Santa Clara: Ethical dilemma and an SCU education

150-300 words

At Santa Clara University, we push our students to be creative, be challenged, and be the solution. Think about an ethical dilemma that you care about that our society is currently facing. This can be something happening in your local community or more globally. How can an SCU education help you prepare for and address this challenge?

What it’s really asking

Name a real ethical dilemma (two goods in genuine tension, not a one-sided problem), show that you understand both sides, and connect it to a specific Santa Clara education: a course, a program, the Ignatian Center, community-based learning. Smaller and local often beats huge and global here.

Why they ask it

This prompt is Santa Clara's mission in a sentence: be the solution. Jesuit education prizes discernment, the slow reflective weighing of hard choices. They want to see how you think under moral pressure and whether you see SCU as the place to sharpen that thinking.

Three ways in

Choose a dilemma you have stood inside

Skip the biggest headline and pick something with personal stakes. Lived proximity makes your reasoning believable.

State both sides fairly

Lay out both goods before you lean toward either. The honesty of the tension is the whole point of the prompt.

Tie it to a real SCU resource

Name a specific course, center, or program. Naming it by name shows you looked and you mean it.

✕ Weak opening

“One of the biggest ethical dilemmas facing our society today is climate change, which threatens the future of our planet.”

✓ Strong opening

“My uncle's auto shop survives on gas cars, so when my city proposed banning them by 2035, I did not know whose side I was on.”

✦ Annotated example · Who owns a deleted account. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

My grandfather died in March, and a week later his Facebook account wished him a happy birthday. ¹My family didn't know his password, couldn't prove we were his next of kin to a company in California, and spent two months arguing with a help form that had no human on the other end. The dilemma that keeps me up is simple to ask and hard to answer: who owns a person's digital life after they are gone, and who gets to decide what happens to it? ²I care about this because the easy answers fail real people. If companies hold everything, grieving families are locked out. If families control everything, a person's private messages and secrets become public property the moment they die. Both options trade one harm for another, and most of us signed terms of service we never read. ³An SCU education feels built for exactly this kind of problem. I am drawn to the combination of a strong Computer Science and Engineering program with the ethics work coming out of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, which already publishes on data privacy and consent. ⁴I don't want to only learn how to build the systems that store our lives. I want to learn how to question them, to ask whose interests a default setting serves and who gets harmed when no one asks. A course that puts me in a room with both engineers and ethicists is where I would learn to design that better consent form, the one a grieving family can actually use. ⁵I cannot give my grandfather a dignified digital goodbye now. But I would like to spend four years learning how to make sure the next family doesn't have to fight a web form to grieve. That, to me, is what it means to be challenged and to be the solution.⁶

1A jarring, specific opening that names a real and underexplored ethical issue (digital remains) without sounding like a debate-club topic.
2Grounds an abstract ethics question in lived family experience, which matches SCU's value of ethics you actually wrestle with rather than perform.
3Shows genuine wrestling by steelmanning both sides and naming the tension instead of picking a comfortable villain. This is the 'be challenged' move SCU asks for.
4Names two specific, real SCU resources (CSE plus the Markkula Center) and connects them, proving the applicant researched the school's actual strengths.
5Translates the dilemma into a concrete, ethically informed goal. The Jesuit ideal of being 'the solution' is shown through a tangible aim, not a slogan.
6Closes by tying personal stakes back to the prompt's exact language ('be challenged, be the solution') and to service that grows from learning, without overstating the writer's reach.

Stuck? Start here

Where in my own life have I seen two good things in direct conflict, with no clean winner?
What is a local issue I understand better than most of my classmates because I have lived near it?
Which Santa Clara course, center, or program would actually help me work on this, and have I looked it up by name?

Before you submit

Is my topic a true dilemma with two defensible sides, not a one-sided problem?
Did I show my reasoning and the hard part, instead of just declaring an answer?
Did I name a specific Santa Clara resource and connect it to my issue?

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