埃默里大学六篇优秀申请文书&招生官点评分享（六）-新东方前途出国

文书六：用你真实的视角

Essay题目：Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

Over the past half-century, the crosswinds of social and economic change sweeping through Nebraska’s small towns have left me and my family, alongside many others across our state, straddling a tedious tightrope between the old and the new, the familiar and the foreign.

All my life, I’ve been shaped by the collision between the rural, small-town currents of my upbringing and the city-slicker world of tall buildings and traffic jams I’ve largely grown up in. By this, I don’t mean cornfields and mainstreets melting away under the pressures of urban expansion. I mean the collision between two vastly different worldviews—one deeply suspicious and distrustful of outsiders, manifested around me through my grandfather’s diatribes bemoaning the parasitism of immigrants or his deftness in dealing out words I’ve been taught to consider unspeakable, and the other warm and welcoming, centered around a household that counts inclusiveness as a primary virtue and has embraced the evolving nature of Nebraska’s identity.

To understand the tumult of emotions interwoven within this collision, it is critical to understand that, over the past several decades, rural blight has descended upon communities across Nebraska. As families like mine have emigrated to larger towns and cities in search of greater opportunity, rural populations have dwindled, and hospitals and businesses have shuttered. In addition—and particularly relevant to my experience of Nebraska’s rural crisis—a wave of major demographic shifts have left many communities across my state broken and hurting. From Schuyler to O’Neill, from Lexington to Fremont, increasingly large international immigrant populations have been caught in the chokehold of a vehement and metastasizing nativism. This fervent anti-immigrant sentiment, rather than promoting some distorted idea of cultural integrity, has left entire communities—old blood and newcomer alike—under the weight of suffocating suspicion and hatred as unprepared school districts buckle and ambush-like ICE raids tear families apart. The situation in much of rural Nebraska, to put it bluntly, is dire.

And so, this summer, determined to glean a more complete understanding of this issue and its effects on my family, I traveled to live and work on the family farm, which is managed primarily by my grandparents. The experience was instructive—in a time of trade wars and tariffs, I was reminded of the tremendous economic pressure under which farmers operate. But, far more eye-openingly, it gave me a new appreciation for the social and cultural strain bearing on rural Nebraska. For context, it is helpful to understand that the nearest town has undergone a transition from nearly homogeneously white to over 70 percent Hispanic in just the past three decades. Many evenings, as my grandparents and I sat down to supper, a soft vitriol would pervade the conversation as my grandparents exchanged worried comments about the new and burgeoning Sudanese population in town or the Mexicans working at the Cargill plant.

Welcome to racism in my world.

It’s soft, it’s private, and it’s the most barefaced form of racism I’ve ever encountered. It hurts me to know that two of the people I love and admire most in the world have been brought to hate their neighbors and blame them for the much broader issues facing rural America. It hurts me to know that many groups of people simply seeking security—people who, in fact, will likely prove vital to the survival of small-town Nebraska—are facing a chilling welcome in a state I am otherwise so deeply proud of.

Though prejudice might be stubborn, I am too. My writing on the subject has received national recognition, I care for refugee families through my school, I’ve corresponded with my elected representatives, and I’ve engaged in thoughtful, compassionate dialogue with my grandparents. It’s harder to hate people if you understand them, after all. I believe that education and reconciliation are vital to the recovery of my state and our broken communities, and I’m doing my best to facilitate, wherever I can, the beginning of this healing.

招生官点评

这篇文章写起来不容易。对每个人来说，家庭和家庭都是复杂的，尽管有些人比其他人更复杂。很少有人谈论自己成长过程的复杂性，更很少有人愿意公开分享家中晚餐时发生的种族主义对话。然而，这不是一篇激进的文章。尽管使用了诸如家庭、爱情和敬佩之类的词语，这些词语常常表达一种亲近感，但作者还是写了一篇有点遥远的文章。分享的每一条信息都经过计算和测量，以便读者对这个学生的环境有一个非常具体的了解。对内布拉斯加州农村的描述读起来就像经济历史学家的话，不一定是你平均17岁的孩子。

作者成熟而深思熟虑的语法无疑让这篇文书增色不少。“The crosswinds of social and economic change”和“the chokehold of a vehement and metastasizing nativism”。这些是真正有天赋的作家的短语，他们努力工作使每一个词都能产生影响。这篇文书中我最喜欢的词是最后一句：healing。经过多次阅读，这篇文章本可以有一个不同的，可能更明确，转向。相反，我相信作者为这种遥远的语调提供了一种解释，他们也在治愈。