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

Ancestral Legacy: Is there a particular historical figure or tradition from your heritage that deeply resonates with you? How does it inspire you?

"My Grandfather’s Hands Smell Like Books and Smoke"

There’s a paradox I carry with me: I’m building the future, but I keep my eyes on the past.

My friends joke that I have an “old soul.” Maybe. But the truth is less poetic — and more peculiar. I live between generations, haunted by stories from before I was born. Haunted in the best way, if that makes sense.

My grandfather — the one from Cairo, not Casablanca — had a way of holding a cigarette like he was contemplating the universe. Not smoking it, really. Just holding it, between two fingers stained faintly yellow, while reciting lines from Al-Mutanabbi, or asking me impossible questions like: “Do you know why the olive tree doesn't bloom like the cherry?” I never knew if he meant it metaphorically. I still don’t.

He was a librarian. But not the kind you imagine. His library was hidden behind a metal roll-down door in a crumbling alley, half-swallowed by jasmine vines and the steady roar of Cairo traffic. Inside were tomes from Byzantium, dusty Qur’anic manuscripts, philosophy texts in Arabic and Greek, and a battered armchair that creaked like an old violin every time he sat down.

I remember a time — I was maybe ten? — when he opened a book of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, pointed to a line about cycles of civilization, and said, “We don’t inherit the world. We inherit its ruins — and it’s our job to rebuild it beautifully.”

That line stuck. Maybe too much.

Because now I find myself obsessively gathering fragments — of culture, of memory, of history — like some amateur archaeologist trying to restore a mosaic that might never be whole. I don’t know why I do it, exactly. Just that it feels urgent. Necessary. Even when it hurts.

In practice, this looks like coding machine learning models while listening to Fairuz. It looks like writing poetry in a hybrid tongue — Arabic syntax with English vowels — because my identity doesn’t obey linguistic borders. It looks like researching water scarcity in North Africa while wondering whether the Roman aqueducts could teach us something — if only we’d listen.

I understand how this sounds. Romantic. Maybe even grandiose.

But here's the unpolished version: sometimes I feel like a fraud. A kid in a hoodie trying to resuscitate ancient dreams with a laptop and some borrowed languages. Sometimes I wonder if my grandfather’s reverence for knowledge is even relevant in a world of swipe-right attention spans. Sometimes I get tired — of explaining why I care so much about dead philosophers and endangered dialects.

And yet.

There’s a gravity in ancestral legacy. Not a weight — more like a pull. A kind of spiritual magnetism.

For me, that pull is Ibn Khaldun.

Not just because he was a North African polymath who invented a science before the world had a word for “sociology.” But because he understood — in the 14th century — that civilizations rise and fall in patterns, and that education isn’t just about storing facts, but transmitting values across the fraying thread of time.

That idea gives me purpose. It makes my pursuit of knowledge feel less like ambition, and more like a form of repair.

Because — and this is the part that chokes me up, unexpectedly — I think I’m still trying to answer my grandfather’s olive tree question. I’m still trying to understand why some cultures bloom visibly, while others bear fruit quietly, in shadow. And whether I, in my hybrid skin and multi-script notebooks, can help coax something fragrant out of inherited silence.

So yes. I’m applying to Harvard not just to learn, but to listen.

To collaborate with minds who don’t flinch from contradiction. To study history not as a parade of dates, but as a breathing organism. To pursue the intersection of heritage and innovation — whether through computational linguistics or postcolonial theory — and to ask better questions, even if the answers are elusive.

Maybe I’ll never find out why the olive doesn’t bloom like the cherry.

But maybe — if I’m lucky, if I work hard, if I keep reading books that smell like smoke — I’ll learn how to make both trees grow.