ASU: Something You Enjoy (Option B)
300-500 words
Briefly tell us about something you enjoy and why. This can be an organized activity or something you informally pursue in your free time. The bulk of your essay should then be spent speaking to how this interest makes you a good fit for Barrett (not college in general, but specifically the honors experience at ASU).
What it’s really asking
Open with a real interest or hobby, then spend most of the essay connecting the WAY you pursue it to the honors experience at Barrett. This is for Barrett Honors applicants only; general ASU admission requires no essay. You choose only one of the three prompts.
Why they ask it
This prompt rewards specificity and self-knowledge. Barrett can tell a lot about how you will behave in seminars from how you describe the thing you do when no one is grading you.
Three ways in
Go true, not impressive
Pick something honest and slightly unexpected, even if it is small. Honesty reads better than prestige here.
Show the habit of mind
Reveal how you question, iterate, or notice inside the hobby. The how matters more than the what.
Bridge to honors
Translate that habit directly into Barrett seminars, the thesis, or honors discussion, not college in general.
✕ Weak opening
“One thing I truly enjoy in my free time is reading, because it has shaped who I am as a person.”
✓ Strong opening
“I collect failed sourdough starters the way other people collect stamps, and I have named all four of them.”
I repair mechanical watches, the kind with no battery, where a hairspring thinner than a human hair has to be coaxed back into a flat spiral with tweezers and a held breath. I started because my grandfather left me a 1962 Seiko that did not run, and the cheapest repair quote was more than the watch was worth.1So I taught myself, badly at first. I have lost screws into carpet that I am fairly sure are still there. But over two years I have brought eleven dead watches back to life, including that Seiko, which is on my wrist as I type this.2Here is what watch repair actually taught me, and why it points to Barrett specifically rather than to college in general. A movement is a system where every part is interdependent: clean the balance wheel but ignore the mainspring barrel, and the whole thing still fails. You cannot fix one component in isolation and call it solved. You have to hold the entire mechanism in your head at once.3That is the exact habit Barrett is built around. The Human Event, the two-year interdisciplinary seminar at the core of the honors experience, refuses to let you study Plato in one box and the French Revolution in another. It asks you to see ideas the way I see a movement: as one connected mechanism where a change in one era torques everything downstream. Most honors programs bolt enriched classes onto a normal major. Barrett instead rebuilds the foundation, which is the difference between swapping a battery and actually overhauling the movement.4I also want the honors thesis for the most literal reason imaginable: it is the longest, most patient project an undergraduate can take on, and patience is the one skill I have actually trained. A hairspring will not be hurried. Neither, I suspect, will an original research question worth four years.5I am not bringing watch repair to ASU as a quirky line on a list. I am bringing the way it taught me to think: slowly, systemically, and with the assumption that nothing is truly broken until you have understood the whole of how it was supposed to work. Barrett seems built for people who would rather overhaul than replace, and I would like four years among them.6
- 1Leads with a vivid, unusual, specific hobby and a concrete object (the 1962 Seiko). The prompt asks for the activity 'briefly,' so the opening is sensory but compact, leaving room for the fit argument.
- 2Shows follow-through with honest self-deprecation and a number (eleven watches). 'Follow-through' is exactly what ASU says it rewards; the lost-screw line keeps the voice human.
- 3Pivots cleanly to the 'bulk' of the essay as instructed, and extracts an intellectual habit (whole-system thinking) from the hobby rather than just describing it. The explicit signpost 'why it points to Barrett specifically' shows the student read the prompt carefully.
- 4Names a flagship Barrett feature (The Human Event) and the structural fact that Barrett is a foundational college, then closes the loop with the watch metaphor. This is the strongest possible 'fit' move: the analogy and the program feature are genuinely the same idea.
- 5Adds a second concrete Barrett feature (the thesis) and ties it to a personal trait already demonstrated, so the claim of fit is earned by evidence rather than asserted.
- 6Closes by translating the hobby into a thesis about how the student thinks, and reframes 'fit' as a shared temperament with Barrett's community. Returns to the central metaphor for a clean, non-generic ending.
Stuck? Start here
- What do I do in my free time that I would do even if no one ever saw it?
- What does the WAY I pursue it reveal about how I think (do I iterate, question, organize, notice)?
- Which Barrett feature (seminar style, the thesis, honors housing) matches that habit of mind?
Before you submit
- My interest is specific and genuinely mine, not chosen to impress.
- Most of the essay connects the interest to Barrett specifically.
- I showed a habit of mind, not just an activity.
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