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

The Future of Your Talent: How do you envision continuing to develop and apply your talent in the future, particularly at a place like Harvard?

The Art of Tinkering with Tomorrow

I have a love-hate relationship with certainty. It’s seductive—offering clean answers, reassuring rules. But it’s also… a bit of a tyrant, isn’t it? Certainty never built a telescope. Curiosity did. And I think that’s where my talent lives: somewhere between not knowing and needing to know.

I’ve always been a tinkerer—not with wires and wrenches (though I’ve broken a few radios), but with ideas. Questions that keep me up. Systems that feel unjust. Truths that fall apart under a microscope. My talent, if I can call it that without wincing, is in asking why something works and then asking—gently, stubbornly—why it should work that way.

I remember a time, 14 years old, sitting in a public library in Boston’s Back Bay (the AC was broken, the chairs creaked like ships). I had just read about CRISPR in a biology magazine and felt like someone had whispered a secret to me: we could rewrite the genome. Like literally edit the alphabet of life. But then I thought—who gets to hold the pen?

Since then, I’ve found myself chasing those questions into strange places: AI ethics panels where adults argued about “moral architecture” while ignoring the lived realities of bias; physics lectures where space warped but the syllabus didn’t; volunteering in public schools, where giftedness is often code for privilege.

And yet, here’s the paradox that follows me like a shadow: the more I learn, the less I feel qualified to hold strong opinions. That frustrates me. But it also humbles me into action. Because even if I don’t know everything—and I won’t, ever—I can build bridges between what we do know and what we ought to consider.

In practice, this looks like something messy. Think late-night Python scripts predicting food insecurity zones, inspired by a conversation with a cafeteria worker. Or reimagining history curricula to include scientific revolutions from non-Western civilizations. It’s not always glamorous. Sometimes it means being told I “overcomplicate things.” And maybe I do.

But at Harvard, I don’t want to simplify my questions—I want to refine them, expose them to critique, let them breathe in environments dense with paradox. I want to join the metaLAB and experiment with how data can tell stories with soul. I want to work with professors like Sheila Jasanoff to study how science and policy dance—and sometimes stumble. I want to listen more, write less, then write better.

My vision isn’t to become a “thought leader.” That phrase makes me cringe a little—it feels like trying to trademark insight. What I want is quieter, stranger: I want to be a translator between worlds that rarely speak—science and ethics, code and community, logic and imagination.

I understand how this sounds. Like I’m painting with colors that don’t exist yet. But that’s how progress begins: as a sketch in someone’s uncertain mind.

So yes, I’ll bring my talent to Harvard—but more importantly, I’ll let Harvard complicate it. Stretch it. Challenge it until it cracks. And in those cracks, I hope to find light—maybe not the light of certainty, but the shimmer of something more alive. A better question. A wiser doubt.

After all, isn’t that what talent really is? Not a thing we have, but a flame we’re foolish enough to protect, even when the wind picks up.