BU / Essays / Prompt 1

BU: Required supplemental essay (choose one of two)

300 words or less (you respond to ONE of the two prompts)

Reflect on a social or community issue that deeply resonates with you. Why is it important to you, and how have you been involved in addressing or raising awareness about it? OR What about being a student at BU most excites you? How do you hope to contribute to our campus community?

What it’s really asking

BU gives you a choice. Prompt 1 wants a social or community issue you care about and, crucially, what you have actually done about it. Prompt 2 is the signature 'Why BU' essay with a twist: it asks both why BU excites you and how you will contribute back. You answer only one. Note that some applicants also complete additional essays for the Kilachand Honors College (600 words) or the Trustee Scholarship (600 words), but those are separate, optional, and program-specific. This required prompt is the one nearly every first-year applicant writes.

Why they ask it

With test-optional admissions and roughly 80,000 applications, BU uses this short essay to find applicants who are both specific and self-aware. Prompt 1 reveals whether your values come with action attached. Prompt 2 reveals whether you actually researched BU or are recycling a template. Either way, 300 words forces you to choose what matters and say it cleanly, which is exactly the skill they are screening for.

Three ways in

For Prompt 1, lead with action

List issues you have done something about, not issues you merely have opinions on. The volunteer hours, the club you started, the fundraiser. Pick the one with the most concrete action behind it.

For Prompt 2, mine the right college site

Open the website of the exact BU college you are applying to and collect three specifics: one course, one professor or research center, and one club or community. You will use one or two, but having a few lets you choose the best fit.

Pick the prompt you can picture

Decide which prompt lets you tell a true story with sensory detail. If you can picture a specific scene, that is your prompt. If both feel abstract, do more digging before you write.

✕ Weak opening

“Ever since I was young, I have been passionate about making a difference in my community and helping those less fortunate than myself.”

✓ Strong opening

“The food pantry ran out of rice at 4:40 on a Tuesday, twenty minutes before close, and I learned that 'we're out' is a sentence you have to say to a person's face.”

✦ Annotated example 1 of 2 · Option A: Community issue (food access). Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

Every Thursday after closing, the bakery three blocks from my house throws away forty loaves of bread.¹I learned this because my grandmother sends me to buy the day-old rolls at half price, and one evening the owner, Mr. Osei, told me he hates the waste but has nowhere to send it. That conversation stuck with me. In my town, the food pantry on Carlton Street runs out by ten in the morning, while perfectly good bread goes into a dumpster a mile away. The problem was never scarcity. It was the gap between the two.So I started small. I asked Mr. Osei if I could pick up the unsold bread myself, and I emailed the pantry coordinator until she agreed to a Thursday-night drop-off.²For the first month it was just me and a borrowed wagon. By spring, two friends and a teacher had joined, and we were moving bread from four businesses, not one. We named it nothing. We made no logo. It was simply a route.What this taught me is that the issues I care about are rarely solved by grand gestures. They are solved by noticing a specific waste, in a specific place, and refusing to look away from it.³I want to keep doing exactly this kind of work at BU, where students run programs through the Community Service Center that connect campus surplus to the surrounding neighborhoods of Boston. The wagon was a start. The route is what I am bringing with me.⁴

1Opens on a concrete, slightly jarring image instead of an abstract statement about hunger. BU rewards specificity over vague passion, and a number plus a place pulls the reader straight into the writer's actual neighborhood.
2Shows initiative at a believable, human scale. Admissions readers distrust essays where a teenager 'solves hunger'; logging the unglamorous steps (asking, emailing repeatedly) reads as genuine involvement rather than performance.
3Names the lesson plainly without inflating it. The phrase 'a specific waste, in a specific place' mirrors the essay's method and quietly signals the self-awareness BU looks for.
4Closes by tying the personal habit to a named BU resource, showing two-directional fit: what the applicant will both take and give. Concrete reference beats generic praise of the school.

✦ Annotated example 2 of 2 · Option B: Why BU excites me. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

I am the kind of person who reads the syllabus before the first day and circles the one week I cannot wait for.¹When I read about BU's Kilachand Honors College, that is the feeling I had, scanning a path I had not walked yet and already wanting more. What pulls me is not the prestige but the structure: a curriculum that treats engineering and ethics as the same conversation rather than two electives that never speak.I want to study biomedical engineering, but I keep getting stuck on the questions a circuit cannot answer. Who can afford the device once it works? Who was in the room when it was designed?²BU is one of the few places where I could prototype a low-cost prosthetic in the Engineering Product Innovation Center and, the same afternoon, argue about who it leaves out in a seminar across the river. That commute between the lab bench and the seminar table is exactly the friction I am looking for.³I also hope to contribute, not just consume. In high school I ran a Saturday tutoring table for younger students who found math frightening, and I would bring it with me.⁴I would volunteer with BU's chapter of the Society of Women Engineers to keep that table running for kids in Boston, because the version of me who was once scared of math is the reason any of this matters to me.⁵

1Establishes voice and intellectual eagerness in a single sentence. It is specific to a personality, not a brochure, which is the tone BU's 'genuine engagement' criterion rewards.
2Surfaces a real intellectual tension instead of a list of interests. Posing the questions the applicant 'gets stuck on' demonstrates the thinking style, rather than just claiming to be curious.
3Names two specific, real BU settings and connects them to the writer's own dilemma. This is the 'specificity over name-dropping' that BU explicitly values: resources cited because they serve a stated need.
4Pivots cleanly to the 'how will you contribute' half of the prompt, which weaker essays forget. It grounds the offer in something the applicant has already done, so the promise is credible.
5Ends by making fit run both directions: the applicant takes from BU and gives back through a named organization, looping back to the personal stake. Warm, specific, and free of generic flattery.

Stuck? Start here

For Prompt 1: what is one issue where I have done something real, and what exactly did I do? Picture the scene where I did it.
For Prompt 2: which BU college am I applying to, and what is one course, professor, or program there that I could not find at a generic 'good school'?
For either prompt: what is the one thing I will start, lead, or bring once I am on campus, even if it is small?

Before you submit

Did I answer only ONE prompt, fully, instead of half-answering both?
If Prompt 1, did I spend most of my words on what I DID, not just why the issue matters? If Prompt 2, did I name a BU-specific detail AND say what I will contribute?
Could I swap in another university's name and have the essay still work? If yes, I have not been specific enough. Fix it before submitting.

Drafted it? Get an honest, admissions-style read, free.

Score my essay