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USF  /  Essays  /  Prompt 2

USF: Nursing School Short Answer

50-200 words

What will be your responsibility to others as a Jesuit-educated, BSN professional registered nurse?
What it’s really asking

This short answer is required only for applicants to USF's School of Nursing and Health Professions, and it must be distinct from your personal statement. USF wants to see that you understand nursing as an obligation to other people, framed by the Jesuit value of service, not just a stable career you find interesting.

Why they ask it

USF is testing whether you grasp that nursing is service under pressure. In 200 words there is no room for a life story, so they are watching whether you can name a concrete idea of responsibility and connect it to one real moment of caring for someone.

Three ways in
One caregiving moment

A sick relative, a patient you shadowed, or a job where you cared for someone, and the obligation you actually felt in that moment. Concrete beats abstract here too.

A definition you can defend

Your own working definition of what responsibility to others means, grounded in one example rather than a slogan about helping people.

A tension in care work

Something hard you have noticed about caring for people (dignity, fear, time, exhaustion) and how you want to meet it as a nurse.

✕  Weak opening

“I want to become a nurse because I am a caring person and I love helping people who are sick.”

✓  Strong opening

“When my uncle was dizzy from chemo, what he needed was not a cure that morning but someone to walk him to the bathroom without making him feel small.”

✦ Annotated example · The Glass of Water. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
As a Jesuit-educated, BSN nurse, my responsibility to others begins where the chart ends. 1Jesuit education taught me cura personalis, care for the whole person, and I take that to mean a patient is never only a diagnosis on a screen. When I volunteered on a med-surg floor, an elderly man kept ringing his call light. The aides were frustrated. He did not need pain medication. He needed someone to refill his water and tell him what time it was, because without his glasses he could not read the clock and felt unmoored. 2My responsibility is to notice that, to treat his disorientation as real and worth my time. I owe my patients competent, evidence-based care, but I also owe them dignity in the hours when no procedure is scheduled. 3To my colleagues, I owe honesty and a willingness to carry the heavy end of the work. To the wider community, especially those who are uninsured or afraid, I owe advocacy, because health is not distributed fairly and a nurse sees that inequity up close. 4That, to me, is the whole responsibility: to refill the glass, read the clock aloud, and never decide that any person on my unit is too small to be seen.
  1. 1A crisp thesis that directly names the prompt's framing (Jesuit-educated, BSN) and signals the essay will move beyond clinical tasks to whole-person care.
  2. 2A concrete, small-scale example proves service is lived, not claimed. The mundane detail (water, a clock) is far more convincing than abstract language about compassion.
  3. 3Balancing clinical rigor (evidence-based care) with humanity shows a mature, realistic picture of nursing rather than a sentimental one.
  4. 4Widening the circle (patients, colleagues, community) reflects the Jesuit ideal of service to the marginalized, which USF specifically rewards.
Stuck? Start here
  • What is one specific moment when you cared for someone who was vulnerable, and what did you owe them in that moment?
  • How would you define 'responsibility to others' in a single sentence you could actually defend?
  • What is the hardest part of caregiving that you have witnessed, and how do you want to meet it as a nurse?
Before you submit
  • Does this answer say something your personal statement does not?
  • Does it actually answer the responsibility-to-others question rather than just explaining why you like nursing?
  • Is there one concrete moment of caregiving instead of only general statements about compassion?

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