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Tufts  /  Essays  /  Prompt 2

Tufts: Choice prompt (Arts & Sciences / Engineering)

200-250 words

It's cool to love learning. What excites your intellectual curiosity and why? / How have the environments or experiences of your upbringing - your family, home, neighborhood, or community - shaped the person you are today? / Using a specific example or two, tell us about a way that you contributed to building a collaborative and/or inclusive community.
What it’s really asking

Choose ONE of three prompts. Option 1 is about a genuine intellectual passion and the why behind it. Option 2 is about how your upbringing, family, home, or community shaped you. Option 3 asks for a specific example of how you helped build a collaborative or inclusive community. SMFA applicants instead respond to a single art-focused prompt: "Art has the power to disrupt our preconceptions, shape public discourse, and imagine new ways of being in the world. What are the ideas you'd like to explore in your work?"

Why they ask it

This is where Tufts looks for the actual human. The three options map to the school's core values: playful curiosity, self-awareness about where you come from, and real contribution to others. Whichever you pick, readers want a specific person, not a category.

Three ways in
Curiosity: chase the obsession

For the curiosity prompt, pick the obsession you would talk about unprompted, even the slightly embarrassing one, and trace why it grabbed you.

Upbringing: zoom into one scene

For the upbringing prompt, choose one small scene from home or neighborhood that quietly shaped how you see things, and let it stand for the larger truth.

Community: tell it as a story

For the community prompt, find one moment where you did something concrete for a group, and narrate it with names and actions, not resume bullets.

✕  Weak opening

“Ever since I was a child, I have always had a deep passion for learning and helping my community in any way I possibly can.”

✓  Strong opening

“I spent a summer trying to figure out why my grandmother's bread never rose right at our altitude, and I have not stopped thinking about yeast since.”

✦ Annotated example · Intellectual curiosity: why does a violin sound sad. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
It started with a question my little sister asked during a recital: why does a violin sound sad? I said something about minor keys and felt immediately that I was lying, or at least guessing, which to a fourteen-year-old is the same crime.1 So I went looking. I learned that sadness in music is not in the notes themselves but in how our brains read tiny imperfections: the slight wobble of vibrato that mimics a trembling voice, the way a slowing tempo echoes a tired body.2 The instrument is sad, it turns out, because it sounds like a person who is sad. That single answer cracked open a much bigger room.3 If music borrows the body's signals, then emotion is partly a language we did not invent on purpose, one shared between a cello and a sob.4 Now I chase that thread everywhere. I read about why certain colors feel warm, why some math proofs feel elegant and others merely correct, why a joke lands a half-second after the punchline. The common question underneath is the one my sister handed me: how do physical things make us feel things?5 I do not have the answer, and that is exactly why I keep going. At Tufts I would want to sit in a cognitive science seminar and a music theory class in the same semester and watch them argue with each other. My sister still asks me hard questions. I would like to spend four years getting better at not lying.6
  1. 1Answers the 'what excites your curiosity' prompt with a concrete origin moment, and the self-aware admission of bluffing signals the intellectual honesty Tufts prizes.
  2. 2Shows real intellectual payoff with specific, vivid content, not a vague claim that the applicant 'loves to learn.'
  3. 3Delivers a satisfying one-line resolution to the opening question, then immediately reopens it into a larger inquiry, a deliberate rhythm that keeps the reader leaning in.
  4. 4Demonstrates the move from a narrow fact to a larger idea, which is the intellectual playfulness Tufts explicitly rewards.
  5. 5Generalizes the curiosity into a genuine, recurring pattern across disciplines, signaling the cross-field thinker Tufts wants without sounding like a resume.
  6. 6Closes by tying the curiosity to specific Tufts study, looping back to the sister with warmth and humor, and landing on the honest 'not lying' line that gives the essay a memorable, un-polished signature.
Stuck? Start here
  • What is something you would happily explain to a stranger for twenty minutes without being asked?
  • What is one small, ordinary scene from your home or neighborhood that quietly shaped how you think?
  • When did you actually do something for a group of people, and what specifically did you say or build?
Before you submit
  • Did I pick ONE prompt and answer the exact question it asks (especially the 'why' or the 'specific example')?
  • Is there a real scene with details, or am I just stating that I am curious or inclusive?
  • Does this essay reveal something my why-Tufts essay does not?

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