50 Harvard Essays

Essays are for reference only. Do NOT copy or imitate anything! 
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himself: “I act like a big brother … to compensate for not being any kind of brother 
at all to Robert.” Bright is able to see that there are positive aspects of this bad 
experience and then applies them to his life; he shows to us that he is willing to 
change himself and make up for what he did not do for Robert by becoming “a much 
more involved person.” In his essay, many aspects of Bright shine through: his 
maturity and strength, as well as his capacity to see a bright silver lining on what 
looks like a black thundercloud. Qualities such as these are ultimately the most 
important in terms of measuring who one is. 
The only thing that Bright might have added to his essay is more of what happened 
to Robert. We learn that Robert was arrested, and is now studying for his SATs and 
preparing to go to college, but we are not told what happened to him between his 
arrest and his self-improvement. How did Robert decide to turn his life around? 
What challenges did he face? The second to last paragraph might need a little more 
detail as to how Robert went through the process of becoming who he is today. Yet, 
aside from this one minor comment, the essay stands on its own – it jumps out at 
the reader for its uniqueness, for its quiet, yet powerful, personal revelations. 
“The Line” 
“The Line” 
--by Daniel B. Visel 
“There is no chance,” wrote Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “no destiny, no fate, that can 
circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.” These words 
are from her poem “Will,” a favorite of my Aunt May. Though Mrs. Wilcox’s words on 
chance and destiny never really caught my ear when Aunt May read it to me so 
many times, those words resonated in my head December 9, 1994, a day that I will 
never forget. On that day, I stood before Judge Stanley Pivner to testify against my 
best friend, Wyatt. The workings of fate are strange indeed: Wyatt and I had been 
friends since kindergarten, when we went to Suzuki violin lessons together. We had 
been the best of all possible friends in grade school, helped each other through the 
troubled junior high years, and have remained close through high school. Our paths, 
though, had led us in different directions: I spent all my time studying for classes, 
while he invested time and money in soaping up his 1986 Dodge Ram. College didn’t 
seem the necessity to him that it did for me: Wyatt lived for the moment. The future, 
for him, would be dealt with when he came to it. 
Wyatt’s crowd was a wild bunch. I was wary of them – they did dangerous things. 
Somehow, I didn’t associate Wyatt with any of this, thought: he was Wyatt, my 
friend, a known quantity. I guess I had been too busy studying to notice how much 
he had changed. It didn’t hit me until a Thursday night my senior year == the night 
that Wyatt pulled up in his truck and asked if I was doing anything. I had finished my 
math homework for the week, and had a good start on a draft of the term paper I 

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