ASU: A Challenge You Will Help Resolve (Option C)
300-500 words
Identify a local, national, or global challenge - big or small - that you intend to play an active role in resolving. Be specific in explaining why this challenge is important to you, how it informed your selection of a field of study at ASU, and in what ways joining Barrett will prepare you to address this issue.
What it’s really asking
Name a challenge you genuinely care about, ideally a specific or local one, explain why it matters to you personally, link it to your intended major, and show how Barrett prepares you to act on it. This is for Barrett Honors applicants only; general ASU admission requires no essay. You choose one of three prompts.
Why they ask it
Barrett wants intellectual purpose tied to agency. This prompt tests whether your stated cause is real (rooted in your life) and whether you have a credible plan, not just good intentions.
Three ways in
Small beats global
Choose a specific or local problem you have actually touched over a big abstract one you have only read about.
Tie it to your major
Connect the challenge to your intended ASU field of study so the link feels earned, not bolted on.
Name your Barrett tools
Show how Barrett (the thesis, faculty mentors, honors courses) gives you the means to act on the problem.
✕ Weak opening
“Climate change is the greatest challenge facing our generation, and I want to help solve it.”
✓ Strong opening
“The creek behind my middle school flooded three Aprils in a row, and the third time it took the kindergarten playground with it.”
The challenge I intend to spend my life on is small enough to fit in a glass and large enough to decide whether my home state survives the century: groundwater. I grew up in Arizona, where the tap runs from an aquifer that is, in a sense, a savings account thousands of years old that we are spending faster than it refills.1This is not abstract for me. The summer I was fifteen, the well on my aunt's property outside Willcox went dry. Not metaphorically dry, actually dry, the pump pulling air while her almond trees browned. The state had no requirement to even measure how much water her agricultural neighbors were pumping. I remember thinking that you cannot manage what you refuse to count.2That sentence is why I am applying to study hydrology and water resource management at ASU rather than a more generic environmental program. ASU sits inside the problem. The Kyl Center for Water Policy and the School of Sustainability are not studying drought from a distance; they are doing it in a metropolitan area of five million people that runs on engineered water. I want to work on the unglamorous part: the measurement, modeling, and policy that turn an invisible underground resource into something a legislature can actually govern.3Barrett is where I expect to learn to do it rigorously rather than just earnestly. The honors thesis is the obvious draw: a multi-year original project, which is exactly the scale a real water question requires, since you cannot model an aquifer's recharge in a single semester. But I am almost more interested in the interdisciplinary core. Water is never only an engineering problem; it is law, economics, tribal sovereignty, and history at the same time.4Barrett's habit of forcing those disciplines into one conversation is the training I need, because the dry well in Willcox was never going to be solved by a better pump alone. It needed someone who could read a hydrograph and a water-rights statute in the same afternoon.5I do not expect to fix Western water in four years. I expect to leave Barrett able to measure it honestly, model it credibly, and argue for it persuasively in front of the kind of people who once told my aunt that nobody was required to count. That is the active role I intend to play, and Arizona is the only place I would want to learn to play it.6
- 1Names a specific, scoped challenge in the first sentence and stakes a personal claim on it. The savings-account framing makes an abstract issue concrete and shows the student can explain, not just cite, the problem.
- 2Anchors the global issue in one specific lived experience with a real place (Willcox) and a real consequence. The closing line ('you cannot manage what you refuse to count') is the student's own thesis and previews the field of study.
- 3Directly answers 'how it informed your selection of a field of study at ASU' and names specific, real ASU resources (Kyl Center for Water Policy, School of Sustainability). This is the concrete fit the prompt demands.
- 4Pivots to 'how joining Barrett will prepare you' with two specific honors features (the thesis and the interdisciplinary core) and explains why each one matches the nature of the challenge, not just that they exist.
- 5Ties the Barrett interdisciplinary point back to the opening anecdote, closing the loop so the school's structure is shown solving the student's specific problem.
- 6Closes with realistic humility about scope ('I do not expect to fix') paired with three concrete verbs of intended contribution, then loops back to the personal stake and to Arizona itself, reinforcing genuine fit.
Stuck? Start here
- What problem have I actually touched in my own town or life, not just read about?
- How does this challenge connect honestly to the major I want to study?
- Which Barrett resource (the thesis, a faculty mentor, an honors course) would help me act on it?
Before you submit
- My challenge is specific and rooted in my real experience.
- I connected it clearly to my intended ASU major.
- I named a concrete Barrett resource that prepares me to address it.
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