牛津、剑桥、斯坦福……这些世界顶尖的名校构成了全球各地无数学子的梦想。许多人甚至会花费高昂的价格来购买一些申请成功者的经验技巧，却全然不知，在这些名校的官方网站上都有供在校生与申请者一对一问答交流的免费途径。
拿哈佛举例。在哈佛大学的官方网站上，在首页“Life at Harvard”板块中，找到“Student Voice”板块，就可以找到许多在校生极其珍贵的经验分享，也可以通过关键词搜索找到自己感兴趣的内容。
While the personal essay is a great opportunity to infuse your voice into the application， I think some people （cough， me， cough） can get overwhelmed by it to the point where they don’t know how to begin。 What do I write about？ What makes me stand out？ How can I explain all of this in only a few hundred words？
I know， that sounds really obvious。 But sometimes the hardest part of writing is just getting started – if you spend too much time criticizing your ideas before you write anything down， you won’t get anywhere。 Write a few sentences， jot down some random ideas， note a couple anecdotes that might be interesting… just get something on paper that you can look back to。 Maybe one of those ideas will catch， and BOOM you have an essay – or maybe you’ll look back to this list after a few weeks and think of something else that you would rather write about。 That’s fine！ The beginning of the creative process involves coming up with ideas， judging them comes later。 Trust me， I took a class on this （really： it was a psych class called “Creativity： Madmen， Geniuses， and Harvard Students。”）
我知道，这听起来很明显。但有时候写作最困难的部分是刚刚开始——如果你在写下任何东西之前花太多时间纠结于你的想法，你将一事无成。写下一些句子，随意写下一些想法，记下一些可能有趣的轶事……只是在纸上记录一些你可以回顾的东西，也许其中一个想法会抓住你，然后你就有了一篇文章。或者也许你会在几周后回头看看这个列表，然后想一些你更愿意写的东西。这很好！创造性过程的开始包括提出想法，然后再对其进行评判。相信我，我上过这方面的课（真的：那是一门叫做“创造力：疯子、天才和哈佛学生”的心理学课）。
