not with fireworks. Not with enlightenment. But with embarrassment.

It started with a calculator—one I was coding from scratch as part of a side project on building a minimalist OS interface. It was meant to be a clean, efficient, open-source marvel. Instead, it broke when I pressed “.” (Yes, a literal dot.) I stared at the terminal like it had just insulted my intelligence. I could write recursive tree-traversals. I could simulate Conway’s Game of Life. And here I was—brought to my knees by a dot.

I stewed in stubborn silence for three days.

Eventually, with the drama of a Shakespearean tragedy (or so it felt), I posted my question on a forum. Thirty minutes later, I got a reply from someone named "conniebyte." They didn't just fix my bug—they rewrote my logic, commented it, and asked me questions about why I’d structured the code the way I did. That wasn’t mentorship. That was sorcery.

I replied, cautiously. They replied back. I asked again. They answered—always with questions first, never with condescension.

It went on like that for weeks. Late-night messages. Code snippets. Doodles on whiteboard apps. Debugging sessions that felt like philosophical conversations about clarity, minimalism, and the ethics of open-source work. And eventually, something shifted.

I stopped copying their solutions. I started building on them. I began to anticipate their questions before they asked them. And, weirdly enough, I started to feel like I deserved to be in that dialogue.

At some point—though I can’t tell you when—I began mentoring others too. People who reminded me of my past self: isolated, smart, scared to ask for help. In practice, this looks like checking StackOverflow not for answers, but for unanswered questions I might solve. Or hopping into Discord channels to decode error messages with strangers from time zones I can’t pronounce.

I understand how this sounds. But it’s not a story about coding. It’s a story about learning how to learn with people.

Because mentorship, I’ve learned, isn’t just someone wiser pulling you up the ladder. It’s messy. It’s mutual. Sometimes the ladder is sideways. Sometimes it’s made of duct tape and spite. But if you're honest about where you are, someone somewhere will say, “Yeah. Been there.” And suddenly, you’re not alone in the room.

I wish I could say I met Connie. I haven’t. I don’t even know if Connie’s a “she” or “they” or someone’s spare Gmail alter ego. But that’s not the point.

The point is: mentorship isn't always formal. It’s often anonymous, accidental, unplanned. And yet it’s the scaffolding that holds up who we quietly become.

Learning to code complex systems taught me a lot about recursion and state machines and edge cases. But learning to ask—to trust others with my ignorance—that changed everything. That taught me empathy. Humility. Patience with the version of myself who still sometimes stares at a bug for too long before whispering, “Help?”

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think Harvard values that kind of growth—the kind that’s not always linear or photogenic, but gritty, human, and just a little bit poetic. The kind of growth that begins not with brilliance, but with a dot.

And so I continue—half-teaching, half-learning, always building.
With others.
Because I finally know: genius alone is a myth. But mentorship? That’s real magic.