Writing Portfolio
Curious about our creative work?
At Foundry, we don’t just teach writing—we practice it. Our writing has earned us admission to top colleges and graduate programs, and secured competitive grants such as the Watson Fellowship and the Fulbright Fellowship. Our work has been published not only on industry platforms like the Perfect Circuit Signal Blog, but also in academic publications. We maintain an active professional writing practice across the arts, education, technology, and creative fiction—so we understand what it takes to write with purpose and impact. This portfolio features examples of our own work. Whether it’s a personal statement, a research-based essay, or a published article, we bring the insight of working writers to every coaching session, helping students craft writing that is clear, compelling, and deeply their own.
This excerpt comes from Sophia’s successful application to Harvard’s Technology, Innovation, and Education (TIE) graduate program. It demonstrates key qualities of strong personal writing: clarity of purpose, thoughtful reflection, and a compelling link between lived experience and future goals. Rather than listing accomplishments, Sophia frames them within a larger story of resilience, risk-taking, and a desire to create impact—making the writing both powerful and memorable.
Excerpt from Sophia’s Harvard Graduate School of Education Application
"Throughout my childhood, my mother fought to educate me while staying financially afloat. My life is an example of the value of that education. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to build a business supported by my local community at a young age and to have had a laboratory in which I explored the intersections of technology and education, from Raspberry Pi and Arduino to Adobe Photoshop. It has allowed me to take risks and learn from mistakes many teachers are not free to explore. Now, I have come to a crossroads, where I have the possibility to expand my business or start a new venture. By pursuing a Ed.M. through Harvard’s TIE program, I am seeking not only to understand the complex socioeconomic factors that influence student success, but also to give back by developing an intellectual foundation for future projects that will serve my community and others like it."
"High above the Alaskan wilderness, a blast of solar wind ionizes nitrogen in the upper atmosphere. The night is lit up with a bright red Aurora Borealis. Activity in the local magnetosphere is recorded by the scientific magnetometer station at Kaktovik on the frigid northern coast. Thousands of miles away, in a small room at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska, bell-like sounds tumble down from speakers hidden in the ceiling, joining a chorus of digital sounds representing geological and environmental events across 600,000 square miles of Alaskan wilderness. This is The Place Where You Go to Listen, a work of installation art and computer music by the Alaskan composer John Luther Adams. It is more than a record of the Alaskan landscape. It is a creative work representing John Luther Adams’s personal, powerful connection to Alaska and his love for nature. Even as composers and artists are increasingly using computers in the creation and performance of their music, computer music is also being used to express some of the most ancient and fundamental aesthetic experiences: the experience of wonder which comes from seeing and hearing, first-hand, the Earth’s power and beauty. During my Watson year, I would explore this unusual synthesis of the ancient and the high-tech in the form of modern computer music."
The Watson Fellowship is a highly competitive, year-long grant awarded to graduating seniors to pursue independent exploration outside the United States. This excerpt from Daniel’s winning proposal demonstrates how standout application writing can be both intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant. With vivid imagery and a clear narrative arc, Daniel introduces a complex topic—computer music as a medium for environmental expression—through a specific and evocative example. The writing balances clarity and depth, grounding an ambitious project in personal curiosity and a genuine sense of wonder. It’s persuasive not because it tries to impress, but because it draws the reader into a compelling, meaningful journey.
Excerpt from Daniel’s Watson Fellowship Project Proposal
Excerpt from Sophia's Spotify grant application
This excerpt comes from a grant application Sophia submitted to a Spotify sponsored community-based storytelling initiative. In it, she explores how fictional narratives shape our understanding of identity, power, and possibility—especially for young people. Drawing from her work as an educator, she reflects on how collaborative worldbuilding with students opens up conversations about social issues, empathy, and belonging. The writing stands out for its clarity, originality, and deep sense of purpose, blending personal experience with a compelling vision for community-centered storytelling.
"Stories tell us what is possible, of who we can become. When the heroines and heroes in books, movies, or TV shows don’t reflect who we are, we shed those versions of ourselves that don’t fit these popular narratives. Perhaps we rediscover and reconcile those stories of ourselves later in life, but I want to capture and share the diverse stories of children today. [...] Designing fictional worlds with my students has been a dialogue. In understanding their choices for who gets magical powers and who doesn’t, and why villains become wicked, I heard their perspectives on the problems they see in society. In particular, I’m fascinated by villains and the way they morph over the centuries to embody the fears of contemporary society. In conducting workshops with people spanning generations, I see how stories that blend fact with fiction allow perfect strangers to be vulnerable, empathetic, and willing to share their fears with others. In 2016 I pursued a master's degree at Harvard University in order to dig deeper into the opportunities provided by storytelling in building empathy."
"Miles Davis loved fast cars. His collection eventually included a Mercedes-Benz 190 SL, several Ferraris, and the pièce de résistance—a custom lime green Lamborghini Miura, worth over $1.7 million today. Although this car sadly met an untimely demise on the West Side Highway in 1972, Davis collaborator Paul Buckmaster recalls that Davis kept a cassette tape of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen in the car. It’s a fascinating image, instantly iconic—Davis steeped in the dense clangor and staccato electronic outbursts of Stockhausen’s tape mashup, settled amid the Miura’s flowing lines and low-slung silhouette, weaving through traffic beneath the George Washington Bridge.
Stockhausen might seem like an unlikely place for the jazz trumpet virtuoso, at the height of his career, to turn for inspiration. Born in 1928, Stockhausen emerged in the post-war period as an iconoclastic avant-garde composer in the German modernist tradition, renowned for blending rigorous serial-music techniques with groundbreaking electronic experimentation, creating works that explored profound spiritual and cosmic themes while reimagining the structure and experience of music itself. His theatricality shines in works of breathtaking scale such as Licht, a seven-opera cycle involving mystical characters such as Michael, Lucifer, and Eve, while latent mysticism is exemplified in works such as Gesang der Jünglinge, a groundbreaking work of musique concrète setting texts from The Book of Daniel, and Inori, a meditative work where a solo performer enacts ritualistic, prayer-like gestures from a platform suspended above an orchestra. [...]
For Davis, whose career was marked by constant self-reinvention, Stockhausen’s radical approach to sound was a natural outgrowth of a musical reevaluation that was already well underway. Often misunderstood or overlooked by critics, Davis’s electric period, which is usually considered to begin with the 1967 recording of the track “Circle in the Round,” marked a dramatic departure from his earlier work, embracing a fusion of jazz with rock, funk, and experimental elements. This period saw Davis moving away from traditional structures and acoustic instruments, exploring instead new stylistic influences, the textural possibilities of amplified instruments, electronic effects, and studio techniques such as splicing and layering.
Stockhausen’s influence on Davis was not direct in a stylistic sense, but certain techniques—such as the use of process composition, intuitive performance, and the integration of found sounds—were mirrored in Davis’s own experiments. The influence was not unidirectional either. The two men met only once—at Columbia Studios in 1980, where they collaborated on a recording session that sadly still remains unreleased—but certain aspects of Davis’s influence are detectable in Stockhausen’s later works as well."
Excerpt from Daniel's article "Miles Davis: the Electronic Music Legacy" - Published on Signal Blog
Published on Signal, the editorial blog of Perfect Circuit (a blog that frequently publishes Daniel's work), this article explores the unlikely connection between jazz legend Miles Davis and electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Signal is known for publishing deeply researched, artist-driven essays at the intersection of sound, technology, and culture—and this piece exemplifies that mission. Daniel’s writing stands out for its cinematic detail, rich historical context, and narrative flow. Rather than simply drawing a comparison, he constructs a vivid, layered exploration of mutual influence, cultural currents, and artistic risk.
Excerpt from Sophia's short story Scarab
Sophia wrote Scarab to explore themes of identity, dislocation, sacrifice, and the quiet unraveling of love over time—but what makes the story remarkable is the quality of its prose. With lyrical precision and emotional restraint, Sophia captures the textures of connection, isolation, and memory in sentences that shimmer with detail. From a paper boat launched in a Los Angeles creek to the muffled grief of a train crash in China, the writing moves fluidly across landscapes and emotional registers. Quietly devastating and deeply reflective, Scarab is a masterclass in how powerful storytelling emerges not just from what is said, but from how it’s said.
"From his back pocket, he pulled out a crumpled advertisement for a burger place they tried over the weekend and began to fold. A little boat emerged, its glossy body vermillion and orange. She set it afloat, and hand in hand, they watched the meandering current carry the boat away.
They grew into adulthood together, with the muted terra cottas of the dishware they purchased and the scarlet cactus flowers that brightened their kitchen table. They spoke so often of their entwined futures, until Alison could smell the overripe tomatoes from their garden and Jeremy could see their book collection aligned on redwood shelves, his Carroll next to her Joyce. Alison imagined hiding her memories of this time into the delicate folds of origami, one crease of paper after another, shielding them from the taint of what came after.
Alison cannot recall when their paths stopped converging, when their futures became separated, not shared. After they first moved from Los Angeles to Xi’an, they depended even more on one another, fitting their schedules together like nestled measuring spoons. It didn’t help that Jeremy never felt at home with Chinese society or culture. His Chinese surname bought him anonymity, but his American upbringing kept him an outsider. Despite Alison’s cheerleading and coaxing, Jeremy couldn’t wrap his mind around the unfamiliar tones, much less attempt to memorize the foreign characters. Eventually, Alison stopped buying vocabulary flashcards, stopped asking whether he wanted to explore the night markets, and stopped asking him to try out the newest restaurant in town. She went alone. Seated before a counter on a swiveling bar stool, Alison sipped at her sweet and sour soup in silence, wondering how it could be that she felt more comfortable in a restaurant with strangers than in the presence of the man she married."