UMass Amherst: Community

100 words

At UMass Amherst, no two students are alike. Our communities and groups often define us and shape our individual worlds. Community can refer to various aspects, including shared geography, religion, race/ethnicity, income, ideology, and more. Please choose one of your communities or groups and describe its significance. Explain how, as a product of this community or group, you would enrich our campus. (100 words)

What it’s really asking

Pick one community you belong to, show why it matters to you, and then make the turn the prompt demands: how would being shaped by that community make UMass better? The second half is the part most applicants shortchange. 'Community' is broad on purpose: a neighborhood, a family, a faith, a team, a fandom, a job all count.

Why they ask it

UMass is asking what you will add to a campus of thousands. They want contributors, not just members. The prompt tests whether you can reflect on how your background shapes the way you show up around other people, and whether you think in terms of giving back.

Three ways in

Pick something specific

Choose a community that is specific and a little unexpected, then show one concrete thing it taught you.

Spend the second half on contribution

Use the back half explicitly on what you would start, join, or change at UMass.

Write what you know

Pick the community you can render in real detail, not the one you think sounds most impressive.

✕ Weak opening

“Being part of my community has taught me so much about diversity, teamwork, and the importance of helping others around me.”

✓ Strong opening

“At my uncle's halal cart, I learned to read a customer's order before they finished saying it, and to feed the regular who never could pay.”

✦ Annotated example · Community: the Saturday Khmer school. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

Every Saturday I teach the alphabet to six-year-olds at our Khmer language school above a Lowell grocery store. ¹My grandparents survived the Khmer Rouge, which erased teachers first; learning to write Khmer letters is, in our family, a small act of refusal. ²I am not the most fluent teacher there. I am the one who translates between the elders' Khmer and the kids' Massachusetts English, ³so I have learned that a community survives only when someone keeps standing in the gap between its versions of itself. ⁴At UMass I would stand in that gap again: starting study tables where first-generation students translate college for each other the way I translate Khmer, ⁵and bringing the patience you only learn from a six-year-old who has asked you the same question four times.⁶

1A precise, sensory setting (above a grocery store) establishes a real, specific community rather than a vague category.
2Raises the stakes with honest historical weight, showing the community's significance without melodrama.
3Names a humble, specific role. UMass rewards genuine self-awareness over self-aggrandizing claims.
4Turns the anecdote into a transferable insight, which sets up the 'enrich campus' pivot the prompt requires.
5Directly answers 'how would you enrich campus' with a concrete, ownable action tied to the same skill, hitting the prompt's required second half.
6Ends with a warm, specific image that lands the essay close to the 100-word limit and ties back to the opening.

Stuck? Start here

Which community has actually changed how you treat other people, and what is one specific moment that proves it?
What is something your community does well that a big campus often does badly?
What would you concretely start or join at UMass because of this community?

Before you submit

Did you spend real space on the contribution half, not just the description half?
Is your community specific enough that the story could not be swapped with another applicant's?
Does at least one concrete moment or detail carry the meaning, instead of abstract words like 'diversity' or 'growth'?

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