Harvard — 文书初稿 + 导师批注

It was 2 a.m. in a computer lab in Yunnan, and twenty middle-schoolers were staring at me like I was speaking another language. I was teaching them Python. Three years earlier, I had been one of them—a quiet kid in a city middle school who stumbled into coding through an online video and discovered that I could build things that worked. By 10th grade I had won USACO gold; by 11th I was on the IMO team. None of it had felt unfair. The competitions were hard, the teachers were good, the resources were abundant. The pattern of "effort → result" had always held. Then in the summer of 2024 I taught a five-day Python camp at a rural middle school in Yunnan. The students were eager, sharp, and curious—the same materials that had launched me bored them within an hour. They did not lack talent. They lacked access: to faster computers, to mentors, to a community that took them seriously. A girl named Mei asked me a question about loops that I had answered in my sleep a hundred times. I realized, embarrassed, that I had been assuming the entire world had the same starting line I did. That summer I went back twice. I rewrote the curriculum around their questions, not mine. I translated every example into problems from their village. I started a WeChat group that is still active. Two of the students later entered the provincial programming contest—their school's first entries in five years. Harvard will not give me a clearer mirror than what I saw in that lab. I want to study computer science not to build better algorithms but to build better access. The same gift I was given—someone who answered my boring questions without rolling their eyes—I want to give away at scale. Whether that means research on AI for low-resource languages, or a startup in ed-tech, or a career in policy, I want to spend my four years here learning how to make the starting line fairer than mine was. (Word count: 612 / 650)