Utah: Honors College Essay (choose one)

500 words

Intellectual Traditions courses in the Honors College help prepare students to make informed decisions about complex, interdisciplinary problems. Each course explores big or universal questions that transcend historical bounds. You are tasked with creating a new Intellectual Traditions course. Please name your course and describe the topics and questions it would cover.

What it’s really asking

This prompt is only for Honors College applicants, who choose between this one and the Honors Thesis prompt (also 500 words): "The Honors Thesis is an independent research or creative project completed with the mentorship of a professor. Describe what motivates you to pursue this opportunity, and why you would like to have the chance to do an Honors Thesis." The course prompt asks you to invent a real, interdisciplinary class and the questions it would chase across time.

Why they ask it

Honors readers use this to see how your mind moves. Designing a course forces you to pick a question you genuinely care about, connect fields, and show intellectual range. It reveals curiosity far better than a list of favorite subjects, and it shows whether you think in questions or just in answers.

Three ways in

Start from a real argument

Take a question you already argue about with friends or family and build a whole course around it.

Collide two fields

Cross two subjects that rarely meet (food and economics, silence and zoning, maps and power) and let the friction generate the syllabus.

Assign real material

Anchor the course in a few specific texts, cases, or objects you would actually put on the reading list, not just broad themes.

✕ Weak opening

“My course would be called The Human Experience and would explore what it means to be human across many different cultures and time periods.”

✓ Strong opening

“My course is called Who Gets to Be Quiet, and it studies silence as a privilege, from monasteries to noise-mapped city zoning.”

✦ Annotated example · Course: Who Counts as a Neighbor. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

My proposed Intellectual Traditions course is called Who Counts as a Neighbor: The History and Future of the Moral Circle. The course begins with a deceptively small question. When a flood, a famine, or a fortune is at stake, whom do we feel obligated to, and why does that boundary keep moving? ¹Every generation seems convinced it has finally drawn the circle correctly, and every later generation looks back astonished at who was left outside it. We would start in the ancient world, reading the parable of the Good Samaritan alongside Mencius on the child at the well and the Stoic idea of oikeiosis, the slow widening of concern from self to family to stranger. ²These texts disagree productively. Is moral concern something we reason our way into, or something we feel and then justify? Students would not be asked to settle this, only to hold both possibilities long enough to feel their weight. From there the course follows the boundary as it stretches. We would read Bartolome de las Casas arguing for the humanity of Indigenous peoples, then the abolitionist pamphlets, then Peter Singer's famous drowning-child argument and its uncomfortable conclusion that distance should not dilute duty. ³Each week pairs a historical expansion of the circle with a present-day test case: refugees at a border, future generations who will inherit our climate, and the harder cases, like animals and someday perhaps artificial minds, where many students' intuitions simply break. The assignments would resist easy answers. ⁴In place of a standard term paper, each student would write a Boundary Audit of an institution they actually belong to, a team, a town, a religious community, mapping who that institution treats as fully inside its concern and who sits at the blurry edge. ⁵The point is not to indict anyone but to notice how invisible these lines feel from inside them. The course would close on a question I cannot answer and do not expect the class to either. If history shows the moral circle has only ever widened, is that a law we can count on, or a streak we could still break? ⁶I want students to leave unable to look at any boundary, on a map or in a budget or in their own quiet assumptions, without asking who it leaves standing on the far side, and whether that is a choice we are still making on purpose.⁷

1Names the course immediately and frames it as one driving question. Utah's Honors prompt wants a big, transcendent question, and the moving moral boundary is genuinely interdisciplinary.
2Pairs sources across traditions (Christian, Confucian, Stoic) rather than one canon. This signals real intellectual range and the kind of curiosity that crosses historical and cultural bounds.
3Shows a coherent arc across centuries and disciplines (theology, history, moral philosophy). Holding a question open rather than resolving it reflects intellectual maturity the Honors College rewards.
4Connects the historical tradition directly to live, complex problems, exactly what the prompt says these courses prepare students for. The 'intuitions break' line invites genuine difficulty.
5A creative, concrete assessment that turns abstract ethics into self-examination. This is plainspoken and practical, fitting Utah's preference for sincerity over polish.
6Ends on an honest, open question rather than a neat moral. Admitting the instructor cannot answer it models the intellectual humility and curiosity the Honors College explicitly prizes.
7Closes with a durable takeaway phrased as a habit of mind, not a slogan. It ties the grand question back to everyday decisions, reinforcing the course's interdisciplinary, real-world ambition.

Stuck? Start here

What is a question I genuinely argue about or keep returning to, that does not have one clean answer?
What two subjects that rarely touch could I put in the same room, and what sparks would fly?
What specific books, cases, or objects would I actually put on the syllabus?

Before you submit

Does my course reveal a real question I care about, or just sound impressive?
Have I named concrete topics, texts, or assignments rather than vague themes?
Is the course something a curious student would actually want to take, including me?

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