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TCU: What Matters to You

300-500 words (choose one of four options)

In her best-selling novel The Secret Life of Bees, TCU alumna Sue Monk Kidd wrote, "The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters." What matters to you?
What it’s really asking

This is TCU's signature identity prompt, and the one most applicants should consider first. It asks what you genuinely value and, just as importantly, what you are willing to give up for it. The word 'choosing' is the key: mattering implies a tradeoff. The best answers show a value that cost you something. Note that this is one of four options on the single required essay; you only answer one, but program applicants (Honors College, Nursing, certain scholarships) may face additional questions, so check your specific program.

Why they ask it

TCU is a values-centered university, and this prompt is the most direct test of whether you have actually examined your own. Readers are looking for self-knowledge and sincerity, not a noble-sounding abstraction. They want to see a real person who has weighed competing things and committed to one.

Three ways in
Find the tradeoff

Think of a time you chose one thing over another that you also wanted. The thing you gave up tells you what truly mattered.

Mine the mundane

Identify a small, recurring habit or ritual in your life and ask what value it protects. Mundane often reads as honest.

Look for friction

Recall a moment you defended something to someone who disagreed. Conviction shows up clearest under friction.

✕  Weak opening

“Throughout my life, the thing that has always mattered most to me is my family and the values they taught me.”

✓  Strong opening

“I gave away my spot in the regional final so a kid who had never played could start, and my coach has not fully forgiven me.”

✦ Annotated example · What matters: the standing rib roast. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
Every December my grandmother makes a standing rib roast she cannot afford. 1She lives on a fixed income in a one-bedroom apartment, and for eleven months she eats carefully, clipping coupons and reusing tea bags. Then, on the twelfth, she spends nearly a week of her budget on a roast big enough for fourteen people and a table that seats six. We crowd in. Cousins sit on the arm of the couch. Someone always balances a plate on the radiator. 2For years I thought this was simply impractical. I am the kind of person who color-codes a calendar, who reads the nutrition label, who once made a spreadsheet to decide which summer job to take. The roast offended my sense of order. I tried, gently, to suggest she scale down. She looked at me the way you look at someone who has misunderstood the entire point of something. 3"The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters," Sue Monk Kidd wrote. My grandmother chose a long time ago, and she did not choose efficiency. 4What matters to me, I have slowly learned from her, is generosity that costs something. Anyone can give from surplus. It is easy to be kind when kindness is convenient, to volunteer when it fits the schedule, to share when there is plenty. My grandmother gives from scarcity, and she does it deliberately, because she has decided that a full table is worth a thin month. 5I have started trying to practice it. I tutor a seventh grader in math on Tuesday afternoons, the one window I would rather keep for myself. I gave up my front-row spot in the school orchestra so a nervous freshman could sit where the conductor could see her. Small things, all of them inefficient. 6I still color-code my calendar. But I leave a few blocks empty now, on purpose, because I have learned that the most important things rarely fit neatly into the time you planned for them. 7Next December I will set the table. I already know there will not be enough chairs, and I have stopped minding. That, I think, is what it means to choose what matters: to know the cost, and to pay it anyway, gladly.8
  1. 1Opens on one small, concrete, slightly contradictory image. "Cannot afford" creates instant tension and signals the essay is about values, not the food.
  2. 2Specific, sensory details (reused tea bags, plate on the radiator) make the scene believable and lived-in rather than generic.
  3. 3Reveals the writer honestly, including a flaw (rigid, over-optimizing). Admitting you were wrong is reflection, which TCU explicitly rewards over achievement.
  4. 4Weaves the prompt's quote in naturally at the hinge of the essay, turning it into the writer's own claim rather than decoration.
  5. 5States the named value plainly: "generosity that costs something." TCU rewards values you can name, and this one is precise rather than a vague "kindness."
  6. 6Translates the abstract value into the writer's own concrete actions, showing it is genuinely held, not just admired in someone else. The "inefficient" callback ties back to the earlier flaw.
  7. 7Closing image grows directly from the opening tension (order versus generosity) and shows change without announcing "I grew." Restraint reads as maturity.
  8. 8Ends on a forward-looking, modest resolution that earns its final definition of the prompt's central idea without overstating the writer's virtue.
Stuck? Start here
  • What did you choose last year that you also genuinely did not want to give up the alternative of?
  • Whose small, unglamorous habit do you admire, and what does it reveal about what you value?
  • If you had to defend one belief to a room that disagreed, which would it be?
Before you submit
  • Does my essay show a tradeoff, not just a value I like the sound of?
  • Is there at least one specific scene a reader could picture?
  • Have I admitted something true about myself, including a limitation or doubt?

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