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Davidson  /  Essays  /  Prompt 2

Davidson: Curiosity prompt

250-300 words

Davidson encourages students to explore curiosities in and out of the classroom. What is a topic, activity or idea that excites you? Tell us why. Examples may include hobbies, books, interactions, podcasts, movies, etc.
What it’s really asking

This is the open, get-to-know-you prompt. Davidson wants a window into how your mind works when no one is grading it. The thing you choose matters less than how vividly you show your engagement with it. They explicitly invite low-stakes interests, a hobby, a podcast, a movie, an idea you turn over, so you do not need a prestigious topic.

Why they ask it

At a school built around seminars and close discussion, intellectual aliveness is the trait that predicts a good classmate. This essay tests whether you are genuinely curious or merely accomplished. It also balances the why-us essay: together they should reveal a specific, interesting person, not a list of credentials.

Three ways in
Start with a real Saturday

Pick something you actually do when no one is watching, then show the exact moment it grabbed you.

Trace an idea you cannot drop

Choose a question or idea you keep returning to and show how your thinking about it has changed over time.

Take a small interest seriously

A card game, a recipe, a niche podcast: let your close attention to it reveal how you actually think.

✕  Weak opening

“I have always been a curious person who loves to learn about the world around me.”

✓  Strong opening

“I have strong opinions about the correct order to eat a plate of food, and I can defend all of them.”

✦ Annotated example · Marginalia obsession. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
I collect other people's marginalia. Used bookstores are, to me, archives of arguments nobody finished. I buy the cheapest copy with the most pencil in it. 1My favorite find is a 1971 paperback of Frankenstein where a previous reader wrote, beside the creature's first words, just one furious sentence: 'He is more human than the doctor.' 2What excites me is not the books themselves but the evidence of someone thinking. A margin note is a person caught mid-disagreement with the dead. 3I started keeping a notebook where I copy these annotations and then argue back, so a 1971 stranger, my pencil, and Mary Shelley end up in a three-way conversation across a hundred and fifty years. 4It has changed how I read everything. I annotate news articles now, podcasts I transcribe, even the lab manual in chemistry, because I have learned that the most interesting thought is usually the one scribbled in the gap between someone else's lines. 5I do not know yet whether this is a literary habit or a historical one or just a stubborn refusal to read quietly. 6That uncertainty is the part I like most. It means there is still an argument left in the margins, and I have not finished it yet.7
  1. 1Opens on a genuinely unusual, specific hobby (collecting strangers' margin notes) rather than a resume-line activity. Immediately distinctive and curiosity-forward, which is exactly the prompt's target.
  2. 2A single vivid, concrete example does the work of a paragraph of explanation. The quoted note shows rather than tells why the hobby grips the writer.
  3. 3Articulates the underlying idea with a memorable line ('caught mid-disagreement with the dead'). This is honest intellectual curiosity stated plainly, in the applicant's own voice.
  4. 4Turns passive collecting into an active intellectual practice. Showing the applicant builds on curiosity, rather than just consuming, signals the kind of student who fills a small seminar well.
  5. 5Demonstrates transfer: the curiosity spills into school, news, science. This breadth answers the prompt's 'in and out of the classroom' spirit without naming the college (correctly, since this prompt is about the student).
  6. 6Admits genuine uncertainty, which reads as honesty rather than performance and fits Davidson's preference for real curiosity over polished claims of mastery.
  7. 7Closes by looping back to the opening image (unfinished arguments in margins) for a clean arc, ending on momentum and open-ended curiosity rather than a tidy moral.
Stuck? Start here
  • What do I actually do, read, or argue about when no one assigns or grades it?
  • What was the exact moment this thing first grabbed me?
  • Am I secretly turning this into an achievement brag instead of showing curiosity?
Before you submit
  • The topic is something I genuinely care about, not a disguised resume item.
  • I show a specific moment or detail, not a general claim about being curious.
  • The essay sounds like a real person and lands between 250 and 300 words.

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