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USD: Choose One of Three: Community, Changemaking, or Faith

350 words max (USD recommends ~200)

Applicants choose ONE of the following three options. Option 1 (Community and Belonging): USD is committed to fostering a community where everyone feels a sense of belonging and purpose. Reflecting on your own experiences, what does community mean to you? How have you helped create inclusive, welcoming spaces for others, and what have you learned from those efforts? Option 2 (Changemaking): As a proud Changemaker Campus, the USD experience emphasizes changemaking through care for our common home, social justice efforts, civic engagement, social innovation, creativity and a global perspective. Write about one of the challenges facing humanity today. Why does it matter to you? What experiences or insights have you had that speak to the urgency of this issue? Option 3 (Faith and Spirituality): As a contemporary Catholic university, we welcome and celebrate students from every background and faith tradition, including those who do not identify with a faith tradition. We are committed to helping every student feel connected and supported by offering space to grow in faith, reflect on their values and explore who they are called to be. Share how faith or spirituality, your own or someone else's, has shaped a perspective, experience, or decision.
What it’s really asking

Pick the one option you have a true story for. Option 1 wants a moment you made a space more welcoming and what you learned. Option 2 wants a humanity-scale issue tied to your real experience, not a generic essay about climate or poverty. Option 3 wants faith or spirituality (anyone's, including the absence of it) shaping a specific decision. Choose by which gives you the most honest, specific story, not which sounds most impressive.

Why they ask it

This is USD's heart prompt. They are looking for how you treat other people and what you actually do with your values. The choose-one structure is a generosity test: they want you on your strongest ground, telling a true story, not performing a virtue.

Three ways in
The smallest moment (Option 1)

Find the smallest real moment you noticed someone on the outside and changed it, a lunch table, a club, a new kid, then name what it taught you.

Personal entry point (Option 2)

Anchor a big issue to a personal entry point so it does not read like a research paper, then show why it is urgent to you specifically.

One decision (Option 3)

Focus on one decision that faith or spirituality shaped, and feel free to write about someone else's belief or your own questioning of it.

✕  Weak opening

“Community is one of the most important things in the world, and I have always believed in helping others and making everyone feel welcome.”

✓  Strong opening

“For three weeks, the new kid from Manila ate lunch alone in the stairwell, until I sat down on the cold step next to him and asked what he missed most about home.”

✦ Annotated example · Changemaking: the food in the dumpster. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
I chose Changemaking, and the challenge I keep returning to is food waste, because I have seen it by the cartload. 1I work weekend shifts at a grocery store, and closing means rolling bins of bruised fruit, day-old bread, and dented cans to the compactor. 2The first time I asked why we could not give it away, my manager explained the liability rules, the logistics, the lawyers. None of it made the dumpster smell better. 3It matters to me because two streets over there is a food pantry that runs out by noon. The waste is not a shortage problem. It is a routing problem. 4So I started small. I got our store to set aside sealed near-date items and drove the first few boxes to that pantry myself, then helped them sign a liability waiver that made it official. It is now a standing Tuesday pickup. 5The urgency, for me, is that the solution already exists in pieces. Someone just has to connect them. 6At USD, the Changemaker Hub is where I want to scale that instinct, turning one store's Tuesday into a model other neighborhoods can copy.7
  1. 1Picks one of the three options clearly and names the challenge in the first line. Grounding it in personal sight (not a statistic) signals the value is lived, not declared.
  2. 2Specific, sensory job detail establishes credibility and the urgency-from-experience the prompt asks for. A teenager doing closing shifts is a believable, non-cliche source of insight.
  3. 3Shows the applicant questioning a system and meeting real-world friction. The dry last line gives the voice personality without melodrama.
  4. 4Reframes the issue as solvable, which fits USD's social-innovation framing of changemaking. The juxtaposition makes the injustice concrete and local.
  5. 5Demonstrates initiative and a real, modest result rather than a grand claim. USD prizes community you actually built, and this is built, not imagined.
  6. 6Distills the insight into a clear thesis about changemaking as connection, echoing the program's language without parroting it.
  7. 7Ends with a named USD resource and a concrete ambition, tying the lived value to a future on campus exactly as the prompt's spirit invites.
Stuck? Start here
  • Which option (community, changemaking, faith) gives you a true story with a real scene in it, not the one that sounds most admirable?
  • What is the smallest moment you noticed someone left out and did something about it, and what did it teach you?
  • If you choose changemaking, what personal entry point connects you to a big issue so it does not read like a research paper?
Before you submit
  • Did you pick the option you have the most honest, specific story for, rather than the most impressive-sounding one?
  • Is your essay built on one concrete scene or moment rather than general statements about caring?
  • Did you name what you actually learned or how your view changed, not just what you did?

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