轻轻的摇晃着玻璃杯，在灯光中闪着令人眩晕的光芒。技术员又一次转动着曲柄。空间狭小，所以每一个架子的最初设计都是可折叠的。平常不用的时候，它们折叠堆砌搁在一起就像掀起衣袖形成的皱纹一样：紧张、期待。我站在一堆储藏试验品之间，等待着被相中的那一刻。我斜倚着浏览着一张泛黄的博物馆标签，然后慢慢往后挪一步开始整体欣赏：一个密封的玻璃器皿、琥珀色的酒精溶液以及幽灵般的甲壳类生物。摸上去，这些玻璃杯冰冷冷的，但是由于室内空间小的原因还是装置了防火设备，以防万一。
我的电子密钥卡上标记着一串字符：走入科学，史密森博物院（VISITING SCIENTIST, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION）。我曾经很高兴，虽然这里的门都带着特别的锁，但通常情况下只要轻轻一扣门就开了，但现在这把钥匙在我口袋里却有千斤重。我能感觉到身上的背包，那长方形的“躯壳”抵着我的脊柱，里面有一个装着电子测径器的盒子、珠宝商专用的镊子和一把带拉链的皮革袋手术刀、一架长期设置的微观数码照相机（主要是用来抓拍小型动物或生物的）、笔记本以及从流淌的河水里获取的奇形怪状的泥巴。
我端着第一个玻璃杯，将其放到实验台上。
当我拧开密封十几年的盖子时，耳边似乎听到了一个很奇怪的声音，似乎是我母亲，但其实是我自己发出的惊呼声“虾”？（听得出来，实在是太渺小了）。和超市里那些无头的灰色的死亡的贝类生物来说，这只“虾”又有什么样的意义呢？科学难道不是意味着研究癌症和研发仿真实验吗？为什么要约束自己？为什么不研究一些更大型的实验呢？
没错。我就是一个偏爱小家伙的科学家，我喜欢研究那些在世界野生动物基金会的海报上看不到的生物。而这样的生物是必须亲力亲为才能找到的（you’d have to get down on hands and knees to see at all）。我印象中第一次去动物园的时候，不是急着看大象和长颈鹿，相反的我却喜欢看各类的昆虫。5岁的时候，就常常在我家后院的草地上抓一些小型节肢动物然后把它们一个个放进事先准备好的玻璃杯中。我常常回想起来过去的一幕，每个周末去图书馆，翻阅一本本动物书刊，在阅读中领会昆虫的奇妙世界。
感觉似乎有点偏题，关于上个话题还是暂且写到这里吧！接下来还是说说杯中物吧！
我小心翼翼的把这只虾从密封的杯子里取出来。这十几年来它在里面一定很无聊现在尤其脆弱不堪。我用食指和大拇指用镊子把它夹出来搁置在空气中，欣赏着这只过去了大半个世纪的生物重现光明。
虾轻视自己。它是一只带刺的怪兽，一端长有锯齿，而另一端却有着象牙般的玫瑰花色尾巴。从它豆芽形状的眼部抽出几段细长的花束。它那弯曲的爪子就像芒刺云集的挂钩，而身体却有着像杏似的漂白色。入殓师的标签是一个潮湿的长方形羊皮纸。我用镊子翻转了写有文字的另一面：SANTA MARIA，墨西哥韦拉克鲁斯。 1894年2月14日（SANTA MARIA, VERACRUZ, MEXICO. FEBRUARY 14, 1894）。由于年代久远，墨迹已经很模糊了。
我来这里是要精确的测量其四肢和躯干。但是当卡钳转换角度在其壳上方时，我似乎觉得它还活着。奶油色的条纹裸露在身体的两侧，关节之间都是中国橙。我似乎看到了它的生长轨迹：从上游源头诞生的上百万个兄弟姐妹的浮游生物到童年时期棕榈树环绕的盐湖；我似乎看到它努力的上游，摸索着穿过瀑布和河岸，学会从苍鹭和男孩儿们的棍棒间成功躲闪，进入鲶鱼的隧道庇身；我似乎看到它在网里伸开爪子拼命挣扎的场景；我似乎看到它被随意的扔进充斥着福尔马林药水的试管里。它抽搐着扭曲的身体像被鱼叉插住的鲸鱼，药水溅得到处都是，也包括打捞它的人员，不一会儿功夫它就安静了下来。但其身体的颜色还是那么光鲜。
实验结束了。我关上了卡钳的不锈钢钳口。托盘里的刺和生物槽脊，曾经的水域到这次的实验之旅，像放幻灯片一样依次闪过。我摇了摇头。在这些小型的桡肢动物身上，我看到了如诗般的感觉。
ESSAY赏析
在无数的申请文书中，申请者概括的ESSAY佳作的特点主要集中于表现个人性格优势，做到透明、真实，但事实上不是所有的人都能够认真诚恳的在ESSAY中呈现自己。作者在文中描写的是19世纪晚期的一个试验品“虾”，感觉枯燥无味。但是，从标题可以看到作者讽刺的写作手法，一只死了大半个世纪的虾，作者却说它依然活着。生命的激情大多存在于坚硬的刺和外壳下面，而生命之河回荡在意想不到的地方。通过对古甲壳虫的具体细节描写，让读者信服除它之外很少会有人会去近距离关注它。虽然，整体来看作者是在描写一只死了的虾，但事实上我们却可以感受到他对于科学的激情。作者并没有直接告诉读者他的学术爱好，但是，这只虾已经道出了全部。
作者在最后一句点名“In these swimmerets, there is poetry”，他的话里有话。虽然作者在文章开头描写的晦涩难懂，但在接下来的文章里他能够跳转笔锋直接进入科学的话题。他没有一味的炫技，而是通过词语、句子让读者跟着他的描述一起体会虾的生活。字里行间都流露出了最真挚的情感，这是最大的特点。
全文最特别的除了用词外就是那段一系列的排比”I see…”。” Its creepy antennae “sprout” like a “bouquet,” and its tail flukes are like an’ivory rose.’”从这里可以看到作者的写作天赋。作者就是这样和大家一同分享虾的同时点名了自己对人生的种种看法；其独特的写作视角让人们足矣信服他的学术优势。
—Esther Yi
原英文参考赏析
(26)ALEX KIM—“STILL LIFE”
Barely sloshing, my jars shudder into the light. The technician turns the crank once more. Space is precious here, so these shelves are collapsible. At rest, they bunch up like the wrinkles in my pulled-up sleeves—tense, expectant. Waiting for someone like me, who’ll edge in between them, lean in to scan a yellowed museum label, then step back to take it in all at once: the sealed glass containers, the amber-stained alcohol and the ghostly crustaceans within. These jars are cool to my touch, and the room is fireproofed against their contents.
My electronic card key says VISITING SCIENTIST, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. I had smiled at how smoothly the padlocked doors clicked open, but now the key is oddly heavy in my pocket. Through my backpack, familiar rectangular lumps nestle against my spine. The boxy case of my electronic calipers. Jeweler’s tweezers and a scalpel in a zippered leather pouch. A digital camera, forever set to macro (to capture tiny bristles and spines). My notebooks, muddy and misshapen from run-ins with river water.
I set the first jar on my worktable.
As I twist open a lid sealed decades before my birth (it feels like desecration), I hear a doubtful voice, mostly my mother’s—but my own as well. Shrimp? (The very word, I know, smacks of insignificance.) What’s more to shrimp than dead shellfish, headless and gray on a briny slab of supermarket ice? Isn’t science supposed to be cancer and computer simulations? Why limit yourself—why not study something big?
Yes, I always was drawn to the “small things,” the creatures you’d never see on a World Wildlife Fund poster—that you’d have to get down on hands and knees to see at all. On my first visit to the zoo, elephants and giraffes barely registered; I plowed through that throng of knees straight to the insect house. Aged five, in the tall grass behind our house, I filled dozens of jam jars with the plink of tiny jointed claws. I think back to those early weekly trips to the library, of clutching books with titles like Spineless Wonders and Insect Masquerades. I pause.
Gingerly, I lift him from the jar of preservative. The years have wearied him, turned him brittle. With index finger and thumb, I tug the stirring sleeper into air that knew him last half a continent and a century before.
Shrimp belittles him. He is a spiny beast tipped at one end with a saw-toothed prow and at the other with a fluked tail like the petals of an ivory rose. From between his stalked eyes sprouts a spindly bouquet of antennae. His fingers curve like thorn-studded hooks and his bleached flesh is the color of apricots. The mortician’s tag is a soggy rectangle of parchment. With my jeweler’s forceps, I flip it to read the spidery cursive on its other face. SANTA MARIA, VERACRUZ, MEXICO. FEBRUARY 14, 1894. The ink has barely run.
I am here to reduce him to measurements of limbs and trunk, to a data point. But as I angle my calipers over his shell, I see him as he was in life, cream-colored stripes streaking his sides and China orange in all his many joints. I see him in his infancy, a speck of plankton flushed with a million siblings from the headwaters of his birth to the palm-fringed lagoon of his childhood. I see him make the long slog upstream, scrabbling up cascades and over riverbanks, learning to shelter from herons and stick-wielding boys in undercut banks and catfish tunnels. I see him raising his outspread claws as the naturalist’s dip-net looms overhead. I see him at the moment of death, thrown unceremoniously into a tub of formalin. He flexes like a harpooned whale, splashing his collector’s cotton shirt, and then is quiet. The color’s still fresh in his shell.
Measurements finished, I snap shut the stainless-steel jaws of my calipers. The spines and fluted ridges of the creature on my tray, this time traveler from bygone waters, murmur softly to my eyes. Limiting myself? I shake my head. In these swimmerets, there is poetry.
COMMENTARY
Applicants often make the assumption that the best college essays showcase an individual’s personal strengths and successes in a highly transparent and shamelessly triumphant manner, not realizing that people can often reveal their true and most vibrant colors by taking a more oblique approach in writing about themselves. This is the method employed by this applicant, and to great effect. The entire piece revolves around the simple act of examining a preserved shrimp from the late 1800s: surely one of the dullest—not to mention, literally lifeless—topics one can choose to expound upon. However, the writer capitalizes upon the irony of the situation, as evinced by the clever title, “Still Life,” to suggest that vivacity exists beneath that spiny and crusty exterior, and that life reverberates in unexpected places. Through his exposition about the ancient crustacean, he adeptly convinces readers that he possesses the rare insight that allows him to perceive life in places where few others would see it. His essay may be about a shrimp, but it is actually a meditation on his unique ability to revivify the dead and unstudied through his sincere passion for the sciences. The writer does not simply inform the reader of his academic interests; rather, he conveys the very impact of such passions on his vision of the world around him.
He writes, “In these swimmerets, there is poetry”—and his language deftly proves as much. That said, there is always a risk in beginning an essay too obliquely and leaving the reader confused and disoriented, which the writer does, but he manages it by quickly providing a setting and context for his scene in the very next paragraph. The applicant does not simply describe for the sake of showing how well he can write; he uses his language with the pointed motivation of displaying, through words, the life he sees in the preserved shrimp. His descriptive language is effective not merely for its richness and creativity, but for its ability to evoke his feelings.
An especially strong passage is when he describes the shrimp as he sees it. Its creepy antennae “sprout” like a “bouquet,” and its tail flukes are like an “ivory rose.” The writer indeed brings poetry to the most unexpected of items. His essay invites readers to share his vision of the shrimp and to understand how he sees life, and through the uniqueness of this perspective, this applicant persuades readers that he possesses a vision that few other applicants can boast of.
—Esther Yi
