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Lewis & Clark  /  Essays  /  Prompt 2

Lewis & Clark: Engaging across difference

300-400 words (choose this prompt OR the motto prompt)

Reflect on a time when you engaged with someone whose background or life experiences are different from yours and share with us what you learned from that experience.
What it’s really asking

They want a real interaction with one person unlike you, and what genuinely changed in your understanding because of it. The emphasis is on exchange and learning, not on demonstrating that you are tolerant. Lewis & Clark's stated goal is a community where students grow by trading ideas with people who see the world differently, so they are checking whether you can actually do that. Note that this prompt is required only if you choose it over the motto prompt; you write one essay, not both.

Why they ask it

Liberal-arts colleges live on productive disagreement. This prompt tests whether you can stay curious when someone challenges you and whether you can name a specific way your own thinking shifted, which predicts how you will behave in a seminar.

Three ways in
Find the conversation that unsettled you

Recall a talk where you started out sure you were right and walked away less sure, then build the essay around that turn.

Look at your everyday orbit

Think about a workplace, team, or family relationship where someone's daily reality was nothing like yours and you had to adjust.

Own a moment you were wrong

Find a time you said or assumed something off, got corrected, and actually sat with it instead of defending yourself.

✕  Weak opening

“Volunteering at the shelter taught me that everyone has a story and we are all more alike than different.”

✓  Strong opening

“Mr. Okafor ran the halal cart on Fulton Street, and for three weeks I argued with him about whether college was worth the money.”

✦ Annotated example · Saturdays at the laundromat. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
For two years I spent every Saturday morning folding strangers' clothes beside a man named Tariq, who had been a high school physics teacher in Aleppo before he ran a fluff-and-fold counter in Portland. 1I had taken the job for gas money. I did not expect it to rearrange how I listen. At first our difference felt like a wall I kept bumping into. My Arabic was three polite phrases; his English arrived in careful, deliberate sentences he clearly rehearsed. 2I assumed, in the lazy way you assume things at seventeen, that we would simply work in silence. But Tariq asked questions, constantly, about everything: why Americans put their shoes on before their coats, what a "pep rally" was for, whether I actually believed the things my history textbook claimed. 3He was not making small talk. He was studying a country the way I should have been studying my own. The morning that changed me, I complained about a B-plus on a calculus test. Tariq set down a shirt, smiled, and started explaining the physics of the dryer drum in front of us: angular velocity, the reason wet denim climbs and falls, why the machine tumbles instead of spins. 4For ten minutes the laundromat was a classroom again, and he was, unmistakably, a teacher who missed teaching. I understood then that I had been treating him as a person things had happened to, when he was a person who had done things, and lost the room he did them in. 5My difference from Tariq had made me a tourist in his story. His sameness with me, the part that loved explaining how things move, made me a student again. What I learned is narrower and more useful than "people are people." 6I learned that the fastest way past a wall of difference is not to announce how open-minded you are; it is to let the other person be the expert on something, and to actually want the answer. Tariq moved away last spring to be near his brother in Michigan. I still fold towels in thirds the careful way he taught me, and I still catch myself watching the dryer turn, thinking about the angle at which heavy things rise.
  1. 1Opening with a specific person, place, and the gap between their past and present immediately frames a real encounter across difference, which is exactly what this prompt asks for. No throat-clearing.
  2. 2Naming the awkwardness honestly, rather than skipping to a tidy friendship, keeps the essay believable and shows comfort with discomfort, a quality the school rewards.
  3. 3Reversing the expected dynamic, the older immigrant interrogating the American teenager, subverts the cliche where the privileged narrator generously "learns about" someone. It also models genuine curiosity as a two-way thing.
  4. 4A concrete pivot scene anchored in a vivid, ordinary object (the dryer drum) makes the lesson dramatized rather than asserted. The intellectual content also signals curiosity, the second thing this college names.
  5. 5This is the reflective turn: the shift from pitying to respecting. Lewis & Clark explicitly prizes reflection over achievement, and the insight is about the narrator's own flawed framing, not a tidy moral about diversity.
  6. 6Explicitly rejecting the platitude shows self-awareness and keeps the essay from collapsing into the generic ending this prompt invites.
Stuck? Start here
  • Who have I genuinely disagreed with, and can I name what they believed and why?
  • What did I get wrong or oversimplify before this person corrected my view?
  • What do I now do or ask differently because of that one interaction?
Before you submit
  • Is the focus on what I learned, with myself clearly in the frame, rather than a profile of the other person?
  • Did I show real exchange and a shift in my thinking, not just polite tolerance?
  • Is the other person specific and respectfully drawn, not a stand-in for a whole group?

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