芝大“烧脑”小文书怎么写？这些「录取范文+详细点评」给你启发！

众所周知，对于很多申请芝加哥大学的同学来说，撰写芝加哥大学文书是一件需要绞尽脑汁、令人头疼不已的事情。

今年芝大的小文书题目一如既往精灵古怪。

虽然“怪”与“偏”，但不可否认，芝大文书的烧脑与有趣，给申请者带来了重新思考生活细节的机会，激发学生们思辨能力、创造力及写作能力，对于申请百利而无一害。

不管你有没有想要申请芝大的打算，都可以一起来看看这些芝大的优秀文书，及专业人士的点评，快来头脑风暴吧！

（因篇幅限制，文中仅展示2篇小文书及解析，完整版芝大小文书解析，领取方式见文末）

必写小文书题目：

根据你现在对芝加哥大学的认知，你认为芝加哥大学如何满足你对一种特定的学习方式、团体和未来的希望？

请列举几个你自己的愿望以及它们和芝加哥大学的关联。

小文书6选1：

Did I mention I’m a cultural philosopher interested in starting a Neo-Confucian reformation through literature and music? Well, I am. And there’s no better place for me than UChicago. Here’s why:

When I visited the Leo Strauss Center at UChicago in June 2018, its managing editor Prof. Gayle McKeen led me to the top floor of Regenstein, where Strauss’ notes and manuscripts are stored.

While teaching at UChicago, Strauss dug into ancient philosophers’ esoteric scripts and did a very good job deciphering them -- and the trick lies in those notes. After I realized this, my summer camp roommate never saw me before 10 pm for two weeks. For my own little reformation, a lot of deciphering and arrangement need to be done, for which Strauss’ method will provide an ideal guide. 

UChicago is the only institution that grants access to those notes, and I wonder when my roommate will see me since there is no curfew for undergraduates. (Answer: still 10 pm, since that’s when Regenstein closes.)

Strauss was pretty smart, but he would’ve been more efficient if he had something called “Digital Humanities,” an area in which UChicago is now the undisputed leader. I am excited to benefit from and contribute to this promising enterprise, as I personally experienced its convenience when I pulled statistics of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert from Prof. 

Robert Morrissey’s digitized French literature project, which was an immense help to my research on the Enlightenment. I can see myself compiling and digitizing the “Classic of Documents” with Prof. Edward L. Shaughnessy from East Asian Language and Civilizations department, comparing the respective frequency of Confucius’ use of “Ren” and “Yi” in this work, and investigate the subtleties of Neo-Confucian thoughts.

UChicago is the only school I am applying to that opens to undergraduates the course “Adaptation & Translation in Theater-Making.” The intercultural and interdisciplinary approach of this course makes it a perfect resource for me to refine my “Wen Tianxiang” and begin creating other works. 

The music course “Social and Cultural Studies of Music” will deepen my understanding of the connection between music and the philosophy behind it, and the Composition Seminar will vastly improve my skills as I can receive criticisms from world-renowned composers. 

While technically the seminar is for graduate students, Prof. Augusta Thomas Thomas assured me that distinguished undergraduates can participate as well. Most excitingly, the “Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities” major allows me to fit all of the above into my four-year-journey. My final BA project, as I envision now, will be a full opera that embodies Neo-Confucian philosophy in a modern story, performed in English and accompanied by a Western-style orchestra. 

I also look forward to pursuing a multitude of activities at UChicago’s UROCK Climbing Club (I am actually quite a climber -- didn’t see that coming, did you?), its Symphony Orchestra, its University Theater, and of course its Philosophy Club -- while I certainly hope to stage my reformation, sometimes it’s ok to just be a casual intellectual who sits around and talks, or to just have fun. 

Insofar as I am a cultural philosopher interested in starting a Neo-Confucian reformation through literature and music, I look forward to seeing that reformation emerging in the neighborhood of Hyde Park. (538 words)

1.使用清晰、直接的结构元素。

这篇文章在正文段落中，提供了一个很好的、快速的“钩子”，以及清晰的主题句（尽管它们并不总是段落的第一句）。

你的读者可能会快速到略读的程度。如果是这样，清晰的论文、清晰的主题、清晰（但简洁）的结论，会有助于确保读者不会错过任何重要内容。

2.表明你已经完成了你的研究。

正文讨论了具体的课程、计划和机会，其中一些是芝加哥大学独有的。然后通过清晰的思考，展示了它们是如何与学生想要追求的目标相联系的。

我们清楚地感觉到，学生并不是仅仅因为学校在某处的排名而申请，或者只是略读了一些基本信息，而是TA已经花时间考虑了，芝加哥大学能如何专门提供给他想要的教育。

3.将这些细节与你的价值观联系起来。

我们经常称其为论文的“那又怎样”元素——不要只告诉芝加哥大学它的学校有多棒（它知道）。

要通过反思它们会让你追求或探索什么，去体现为什么这些细节和你的价值观有联系，以及为什么这些事情对你很重要。

如果你可以将你对学校感兴趣的细节，与你已经完成或计划继续的事情联系起来，就像上面那个学生反复做的那样，肯定可以加分。

（2019年）如果宇宙中的物质数量有限，Olive Garden（以及其他餐厅，它们的食物无限的概念）如何提供真正无限的汤、沙拉和面包？

你可以使用任何你希望的分析方法来解释这一点——物理学、生物学、经济学、历史学、神学……正如你所知，选择是无穷无尽的。

—来自Yoonseo Lee，2023er

The human mind tends to dislike inconsistencies. Possibly for this reason, philosophers created (or discovered?) the “law of non-contradiction”: for example, something can’t be limited and unlimited at the same time. So if there’s a limited amount of matter in the universe (clearly an assumption, but let’s grant it and see where it takes us), how can Olive Garden serve an infinite amount of food (not that I’d complain about more breadsticks)?

Both Eastern and Western philosophy have, perhaps without realizing it, struggled with the Olive Garden dilemma for centuries. One possible answer lies in the condition “at the same time.” True, matter in the universe might be limited at any single point in time, and so is the amount of food Olive Garden can produce, but Olive Garden is making food ALL THE TIME! 

Chemistry, biology, and environmental science all teach us that matter and energy recycle, something mirrored in Neo-Confucian cosmology. In the li-qi (principle-matters) system,  the li of the universe is fixed, and the qi at any time is limited, but as time goes on, the qi breaks and reorganizes itself according to the li, destroying and creating matter endlessly. 

The Hegelian dialectic, while working a little differently, shows the same thing. The Thesis and the Anti-Thesis are limited at a given point in time, but as their conflicts grow and materialize over time, a Synthesis is formed -- creating stuff endlessly! (Well, maybe until the “end of history.”) The Daoist dichotomy of Yin and Yang goes a step further: “The Supreme Void divides to The Two; the Two give birth to The Four; The Four create The Eight….”   

As the two essential elements group and regroup themselves, myriad creatures are being created, disintegrated, and recreated. The spirit of this self-generative binary paradigm is continued in modern Computer Science, where groupings of 0’s and 1’s generate infinite possibilities. Although the computer has only limited storage, variations with time create limitless images on the screen. 

Similarly, although the universe has only a limited amount of matter, over an infinitely long period of time Olive Garden can surely serve limitless amounts of food. Even if the amount of matter in this universe is finite, we have no way of knowing it -- the universe could be bound, but its terminus is beyond our perception. Similarly, the food at Olive Garden could in fact be limited, and the customers might simply perceive it to be limitless because they can’t see its limit. In other words, the food of Olive Garden is made infinite by the customers!

As German philosopher Immanuel Kant formulated in his Critique of Pure Reason, the unperceivable world -- the thing-in-itself, aka the secrets in the kitchen -- is unknowable and could be finite or infinite. But what makes it seem infinite is our limited capacity to know, or in this case, to eat. I’m sure many creatures of enormous appetite (myself included) have tried to eat an Olive Garden empty, just as those of outstanding intellect have tried to explore the metaphysical reality of the world, but as far as I know, none have succeeded. This makes the food at Olive Garden effectively infinite. 

Political theories offer tantalizing possibilities for explanation, until each is devoured in time. The combination of the self-generating matter of the universe and the limited capacity of mind -- parallel to the continuously refilling Olive Garden salad bar and the limited appetite of each of us -- can lead to a feeling of frustration. I remember a time when I almost finished off the salad bar, but seconds later they refilled it. Nothing could encompass how I felt at that moment besides the word “frustration.” 

Francis Fukuyama, one of my favorite contemporary political philosophers, likely had the same frustration when he concluded in 1989 that “history has ended with the globalization of liberal democracy,” only to be proven wrong as cultural and ethnic conflicts arose in the 1990s. Fukuyama’s teacher, Samuel Hungtington, then tried to capture this new political zeitgeist in his “Clash of Civilizations,”  only to be proven incomprehensive when ideological conflicts took place again in the Middle East in the 2000s. 

Numerous other theories arose to make sense of our geopolitics, and some did a good job --  for a period of time. As the situation itself keeps changing, those theories inevitably become less accurate and less relevant. Political phenomena in the world, like the food at Olive Garden, just keep presenting themselves ceaselessly, and neither our minds nor our appetites seem capable of fully handling them. 

Hence, we start to question the question. Things -- food and the world -- seem so limitless and overwhelming that we start to doubt whether there’s only a limited amount of matter after all. Maybe the initial proposition itself is wrong! As I wrote this previous line, I finally realized how infinity is truly possible: it is our very ability to doubt, to think outside the box, to question fixed propositions, that is truly infinite.

My favorite philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, acknowledges as much: true, no single account of the world is fully accurate,  but in attempting to formulate those accounts, we create many different ways of looking at the world -- many mini-worlds to ourselves. Each “paradigm shift” is a complete revolution of thought, a collective “thinking outside the box,” a fruit of human creativity, which is limitless and leads us closer and closer to the ultimate reality. 

I guess that’s why Olive Garden is so popular. (906 words)

1.语言、结构和语气。

类似于上面“为什么是我们”的示例，这篇文书提供了一个很好的、快速的钩子，它很好地把握了认真对待题目和对题目的荒谬戏谑之间的界限。

这种语气是这篇文书在整个正文中都能很好传播的东西，并且需要好几份草稿才能实现。

正文段落使用清晰的主题句，让读者能有明确的方向和重点。选词和句式结构也展现出扎实的工艺水平。

最后一句给出了一个很好的、清晰的闭合感，同时又使用了语气助力。

2.给他们展示头脑。

每个正文段落都在一个新方向上做得很好，使作者能够展示TA理解的深度和广度，跨越复杂的哲学和政治思想（黑格尔、孔子、康德、道教、福山、亨廷顿、库恩）。

并且TA可以用有趣的方式去理解，再次“展示TA的哲学肌肉”。

我们读这篇文书的感觉是，TA在学校的常规课外之外，还阅读了很多——这不是严格要求的，但它往往会有帮助。

如果你想成为一个更聪明的人，阅读是一个很好的方式。

（2018年）俗话说，“吃什么是什么”。什么食物塑造了你的生活或世界观？

After asking the children to gather around a large table at the center of the room, I announce the challenge.

“I’m now going to open this bag of lollipops. Take whatever you’d like!”

In a split second hands are scrambling all over the desk and the children scream in delight and in frustration. In a few seconds, everyone retreats from the table to protect their bounty and I see the plastic bag has exploded. Looking around the room, I see a mixture of smiles and frowns just as I expected. Tough Soomin has quickly grabbed hold of eight; little Jaeyong has none.

“Don’t eat them yet! Yes, Junhyeon, I mean it. Just look around, guys. Is everyone happy?”

Many kids shake their heads passionately. Soomin looks a little sheepish.

“OK. But this is where economics comes in, right? I know you’re tired of me saying this by now, but always remember: economics is all about thinking about what to do with all our stuff.”

Bringing up the PowerPoint slide, I introduce them to the Tragedy of the Commons and tell them that this way of distribution was Option 1: Leave everyone to do whatever they want, the very process that causes a Tragedy. After collecting their lollipops back (a difficult process that involves my begging), I announce Option 2: Government Regulation.

I pass all the lollipops to Minsoo, assigning him the government role. “Your job is to give out these lollipops to all of your friends, based on what you think is the best way.”

I’m sure this will yield a better result, since this is a textbook economic solution. But I’m surprised. What I see is nothing close; I see our own society. Minsoo gives priority to his closest friends, letting them choose flavors and giving them two each. Many others don’t get the flavor they wanted. When he has left-overs, he pockets a few for himself.

My presentation loses a lot of meaning with many kids still unhappy. Afterwards, other solutions like communist systems and auctions with Monopoly money don’t work much better. I’m hoping that the final solution will work though.Bringing back all the lollipops to the center table, I announce the ultimate solution, promising kids that after this round they’ll be able to keep their lollipops.

“I’m giving you guys ten minutes to talk about who should get what. I want everyone to be happy!” 

I watch the debate closely, hoping to see the negotiation process bear fruit as predicted by Nobel laureates Elinor Ostrom and Ronald Coase. This is supposed to be the best solution for small communities, and it appears so. After spending weekends together, the children know each other well enough for discussion. Those who don’t want lollipops quickly announce their decisions and help monitor the debate. When they eventually work out something, I ask them if they consider this to be the best solution. Everyone seems to nod and I end the lesson after presenting the ideas of Ostrom and Coase.

I pack my stuff after the lesson when two children come to me. “We didn’t get the flavor we wanted. There were some people who secretly took the flavor we wanted and we had to let them because they were older than us.” I tell them to wait, and quickly return with the lollipop flavors they wanted from a nearby convenience store. At least they have a smile as they go back home. But I’m slightly troubled.

* * *

I was simulating an economy with some twenty children. But the difficulties of finding a solution even in this microcosm had me thinking: what about the real world? 

I’ve learnt that the world is complex and that it’s easy to miss so many important people by relying on classroom theory. It’s why I hope to start tackling the world’s problems at UChicago, to make sure that, as much as possible, everyone gets the lollipops they want. And that’s what lollipops have taught me. (660 words)

1.每个人都喜欢一个好的故事（结构）。

这篇文书以一个经典讲故事的动作开始——在你给我们提供更广泛的背景之前，描绘生动画面并设置冲突的时刻。

对孩子们争先恐后的描述中，有一些很好的画面和细节，让我们进入了这一时刻，让我们对此感到好奇。

在TA补充解释前也有恰到好处的延迟，“好的。但这就是经济学的用武之地，对吧？”。然后再解释说“经济学就是思考如何处理我们日常的专业。”

这个结构揭示了发展的方向，但如果延迟太久，可能会失去读者。

2.用创意的方式展示你的创造力。

棒棒糖和“公地悲剧”？跟我们多说些。

学生尝试使用棒棒糖来教授“公地悲剧”和可能的解决方案（例如奥斯特罗姆和科斯的工作），这展示了一种创造性的教学方法，以创造性的方式进行构建，其联系和深度让我们感到惊讶。 

3.展示成长。

这可能是一件可怕的事情，但讨论自己的失败可以展示你的成长和成熟。我们有一种自然倾向，并受到社会压力的影响，这些压力影响我们希望被视为有能力、有见识的人。

但没有人有兴趣听一个关于你如何面对挑战、一直知道该做什么的故事。是的，你做到了，你太棒了。但最后只会让人产生厌倦。

我们对看到成长和发展感兴趣，而这些东西几乎总是来自奋斗和失败——来自提前不知道正确答案，而不得不学习它。

这篇文书的结尾有一种力量，承认了TA没有答案。

怎么样，看完了是不是会有很大启发~

希望大家能从学长学姐的文书中获得灵感，写出梦校一眼即中的文书！

除了以上3篇，这里还有——

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