Honor Scholar Program Admission Essay Prompts

Before You Begin Your Essay...

Like the Honor Scholar Program itself, these essays address a variety of topics and represent different kinds of opportunities for thought. The topics may touch on sensitive issues; they may challenge you to think in ways to which you are not accustomed. Because creativity and analytical ability are part of the essence of our program, we think that you will find these essays both challenging and rewarding to consider and write about.

Read all the prompts carefully, think about them, and then choose one for your essay. Remember—there are no right answers here—think of this challenge as an opportunity for you to explore interesting issues and build a case for your point of view. The Honor Scholar Program takes the essays seriously, and we worked hard to generate questions at once diverse and engaging.

Because the Honor Scholar program also takes you and your ideas very seriously—both now and after you arrive—at least two faculty members will carefully read your essay. You should be aware that the essay and the interview that may follow are the most important factors in admission for the Honor Scholar Program. The Honor Scholar Program does not simply look at your test scores and GPA to gauge admission. We believe that the intellectual curiosity, engagement, and interest we want in our students manifest more clearly in written work (the essay) and personal interaction (the interview) than in SAT or ACT scores. So, take the essay seriously and use this opportunity to show us what you can do!

Your Essay Response. Choosing one prompt below, respond in an essay of about 500 words. Remember, this is a soft word limit.  

• Please double space your text and include your name and mailing address at the top of your essay.
• Save and title your response as your last name, first name (e.g., Einstein, Albert) in either a Word or PDF file. 

Prompt Option 1: Human or Machine?

In October 2016, physicist Stephen Hawking said, "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.” Since then, AI has seen major breakthroughs. In October 2024, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two researchers (John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton) for their contributions to the machine learning that laid the foundations for Artificial Intelligence.

With this context in mind, how does human intelligence differ from artificial intelligence (if it does)? And, do you agree with Prof. Hawking that we might now have reached the last big event in human history? How might we avoid the risks associated with AI?

Prompt Option 2: Health, Responsibility, and Community

 Public health scientist Thomas Oliver wrote in 2006:

“[p]ublic health commonly involves governmental action to produce outcomes— injury and disease prevention or health promotion—that individuals are unlikely or unable to produce by themselves...[a] political community stresses a shared bond among members: organized society safeguards the common goods of health, welfare, and security, while members subordinate themselves to the welfare of the community as a whole. Public health can be achieved only through collective action, not through individual endeavor.” 

 This perspective may be widely accepted in public health, but it “runs counter to a fundamental emphasis on property rights, economic individualism, and competition in American political culture” as Oliver observes.

Considering recent global health crises such as COVID, Ebola, Zika, obesity, and others that threaten us, what should the role of government or international organizations be in the regulation and promotion of individual and/or the public’s health? 

Reference:  Oliver, T. (2006). Annual Review of Public Health. 27, 195-233. doi: 10.1146/annurev.publhealth.25.101802.123126

Prompt Option 3: The Writer's Task

“Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another. By virtue of that power, it is political, regardless of content.”
            ––Barbara Kingsolver, DPU ’77, in “Jabberwocky,” High Tide in Tucson: Essays From Now Or Never (Harper Perennial, 1995), p. 232. 

“As writers, our services are needed as human beings. . . . I don’t want to write anything that is consolation. I don’t want to console. I want us to feel just a tiny fraction, a tiny fraction more than we do in our deeply comfortable American lives despite all the pain and suffering. . . . I want us to feel uncomfortable and be disoriented.”
            ––Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, 20 Nov. 2024, on accepting the 2024 National Book Award for her fourth book of poetry: Something Like Living

What do you see as the writer’s task? Ca. 1579, in The Defence of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney argued that a writer’s task is to move an audience. Quoting Virgil’s Aeneid (6.129), Sidney explains, “to be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know, hoc opus, hic labor est (“This is the task, this is the work to be done”). Would a writer’s role, as you define it, support or contradict Sidney’s belief that writers should inspire readers to take action in the world?  How does your own view either support, qualify, or refute the views expressed above by two contemporary writers, a novelist and a poet respectively?

Prompt Option 4: Books Outside A Flooded Home, New Orleans

What does this image say to you?  You may take any approach or perspective you like in responding to the photograph.  That is, you could tell a story based on the photo, look at it as a piece of art, or comment on the economic, political, social, or environmental meanings it might convey.

Photograph by Chris Jordan,In Katrina’s Wake. Princeton Architectural Press, 2006 (posted with permission of author).