EssayLens

Buffalo  /  Essays  /  Prompt 3

Buffalo: Honors College, Essay 2 (Multiple Perspectives)

500 words or less

In 500 words or less, discuss one current topic/issue that interests you and how it might be approached from multiple perspectives or disciplines.
What it’s really asking

The second required Honors College essay. UB wants to see you think across disciplines on a real issue, holding more than one lens at once. They are testing intellectual range and fairness, not your politics.

Why they ask it

Honors education is interdisciplinary by design. This prompt reveals whether you can take a genuine question and examine it through, say, economics and ethics and engineering, without collapsing into a one-sided rant. That is the core habit of an Honors scholar.

Three ways in
Pick a real interest

Choose an issue you actually follow, then deliberately argue it from two or three fields (science, policy, ethics, art) rather than one.

Go local

Pick something close to home (Great Lakes water, AI in classrooms) so your perspectives feel lived and observed, not googled.

Hold the tension

Resist resolving it neatly. Showing where the lenses conflict is the whole point of the prompt, so let them disagree.

✕  Weak opening

“One current issue that interests me is artificial intelligence, which is a very controversial and important topic in today's society.”

✓  Strong opening

“Lake Erie is both a chemistry problem and a budget problem, and the city of Buffalo cannot fix one without arguing about the other.”

✦ Annotated example · Who owns a river. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
The issue I keep returning to is deceptively small: who owns a river. Specifically, I have been chewing on the question of whether the Buffalo River, which my grandfather remembers catching fire in 1968, can be said to have rights of its own.1The question got real for me when I read that countries like New Zealand and Ecuador have granted legal personhood to rivers, meaning a waterway can technically be a party in a lawsuit. My first reaction was that it sounded absurd. My second reaction was to wonder why it sounded absurd, and that second reaction is the one I want to follow here.2From a legal perspective, personhood is just a tool. Corporations are legal persons too, and no one finds that strange. A lawyer would ask a practical question: does giving a river standing make it easier to stop the next factory from poisoning it? If the answer is yes, the metaphysics barely matter. The law cares about leverage, not poetry.3An economist would push back. They would say the river's water already has value, and the real problem is that polluters do not pay for the harm they cause; the cost gets dumped on everyone downstream. Fix the price, tax the externality, and you might protect the river without inventing a new kind of person at all. To the economist, rights talk is a clumsy substitute for getting the incentives right.4Then there is the perspective I almost skipped, which is the one that matters most here. For the Haudenosaunee, on whose land Buffalo sits, treating a river as a living entity owed obligations is not a clever legal hack invented in 2017. It is an old idea that European law is slowly, awkwardly catching up to. Seen that way, river personhood is less an innovation than a translation.5I do not have a tidy verdict, and I distrust my own urge to manufacture one. What fascinates me is that the same fact, a river running through a city, looks like property, a market failure, or a relative depending on which door you walk in through. I want to study environmental policy precisely because the interesting work happens where those doors open onto the same room, and someone has to decide which language the room will speak in.6
  1. 1Picks one narrow, vivid topic and grounds it locally with the Buffalo River and a family memory. Specificity over a sweeping issue signals the genuine curiosity the Honors College rewards and avoids a generic op-ed.
  2. 2Models intellectual honesty by recording a first dismissive reaction and then interrogating it. This 'why did I think that' move is exactly the curious, self-examining posture Honors essays should show.
  3. 3Approaches the topic through one named discipline (law) with a concrete analogy to corporate personhood. This directly fulfills the prompt's demand to show a specific lens, and the corporate parallel demonstrates real reading.
  4. 4Pivots cleanly to a second discipline (economics) and lets it genuinely disagree with the first, which is the heart of the 'multiple perspectives' prompt. Using the real concept of externalities shows substance, not name-dropping.
  5. 5Adds a third perspective (Indigenous philosophy) tied authentically to the local setting, and reframes the whole debate. Admitting 'the one I almost skipped' shows growth in the act of writing, which reads as honest curiosity.
  6. 6Refuses a fake conclusion and instead names the unresolved tension as the point, which is more sophisticated than picking a winner. Tying it to a major (environmental policy) shows the curiosity has direction, closing near the word limit.
Stuck? Start here
  • What issue do I actually read about for fun, not because it is assigned?
  • Which two or three school subjects would each see this issue differently?
  • Where do those perspectives genuinely disagree, and can I sit with that instead of fixing it?
Before you submit
  • Did I use at least two distinct disciplines or perspectives, not one argument?
  • Did I let the lenses conflict instead of forcing a tidy resolution?
  • Is the topic specific enough that it could not be any applicant's generic essay?

Drafted it? Get an honest, admissions-style read, free.

Score my essay