Boston College: Conversation and big questions

400 words or less

The late BC theology professor, Father Michael Himes, argued that a university is not a place to which you go, but instead, a "rigorous and sustained conversation about the great questions of human existence, among the widest possible circle of the best possible conversation partners." Who has been your most meaningful conversation partner, and what profound questions have you considered together?

What it’s really asking

Name a real person you genuinely think alongside, and show the questions you have chewed on together. BC is testing intellectual curiosity and your capacity to learn from others through dialogue, not lecture.

Why they ask it

This is one of the least cliche prompts at BC and a gift for a reflective applicant. It lets you reveal how your mind actually works in motion, and the warmth of a real relationship, in the same breath.

Three ways in

The unexpected partner

Choose a younger sibling, a coworker, a grandparent, even a rival, anyone but the obvious inspiring teacher. The surprise itself signals an authentic relationship.

The unsettled question

Build the essay around one recurring question the two of you return to and never fully resolve, which keeps the dialogue alive rather than tidy.

The mind changed

Find a moment the other person changed your mind, and show the exact turn. Intellectual humility is the quality this prompt rewards most.

✕ Weak opening

“My most meaningful conversation partner is my mom, because she has always supported me and taught me so much about life.”

✓ Strong opening

“My best conversation partner runs the register at the gas station on Route 9, and we have spent two years arguing about whether people are mostly good.”

✦ Annotated example · The night bus driver. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

My most meaningful conversation partner drives the 11:40 bus and has never asked my last name. His name is Gerald. For two years I took the late route home from my closing shift at the pharmacy, and for most of that time Gerald and I were the only two people awake on a vehicle the size of a small room.¹ It started with weather and turned, somewhere around the third month, into the real questions. Gerald asked them better than my teachers did, maybe because he had nothing to grade. One night, after a customer had screamed at me over a copay I could not change, I told him I was tired of being polite to people who treated me like a vending machine. He let the question sit through two stoplights. Then he said, "You think being kind is for them. It's not. It's how you stay yourself."² I have argued with that sentence ever since. We did not agree on much. Gerald believes people rarely change and that you should be good to them anyway. I wanted to believe people could be argued into changing, that kindness without results was just surrender. Over months of midnight conversations we kept circling the same great question without naming it: whether goodness is a strategy for improving the world or simply a way of being in it, regardless of whether the world improves.³ I still do not know who is right. I have decided that not knowing is the honest place to stand. What Gerald gave me was not an answer but the habit of treating a hard question as something you keep, not something you solve. He never finished high school. He out-thought me on the only subject that has ever kept me up at night.⁴ When I read Father Himes describing a university as a sustained conversation among the widest possible circle, I thought of that bus. The circle Himes wants is wider than the seminar room. I learned that on the 11:40, somewhere between the pharmacy and home, talking with a man who taught me to hold a question gently and never let it go.⁵

1Subverts the prompt's expectation of an impressive mentor. Choosing a bus driver over a famous teacher signals honesty and reflects BC's preference for the specific and unglamorous over the grand.
2Renders the conversation in actual dialogue, with a pause built in, so it reads as a remembered exchange rather than a paraphrase. The line carries a real idea worth wrestling with, which is what the Himes prompt is hunting for.
3Names the actual 'great question' the prompt demands, and frames it as an unresolved disagreement rather than a lesson received. The conversation genuinely has two sides, which shows intellectual seriousness.
4Quietly dismantles the assumption that the 'best conversation partner' must be credentialed, which is a real intellectual move, not just humility for its own sake.
5Ties back to the Himes quote with a genuine reinterpretation of 'widest possible circle,' showing the writer engaged the prompt's idea rather than name-dropping it. Lands on the question-keeping theme it set up.

Stuck? Start here

Who do I actually keep thinking with, even when no grade or goal depends on it?
What is the one question we return to and have never settled?
Where in our talks did I lose an argument or change my mind, and can I show that turn?

Before you submit

Is my partner a real, specific person whose voice sounds different from mine on the page?
Do I show a genuine question we wrestle with, not a lesson I was handed?
Did I avoid summarizing Father Himes and get to my own life by sentence two?

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