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Bucknell  /  Essays  /  Prompt 1

Bucknell: Why Major + Why Bucknell

250 words

Please explain your interest in your first-choice major/undecided status and your second-choice major (should you opt to list one) and why you would choose Bucknell University to pursue your interest(s).
What it’s really asking

Bucknell wants two things woven together: why you are drawn to your intended major (or why you are thoughtfully undecided, plus a second choice if you list one) and why Bucknell specifically is where you want to study it. This single prompt applies to all first-year applicants; there are no separate program-specific essays for engineering, music, or the arts.

Why they ask it

As a small school, Bucknell cares about yield and fit. This essay tells them whether you understand what you would actually do here and whether your interest is real enough to stick. It also helps them gauge how seriously you have researched the college, which correlates with how likely you are to enroll and thrive.

Three ways in
Follow the thread

Trace your first-choice major back to a specific moment, object, or problem that first hooked you, then follow that thread straight to a Bucknell course, program, or lab that extends it.

Make undecided a strength

If you are undecided, treat the open curriculum as a feature: name two fields you want to explore and the specific Bucknell resources that let you do it without committing too early.

Build around one distinctive

Pick one Bucknell distinctive (a research opportunity, a named program, a study-abroad option, the engineering-plus-liberal-arts model) and build the whole essay around why your particular interest needs it.

✕  Weak opening

“Ever since I was young, I have been passionate about helping people and making a difference in the world, which is why I want to study at Bucknell.”

✓  Strong opening

“I spent a summer fixing the irrigation timer at my grandfather's farm stand, and I learned that the hard part was never the wiring; it was deciding what 'enough water' even meant.”

✦ Annotated example · Animal behavior to neuroscience. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
For three summers I tracked the same colony of cliff swallows nesting under the Route 15 overpass, logging which birds returned to which mud nests and recording the rasping calls they used to claim them. 1What hooked me was not the birds but the question underneath them: how does a brain the size of a peanut encode the difference between a neighbor and a rival? That question is why my first-choice major is neuroscience. 2I want to move from watching behavior to understanding the circuits that produce it, recording neurons rather than nests. Should the wiring of cells pull me toward the chemistry behind it, I would list cell biology and biochemistry as my second choice. 3Bucknell is where these two interests stop competing and start reinforcing each other. Few schools let an undergraduate run the instruments themselves, but Bucknell's Neuroscience program and the Animal Behavior facility would let me design my own study rather than assist on someone else's. 4I have already emailed Professor Ryan about her work on social memory in rodents, and the idea of a four-year stretch in her lab, plus the freedom to pair it with a philosophy course on the mind, is the kind of overlap I could only build here. 5I came to college applications counting swallows. I want to leave Bucknell understanding what those small brains were doing all along.6
  1. 1Opens with a concrete, sustained project rather than a vague claim of passion. The specific detail (Route 15, mud nests, rasping calls) signals genuine, hands-on curiosity, exactly what Bucknell rewards.
  2. 2Names the first-choice major explicitly and ties it to the personal anecdote, answering the prompt's core ask while showing the curiosity is intellectual, not decorative.
  3. 3Smoothly introduces the second-choice major and frames it as a logical neighbor of the first, showing coherent academic direction instead of two unrelated picks.
  4. 4Pivots to Why Bucknell with a fit point that is specific and undergraduate-focused, hitting the liberal-arts-meets-research blend the school prizes.
  5. 5Names a real-fit detail (faculty research, cross-disciplinary pairing) that could only describe Bucknell, demonstrating the 'fit you could only feel here' the prompt is screening for.
  6. 6Closes by looping back to the opening image, giving the short essay a finished arc and a memorable last line within the word limit.
Stuck? Start here
  • What is the earliest specific moment you can remember being curious about your intended field, and what exactly were you doing?
  • Name three things about Bucknell you could not have learned from a campus tour. If you cannot, you have more research to do.
  • If you are listing a second-choice major, what real connection ties it to your first choice or to who you are?
Before you submit
  • Could any sentence in your Why Bucknell section apply to a different school? If yes, replace it with something Bucknell-specific.
  • Have you spent at least a third of the essay on why the major itself excites you, not just why Bucknell?
  • Is the whole thing one connected argument rather than two separate paragraphs, and is it comfortably under 250 words?

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