EssayLens

UVM  /  Essays  /  Prompt 2

UVM: Identity & Community

500 words (optional; choose one of six prompts)

UVM is a community that celebrates the unique identity of every student, faculty and staff member. Tell us how your identities have shaped the ways you interact with the world.
What it’s really asking

UVM wants to understand who you are and how the parts of your identity (cultural, familial, personal, however you define it) shape how you move through the world and treat other people. This is the community and identity option among the six prompts. It is a strong choice if you have a specific facet of yourself that genuinely affects how you act.

Why they ask it

UVM frames itself around community and wants to know what you would add to it. Readers are looking for self-awareness and for evidence that your identity translates into how you actually interact: how you listen, lead, include, or bridge. The word 'interact' is the key; they want behavior, not just labels.

Three ways in
Pick a behavior-changing identity

Pick one identity that genuinely changes your daily behavior, then show a specific moment where it shaped how you treated someone or made a choice.

Lean on the verb 'interact'

Focus on the 'interact with the world' half of the prompt; let the action carry the meaning rather than explaining your identity in the abstract.

Skip the trauma summary

A small, ordinary scene that reveals how you see and treat people is more convincing than a grand statement about hardship.

✕  Weak opening

“My identity is very important to me and has made me into the strong, open-minded person I am today.”

✓  Strong opening

“I am the kid in my family who translates, which means I have spent a lot of my life standing between two people and trying to make them both feel heard.”

✦ Annotated example · Identity: the translator at the table. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
For most of my childhood I was a verb. 1My parents emigrated from Gujarat before I was born, and English arrived in our house through me. By nine I was translating phone bills, doctor visits, and once, memorably, a parent-teacher conference about my own behavior, which is a strange thing to have to interpret faithfully. I learned to hold two registers at once: the formal English of forms and the warmer Gujarati of our kitchen, switching mid-sentence without dropping either. 2That job, being the bridge, shaped how I sit at any table. 3I notice the person who has not spoken yet. In group projects I am the one who asks the quiet kid what he thinks before the loud kids decide for him, because I spent years being the family member whose understanding everyone else depended on, and I know how it feels when a room moves too fast for you. I am not naturally bold. I am naturally attentive, which is a different and quieter kind of useful. 4Being a translator also taught me that meaning is fragile. A word in one language has no exact twin in another, and the closest match can still be wrong in a way that matters. So I have become slow to assume I have understood someone the first time. I ask again. I repeat back what I think they meant, the way I used to confirm a medication dose with a pharmacist while my mother watched my face for panic. 5I am also the kid who codes in his room and the kid who cannot make a samosa as well as his grandmother, no matter how many times she corrects my pleats. These identities do not always agree. The engineer in me wants clean answers; the translator in me knows people are not systems and rarely round to the nearest integer. 6At UVM I want to keep being the person who pulls a chair out for the quietest voice in the room, in a residence hall, in a lab group, in a club I have not joined yet. I have been practicing for that role since I was nine years old, holding a phone in one hand and my mother's worry in the other. I am ready to do it on purpose now, and out loud.7
  1. 1A short, strange opening line that earns a double take. It signals voice immediately and makes the reader want the explanation, which UVM-style specificity then delivers.
  2. 2Anchors identity in a concrete, slightly funny lived scene (translating a conference about himself) rather than abstract labels. The detail does the emotional work.
  3. 3Pivots cleanly from anecdote to the prompt's actual ask, how identity shapes interaction with the world, without announcing the pivot stiffly.
  4. 4Turns identity into a specific behavior pattern in everyday life. UVM asks how identities shape interaction, and this answers literally with observable habits, not vague claims of empathy.
  5. 5Deepens the identity into a worldview (humility about understanding) and grounds it in a high-stakes memory. The pharmacist image makes an abstract value tangible.
  6. 6Shows identity as plural and even contradictory, which reads as honest and human. The samosa-pleats detail adds warmth and a little humor without undercutting the seriousness.
  7. 7Lands the essay in the future at UVM specifically, framing identity as something he will contribute to the community. The closing image loops back to the nine-year-old translator, sealing the through-line.
Stuck? Start here
  • Which part of my identity actually changes how I behave day to day, not just how I describe myself?
  • What is one specific moment where that identity shaped how I treated another person or made a decision?
  • What do I do for a community that no one assigns me, and where did that habit come from?
Before you submit
  • I focused on how I interact with others, not just on naming an identity.
  • I included at least one concrete scene instead of abstract statements about who I am.
  • A reader finishes knowing what I would add to UVM's community.

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

Score my essay