I remember the first time I cradled a clarinet—tall, slender, gleaming between my fourth-grade fingers. Those digits were fast for their size, I soon learned, and within months they flew, urging along the air that flowed from my lungs and emerged from silver-plated holes as sound. Perhaps, for all its quavering uncertainty, its sporadic squeaks, this couldn't yet be called music, but it was something. It was “really something,” murmured my teacher. She deemed it fitting that I surround...

My first stroke of Mandarin was a single horizontal line that, reasonably enough, meant "one.” It nearly formed itself on paper, for in that raucous after-school classroom my mind was halfway around the world, digging its own hole to China, oblivious to the words of the teacher before me. Little did I know that she was promising me passage there. The after-school program fizzled out, but my fascination endured. I was enthralled by the nuances of a tonal language, the...

Penn Model Congress was not the first conference I attended, but it was the most memorable. As the bitter March wind bit at stocking-clad legs, we marched from halls that boomed with our voices to classrooms that captured and contained our words, reminding us that no degree of resonant eloquence would stick without content. The chairwoman was a Penn student. The campus map was adorned with a crest now emblazoned in my mind. I was home. Since the conference, I've...

I chose to write about an experience in which I failed amidst very competitive peers for several reasons. I wanted to demonstrate my writing abilities and my love of the arts; I wanted to express my sense of humility and passion for hard work regardless of recognition for it; and I hoped to emphasize that I was interested in attending a competitive school in part for its competitive - and collaborative - nature. I tried to imply, without saying so...

The conventional archetype of a student attending a college like Harvard (say, the boat shoes-wearing descendant of Puritans) is no longer the predominant - or at least not...