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

The Role of Language: If you grew up speaking multiple languages, discuss how this has shaped your perception of the world or your communication style

“Which version of me are you speaking to?”

That question—silent, subconscious—has haunted most of my conversations since I was five. Not in a scary way. More like a shapeshifter’s itch. You see, I grew up inside three languages: Farsi, French, and English. Each one is a keyhole. Each opens a different door to the same house—me—but never quite the same room.

In Farsi, I am soft-spoken, deferential. I lace my words with poetry and metaphor, as if trying not to bruise silence itself. The phrase delam tang shode—literally “my heart has tightened”—captures longing in a way English just... doesn’t. But French? Ah, French turns me into someone else entirely. Confident. Sardonic. I gesticulate more. I interrupt. I flirt with irony the way Parisians flirt with everything else. English, meanwhile, is my academic spine—my debating language, my language of facts and finals and filling out visa forms. It is sharp-edged and fast, like a hummingbird. But even it has cracks.

When I speak in English, I sometimes say “I’m homesick,” but I don’t mean a place. I mean a feeling that doesn’t translate cleanly. A feeling I can name only in Farsi. Or in silence.

I understand how this sounds. But language isn’t just a way to communicate. It’s a way to perceive. If I say “snow” in English, that’s... it. But Inuit languages have 50 words for snow. That doesn’t mean they’re obsessed. It means they see snow differently. Language shapes sight. That realization knocked the air out of me in a sophomore linguistics seminar. I remember actually gasping. Which was embarrassing.

But I guess I’m used to being startled by words. I used to think that being trilingual was a superpower. Maybe it still is. But it’s also a kind of constant translation, not just between words, but between selves. In practice, this looks like arguing with myself—Should I say this in English? Wait, will it lose its soul if I do?—while everyone else just keeps talking. It can be isolating. Also thrilling. Because when you live inside multiple languages, you don’t just speak differently. You feel differently. You think in shades, not categories.

There’s a memory I keep close: I’m ten, in Tehran, listening to my grandfather tell me about Rumi. He’s reciting, half-singing: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” I remember the way his voice wavered. That line—translated, yes, but still electric—taught me more about moral ambiguity than any ethics textbook. My English teachers praised me for “nuance,” but they didn’t know that nuance wasn’t learned. It was inherited.

Still, there’s friction. Like when I forget a word in English and try to explain it in French but the only real version lives in Farsi. Or when someone hears my name and asks, “Where are you really from?” and I think: Which language do you want me to be today? Which country do you want to fit me inside?

I don’t have a clean answer. That frustrates me. But it also fuels me. I want to study comparative literature—not because I love books (though I do), but because I want to understand how cultures think through language. How stories change when you change the tongue that tells them. How a metaphor can survive migration. Or shatter.

There’s a quiet revolution in realizing that every language is a lens—and none are completely transparent. The world, as I experience it, is prismatic. Not fractured. Just—more complicated. And that complexity doesn’t scare me. It comforts me. It feels like home.

So no, I don’t always know which version of me you’re speaking to. But I do know this: all of them are listening. Closely.