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UBC  /  Essays  /  Prompt 2

UBC: What matters to you

50-500 words (500-2,100 characters)

What is important to you? And why?
What it’s really asking

UBC wants to know your actual values and the reasoning or experience behind them, not a noble-sounding abstraction you picked because it looks good.

Why they ask it

This question separates applicants who can think from those who recite. The 'and why' is the real prompt. A concrete reason rooted in your life is far more convincing than naming 'education' or 'community.'

Three ways in
Go small and true

Pick something specific, a ritual, a place, a responsibility, rather than a giant abstract value, and explain why it holds weight for you.

Trace it to a moment

Follow a value back to the specific experience that taught it to you, and start there.

Name what you would defend

Ask what you would sacrifice for, then explain the why honestly, even if it is not the most impressive-sounding answer.

✕  Weak opening

“One of the most important things to me is education, because education has the power to change lives and open doors for everyone.”

✓  Strong opening

“What matters to me is the Saturday-morning shift at my grandmother's grocery store, where I learned that being trusted is something you earn one transaction at a time.”

✦ Annotated example · The unfinished translation. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
What matters to me is making sure people are not left out of their own conversations. I learned this at a kitchen table, translating a phone call between my mother and a hospital billing office when I was eleven. 1The woman on the line spoke quickly, in a register of English my mother had never been given a chance to learn, and I watched my mother nod at words I could tell she did not understand. She was agreeing to things just to make the call end. I was eleven and furious, not at the billing office, but at how easily a person could be talked past while sitting right there in the room.2After that I became the household translator, which sounds noble and was mostly tedious. Most of it was insurance forms and parent-teacher nights and arguing with a cable company. But somewhere in those years the work changed shape for me. I stopped seeing translation as moving words from one language to another and started seeing it as making sure the quieter person in a room actually gets to decide something.3That is why I gravitate toward the unglamorous middle of things. In my school's debate club I am not the flashiest speaker, but I am the one who runs the novice workshops, because the gap between a confident debater and a terrified one is mostly just access to vocabulary nobody handed them. When a ninth grader who could barely finish a sentence in September won her first round in March, I felt something I have never felt winning a round myself.4I do not think this matters to me because I am especially generous. I think it matters because I remember being eleven and powerful in a way I had not earned, the only one in the room who could understand both sides, and realizing that power should not depend on which kid happens to be bilingual. The fairer version of that room is one where my mother never needed me at all.5So what matters to me is closing that gap, building the room where the quietest person still gets to choose. I am not done figuring out how. But every form I have ever filled out for someone else has been a small, stubborn argument that no one should have to nod along to a sentence they cannot read.6
  1. 1Answers the 'why' immediately with a single clear value, then grounds it in one origin scene rather than abstract language. UBC rewards a specific anchor over a polished thesis.
  2. 2The specific detail of nodding at words she does not understand makes the value felt rather than stated. The redirected anger ('not at the office, but at how easily') shows reflection, not grievance.
  3. 3Refuses to romanticize ('sounds noble and was mostly tedious'), which reads as honest. The reframing of translation widens a small chore into a durable value, showing genuine reflection.
  4. 4Connects the value to a present-day, verifiable activity and contrasts it with personal glory ('never felt winning a round myself'), proving the value is lived, not claimed.
  5. 5Resists a self-flattering explanation and lands on a more uncomfortable, honest insight (the power 'should not depend' on luck). This self-aware turn is exactly the kind of reflection UBC prizes.
  6. 6Ends with forward motion and admitted incompleteness ('not done figuring out how') rather than a resolved bow, while echoing the opening image of the unread sentence.
Stuck? Start here
  • What small, ordinary thing in your week would you defend if someone mocked it?
  • What is a value you hold that you can trace to one specific event?
  • What do you do when no one is grading or watching you?
Before you submit
  • Is the value grounded in a specific experience, not an abstraction?
  • Does it clearly answer the 'why' and not just the 'what'?
  • Would this reason ring true only for you, not for any applicant?

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