近日，约翰霍普金斯大学招生官公布了5篇2030届优秀申请文书，新一轮申请即将开启，很多同学已经开启了文书写作，到底什么样的文书才是招生官想看到的呢？
1、The Secret Ingredient is Connection（by David M.）
An authoritative voice bellows my name in the crowded school cafeteria: “MATZ!” My freshman year track coach advances towards me, each stride squashing surrounding chatter and closing the distance between us. I know exactly what awaits me.
“Remember,” he says, standing in front of me with eyes fixed on mine, “the lemon squares.” He adds with a grin, “And could you put a smiley face on top?”
Wanting his birthday treat to be memorable, I make a note to pick up raspberry jam for drawing the image.
I am known as “The Baker” by countless teachers and peers. Throughout high school, I have shared hundreds of my homemade delights for special days and ordinary days, individuals and groups, and friends and strangers. Baking is incredibly meaningful to me as a way to strengthen my relationships with myself, others, and cultures around the world.
In the kitchen, I transform from student into both chemical engineer and principal investigator. Each creation involves a dance of chemistry on a macro and micro scale; I pour in a bit of extra flour and knead, knowing it will strengthen the dough, and I ponder the reactions that will caramelize its sugars. Following recipes suffices, for it allows me to practice technique. It is winter, so I am making a classic: sugar cookies. I want my cookies to be homogenous, so I beat the butter and sugar vigorously. But my curiosity often takes over. An enthusiast of using creativity, innovation, and sugar in equal parts, I decide to close the recipe book. I form the dough into large, rectangular sheets and do some trigonometry in my head to determine their measurements. Once the cookies emerge from the oven, I arrange them meticulously into a 3D structure using icing as glue. After adding Hershey’s chocolate bar windows and powdered sugar snow, the sugar cookie house is complete and sure to wow at the school holiday bake-off!
However, not all my experiments turn out this way. I chuckle as I recall failed explorations of yore: granulated sugar icing that tasted like sand and improperly leavened sourdough that required a saw to slice. Successful or not, each hour spent as a scientist provides fun and new knowledge.
From my experience, I can ascertain that there is a strong, positive correlation between the promise of a baked surprise and club meeting attendance. Thus, after removing cornbread from the oven, I note on the agenda for tomorrow’s Tri-M Music Honor Society meeting: “Treats!” However, my baking is far from over. I find a clean whisk and start on a second batch, although this time, it is vegan. Butter and oil trade places. Eggs give way to their flaxy brethren. The batch is smaller—I know my dietary demographics—but rich in care. Though not fortune cookies, I intend for each sweet to contain a message: Welcome. Join us. I made these for you.
In every mixing bowl lies a ticket to faraway lands. Seizing this opportunity, a friend and I chart a voyage around the globe. We first travel two thousand miles to Mexico where he shows me how to make polvorones, a traditional cookie served during weddings and holidays. Feeling inspired, I fly us across the Atlantic Ocean to Israel. There, I teach him how to braid babka, forming beautiful, overlapping connections between lengths of dough and between my Jewish heritage and me. When ready to return home, we simply leave the kitchen.
I knock on the classroom door, my smile mirroring the one made of jam on the lemony surprise I hold in my hands. My former track coach invites me in, grabbing a couple of chairs and happily accepting his birthday gift. Even sweeter than the lemon squares is the opportunity they provide; together, we reminisce about the past and discuss future plans, catching up after all this time.
The secret ingredient in each baked good I make is connection.
招生官点评：
David将烘焙的艺术与科学结合，展现了他面对尝试与调整时的创新思维。他在文书中叙述了放弃原有配方、重新调配甜点并与团队分享的过程。招生官从中看到了他如何将个人兴趣转化为社区联结，体现出以解决方案为导向的行动力。
David自述：
David建议在写作中保持真诚与适当的脆弱感。文书的目的不是迎合招生官预设的完美形象，而是展现真实且具个人辨识度的经历，让最终的录取结果真正契合自己的志趣。
2、Developing Roots（by Etina R.）
Flipping over rocks under the imposing maple tree in my front yard, I was looking for two things: roly pollies to stash in my Roly-Poly Playground and earthworms to feed the forever hungry chickens roaming my backyard. Looking at these invertebrates that could easily fit in the palm of my hand, made me feel almost as large, strong, and invincible as the maple tree looming above me. But a maple tree isn’t the strongest, largest, or most resilient tree that exists; I wanted to be a Giant Sequoia.
If maple trees seemed to touch the clouds, Sequoiadendron giganteum trees seemed to enter the mesosphere. Not only are they larger than any other tree species, but they have also evolved a thick, fire-resistant bark allowing growth to continue even after a ravaging fire in their ecosystem. In math and science, I am and always have been a Giant Sequoia, able to withstand countless derivatives, integrals, organelles, and principles blowing my way. In humanities classes, subjectivity covers all three hundred feet of my trunk and limbs in Pueraria, and my likeness to a sequoia is proven through the resilience needed to strip the vines of uncertainty off and see the beauty of the tree beneath.
Being in high school, I often feel like a cottonwood with a pliable, shallow root system that hasn’t yet evolved to withstand the storm that is life. I am held upright largely due to the interconnection of my root systems with like-minded peers and friends I have found through orchestra, classes, and school clubs. However strong the power of community is, in college I long to develop a deep root system of both knowledge and self-sufficiency that can keep me upright, regardless of what happens to the connections that, right now, are crucial to my survival.
The Castanea dentata, the American Chestnut, taught me to value individualism through the permeation of a fungus that ran rampant and eliminated most of the formerly populous species in the United States. Being a lone tree can limit the stresses of altruism, having each effort contribute to just myself rather than spreading through a group, making it incredibly easy to exist as a lone tree in class, absorbing nutrients accumulating ring after ring of knowledge. However, if the Giant Sequoia’s sprawling, intertwined root systems taught me anything, it was that collaboration, feedback, support, and the melding of ideas allow my community and I to have a strong foundation that can resist even the strongest of winds. I am seeking to integrate into an environment in which I can continue to live in that delicate balance between my community and individual development.
While I may aspire to be like a Giant Sequoia, my confidence more closely resembles a Fraxinus tree, of whom millions have been slain by tiny Agrilus planipennis, better known as Emerald ash borers. The strong scores that made me rise to the top in high school should imprint a sense of confidence, but confidence is easily eroded by self-doubt and a focus on the tiny mistakes that remain and drive me to keep improving myself. Only by acknowledging such vulnerabilities and working within a community of friends and mentors can I improve upon them and grow from a sapling filled with hope and potential to become the well balanced contributor to my communities that the seedling who stared at the maple leaves looming above longed to be.
招生官点评：
Etina借助对不同树种的生物学认知，构建了关于个人韧性、扎根与社群支持的跨学科反思。招生官认为，通过自然世界的隐喻来展现内心成长，清晰地勾勒出一名懂得在协作环境中汲取养分并赋能他人的独立学习者形象。
Etina自述：
最初直接描写自己时总觉得缺乏深度和真诚感。后来她选择从活动列表里未明显体现的树木爱好入手，用不同树种映射自身多元的性格特质，从而摆脱了套路化的自我介绍。
3、The Two Sides of America（by Gillian H.）
Lucedale’s population is about 3,000. Its claim to fame is the Rocky Creek Catfish Cottage, the best place to get fried catfish in all of Eastern Mississippi. The residents have still not entirely mastered the four-way stop sign that was installed five years ago. There is little to no cell service, and the only place to shop is Walmart. Lucedale is the antithesis of Chicago. But still, it is my home away from home. The red clay from the dirt roads has seeped into my blood; I will forever be connected to the rural farmland of Mississippi.
My first summer job on the farm was simple: pick up the pinecones that fell from the giant pine by the horse pasture. They were notorious for getting stuck in the lawn mower, so PawPaw made me a deal: five dollars if I cleared them. I spent my days picking up pinecones. No matter how many I picked up, more would fall. By the end of the summer there were still countless pinecones on the ground, but PawPaw still gave me that five dollar bill.
As I got older, picking up pinecones turned to cleaning out the horse stalls turned to bush hogging. The summer that I turned 14, my brother put me on the John Deere and left. I was terrified. Driving the tractor is a major responsibility– it is easy to break and harder to fix. But, I turned it on and went back and forth in straight lines, cutting the thick, rye grass of the horse pasture.
When I was 16, I was finally old enough to work with the cows. I became an employee of SPH Cattle Co., my family’s cattle company. I learned how to herd the cows into the catch pen, which rope tightens the gate and which loosens it. The calves need all of their immunizations, the older ones only need some, and they all need to be sprayed to prevent flies. It’s a process that repeats about 50 times until all of the cows have been pushed through the pen. The work started off as a burden, something that I thought no 16-year-old girl should endure, but by the end of the summer, I found joy in it.
Even 900 miles away, Mississippi is still a part of me; the red dirt, and the lessons, will never leave my blood. Yes, I learned about responsibility and hard work. But the most important thing my summers on the farm gave me? Perspective.
I have listened to people complain at a steakhouse serving $75 ribeyes, but I’ve also experienced the hard work that goes into raising cattle. I call myself a city kid; I have grown up living in high rises, attended private schools. Yet, I have spent my summers in a farmhouse, working in the mud, trading in a golf club for a shovel. I have seen the beauty in rural life. What I value and what I believe comes from this unique perspective that I’m privileged to hold. It’s easy for my Chicago friends to write off rural life, to confine farmers to a stereotype: simple and unaware. My Lucedale neighbors think of folks in Chicago as crazy radicals. I’m unable to make these assumptions. I see the kindness and morality of urban folks. I don’t agree with everything they believe, but that does not make me respect them any less. And I also have so much respect for people from rural communities. They are some of the kindest people I’ve ever met, willing to give the shirts off their own backs to a stranger. My worldview, what I value and what I believe, comes from this rare viewpoint. The beauty of our country, what makes it so great, is these two contradicting sides. And I know first-hand that we wouldn’t survive without both of them, no matter how different they might seem.
招生官点评：
Gillian通过在密西西比州Lucedale农场照料奶牛、参与劳作的夏日经历，展现了责任感以及对不同社群形态的尊重。她在芝加哥都市生活与南方乡村农场之间的切换，证明了她具备打破刻板印象、与多元背景人群顺畅沟通的同理心。
Gillian自述：
Gillian认为，在密西西比度过的夏天重塑了她观察世界与他人的视角，这是她其他申请材料中完全没有展现的一面，也是她个人价值观形成的基石。
4、Clean Closet（by Ruoni T.）
My to-do list always had one unfinished task. No matter how much time passed, I could never check off “clean closet.”
My closet is a time capsule going on eighteen years. It’s packed with favorite toys, plush animals, retired gymnastics leotards, and grandma-sewn dresses that once decorated my childhood. Shelves are adorned with art projects I once was so proud to showcase and yearbooks scribbled with notes from teachers and friends. The rest includes attempts to discover personal style, cheerleading uniforms, and several memory boxes filled to the brim. The closet holds who I was and who I’ve tried to be.
Every attempt to clean became an excavation. Picking up Littlest Pet Shop figures brought back late nights spent creating storylines. Canvases following painting tutorials showed attempts at being worry-free like Bob Ross. Trophies and medals reminded me of how I learned to flip, terrified and exhilarated at once. Every corner echoed a moment that shaped me.
As I started high school, my collection of memory boxes did too. Boxes with charming designs hold every award, letter, trinket, and photo booth strip. Another box is dedicated to flowers from friends and family that I dried. My cheer bag holds well-used pom poms and cheer shoes. All of them remind me of people I learned from and laughed with. Getting rid of them would feel bittersweet. These feelings were exactly why I could never bring myself to clean my closet before. To accommodate the future, I had to do it. One Saturday morning this spring, I sat cross-legged surrounded by piles and committed to completing the task. For years, I always put everything back in the usual place, too sentimental to let anything go. This time, I set aside what I no longer needed in a donation pile, figuring the clothes, books, and toys could benefit others rather than remain stagnant in my closet. I cleared the shelf of childhood books and old art to make space for nail supplies and more memory boxes. It felt weird. But the longer I sat, the more I valued moving toward the future. I can donate books while remembering what made me love them. I can recycle trophies without forgetting my hard work. I don’t need objects to know I’m loved. I still adore and appreciate the sentimental, but I’ve come to see it as a reminder to cherish growth rather than dwell on the past. The memory boxes are my reminders. The things I’ve let go of have grown with me: painting became nail art, gymnastics became cheer, creating storylines became exploring people.
Since then, I’ve acted on that mindset beyond my closet. I stopped constantly worrying about the past and overthinking interactions and choices. Instead, I began saying yes to things that were previously met with hesitation. The same sentimentality I reserved for objects spread to people, and I developed a love for talking to those I once just observed. I started pouring into my nail hobby and volunteering at the hospital. Through these, I get to know clients, patients, and children. I use my love for art and design to reflect personalities on fingers. I celebrate in the rehab ward when patients are going home. I teach kids to be creative and kind. Though they don’t contribute physical objects to my memory boxes, I treasure their smiles. These moments remind me that my childhood self, who loved stories and color, is still within me.
My closet is not spotless. It grows and cycles out, just like life. As I step into new chapters, new memory boxes will start for college, new people, and new milestones. And with the upcoming growth, I’ll have to leave some things behind; the difference is I now recognize that letting go is part of growing.
The next time I’m tasked to “clean closet,” it won’t take eighteen years.
招生官点评：
Ruoni把整理衣橱的过程转化为对身份、记忆与自我更新的探讨。文书中记录了她捐赠旧物、接纳新体验的具体行动，展现出创造力、同理心以及通过服务他人实现成长的特质，高度契合JHU重视实践与探索的校园文化。
Ruoni自述：
Ruoni表示，Common App活动列表只能列出十个项目，无法展现冰冷条目背后的思考方式。她希望通过衣橱整理这一微小事件，填补活动列表留下的空白，向招生官传达自己的处事原则。
5、In the Belly of the Ship（by Ruoyu X.）
I lay on the bamboo mat in a pool of my own sweat, swaying with the ship. A net around my cot attempted to keep out the mosquitos, and the room’s thin walls leaked every crewman’s cough. Yet as I looked outside the porthole, the greatest discomfort was my own shame.
Growing up in a coastal city, the sea carried a call to action. My father, once a cargo crewman and now a shipping administrator, shared tales of free-spirited voyages and world experience; yet I was most drawn to his depictions of close-knit crews. I was someone who hesitated in small social moments: lowering my eyes in the hallway, uncertain if a wave was meant for me, never taking that initial step. The ship seemed to provide what everyday life lacked: a space where closeness was facilitated.
But when I interned aboard a similar vessel in summer 2024, I quickly discovered the details my dad had left out. My excitement melted under the 100°F sun. There weren’t assigned tasks to distract myself with, and both my journal and copy of Moby-Dick I had brought aboard became nothing more than paper weights.
Worse, I didn’t perceive the camaraderie my father had described. The crew kept to their shifts, mostly isolated in the rooms, caring only that “the ship keeps moving.” The sailors spoke in a provincial dialect I could barely follow, and my father had advised me to conceal my background (as an international school student and administrator’s daughter) for fear it would alienate me from the crew. I tried to join conversations, but with no relatable experience and only fragments of understanding, my words fell short. All I felt I could do was lie flat in my cot and wait for morning.
When I disembarked a week later, my relief was as overwhelming as the heat had been. Yet with time, what returned to me most was the sailors’ faces, carrying stories I had never uncovered.
Which is why, the next summer, I stubbornly boarded again. I carried unease, knowing how physically and emotionally draining the prior voyage had been; but I also carried determination to resist that urge to retreat into my cabin. When I boarded, the engineer (the rare woman aboard) looked at me with surprise and spoke in Mandarin instead of dialect: “most never come back. They don’t appreciate the routine.”
Routine. I became determined to find a routine that wasn’t “hide from the heat.” I volunteered to help: rust-chipping the deck, double-checking the cargo tallies, and washing vegetables. The more I leaned into the routine, the more it carried me. Small things I had ignored before became luminous: hammocks stretched beneath the night sky, chuckles exchanged over bowls of noodles.
With little windows of opening, nods of appreciation or smiles of hello, I took small steps to unearth their experience, not allowing dialect (or a ‘blacklist’ of what truths I should withhold) inhibit me. When I led with authenticity, previous obstacles fell to the wayside. In return, I received incredible stories. Not glamorous sea adventures, but honest experiences from people of all walks of life, all of which were documented in my seafarer’s journal. Everything from a middle-aged couple who decades ago had gone deep into debt (and spent 30 years at sea repaying it), to a young captain sailing from loneliness. Soon, my observations transformed into responsibility; after months of policy research, interviews, and sample collection regarding the crew’s lack of treated water, I led water safety sessions and successfully petitioned the department of transportation for new regulations regarding small vessels’ right to clean water.
My contributions were made possible by that crucible at sea, forged in sweat, silence, and routine: the value of small steps, the power of camaraderie, and the fulfillment of persevering through failure. I’m proud to have been eaten alive by a metal beast, and then entered its jaws once more.
招生官点评：
Ruoyu记录了她在海上科研实习中的挑战与坚持。在初次尝试未能达到预期目标时，她依然选择复盘并重返岗位。这种在陌生且严苛环境中追求卓越、寻找归属感的韧劲，正是顶尖研究型大学极为看重的学术素养。
Ruoyu自述：
Ruoyu提到，这一主题突破了她以往作为学生的认知舒适区，结尾的提炼耗费了数月时间。她认为，真实经历所蕴含的意义需要经过时间的沉淀与反复打磨，才能形成有力量的文字。
