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Wake Forest  /  Essays  /  Prompt 3

Wake Forest: Maya Angelou quote

300 words

Choose one of Dr. Maya Angelou's powerful quotes. How does this quote relate to your lived experience or reflect how you plan to contribute to the Wake Forest community?
What it’s really asking

This is Wake's signature identity and community prompt, built around the poet who taught there for decades. They want a real story from your life, not a book report on Angelou. The quote is a doorway. Most of your 300 words should be about a specific experience of yours and what it taught you about dignity, identity, or community.

Why they ask it

Wake's motto is Pro Humanitate, for humanity, and this prompt is where they measure whether you live that. It rewards honest reflection and a concrete moment. It punishes abstraction and quote-worship. They are imagining you in a dorm, a seminar, and a service project.

Three ways in
Pick a quote you have lived

Choose a line that genuinely names something from your own experience, then tell that story in scene.

Center a dignity moment

Show a moment when you honored someone's dignity, or had yours honored, and what it changed in you.

Land on contribution

End by linking that lesson to a specific way you would add to the Wake community.

✕  Weak opening

“Maya Angelou once said, "Still I rise," and this quote has always inspired me to never give up on my dreams.”

✓  Strong opening

“"People will never forget how you made them feel," Angelou wrote, and I think about that every time I remember Mr. Okafor counting his change.”

✦ Annotated example · Maya Angelou quote (~295 words). Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." 1I learned this not in a classroom but at the front desk of a hospice, where I volunteered on Sunday mornings my junior year. 2My job was small: sign people in, point them toward the right room, refill the coffee. 3Mr. Alvarez came every week to sit with his wife, and every week he forgot where her room was. 4I could have just given him the number. Instead I started walking him there, and we talked about her garden along the way. 5After she passed, he came back once more, only to find me, and said the walks were the part of the week he could breathe. 6I do not remember what we said on those walks. I remember that he stopped looking lost. 7At Wake Forest, Pro Humanitate is not an abstraction to me; it is the difference between giving a room number and walking someone there. 8I plan to bring that to the residence halls, the volunteer corps, and every group project where someone is quietly getting lost. That is the community I want to help build.9
  1. 1Opens by quoting Angelou cleanly and accurately, then commits the rest of the essay to lived experience, which is exactly what the prompt asks.
  2. 2Grounds the abstract quote in a specific, unusual setting. Hospice work signals the dignity and character Wake explicitly rewards, without the applicant having to claim those words.
  3. 3Deliberately understating the role builds credibility. The essay earns its later weight instead of inflating the task.
  4. 4Introduces a recurring human detail. Repetition ('every week') sets up a relationship rather than a one-time good deed.
  5. 5Shows a small choice between efficient and humane, dramatizing the quote's distinction between what you do and how you make someone feel.
  6. 6The emotional payoff lands precisely on Angelou's word, 'feel,' tying the anecdote back to the quote without stating the connection bluntly.
  7. 7Mirrors the quote's structure (forgot what was said, remembered the feeling), proving the applicant understood it rather than merely admired it.
  8. 8Pivots to contribution, the second half of the prompt, anchoring it in Wake's actual motto rather than a generic promise to 'give back.'
  9. 9Names concrete campus arenas where the trait will show up, closing at full length with a forward-looking, specific commitment.
Stuck? Start here
  • What real moment in your life is about someone's dignity, before you even pick a quote?
  • Which Angelou line actually matches that moment, instead of just sounding impressive?
  • How would that same instinct show up in a specific Wake club, class, or service project?
Before you submit
  • Is most of your word count spent on a specific scene from your life, not on the quote?
  • Does the essay show an action you took, not just a feeling you had?
  • Does the ending name a concrete way you would contribute at Wake?

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