Washington State: The team / issue essay (Honors College)

400-500 words

Imagine you are putting together a team to work on an issue that is important to you. Briefly describe that issue and what skills, experience, and expertise you would seek in your team members and why.

What it’s really asking

Name a real problem you care about, then design the team that could actually solve it. This is a WSU Honors College essay, required only if you apply to the Honors College; WSU's general first-year application requires no essay. The hidden test is whether you understand the issue deeply enough to know exactly what kinds of people, and what skills, it would take to move it.

Why they ask it

WSU is a land-grant school built around applied, collaborative problem-solving, and the Honors College uses this prompt to spot students who think in systems and teams rather than lone passion. How you scope the issue and who you recruit reveals your judgment, your humility about what you cannot do alone, and how clearly you actually understand the thing you say you care about.

Three ways in

Start from a problem you have touched

Begin with something you have personally bumped into: food waste at your school, a grandparent navigating a clinic in a language she barely reads, a creek that floods your block every spring. Local and specific beats global and vague.

Let the roles reveal the issue

List the actual jobs the problem demands. If it is the flooding creek, you need a hydrologist, a city-council insider, a translator for older residents, a social-media person. The team you build shows how well you understand the problem.

Explain every why

The recruiting choices are where your thinking shows. Saying you want a quiet listener because the loudest meetings always exclude the people most affected tells the reader how you see the world, not just what you know.

✕ Weak opening

“Climate change is one of the most important issues facing our generation today, and I have always been passionate about saving our planet.”

✓ Strong opening

“The creek behind Maplewood floods every March, and every March the same three families on the low end of the street lose their carpets, so that is the issue, and I already know the first person I would call.”

✦ Annotated example · The food-desert team. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

The issue I would build a team around is that the east side of my town is a food desert. The nearest grocery store closed when I was thirteen, and now the families on Beacon Street ride two buses to buy lettuce that has already started to turn. ¹I do not want a team that admires the problem. I want a team that fixes a corner of it, which is why I would start a pop-up produce stand at the bus stop where those two routes meet. ²First, I would recruit someone who actually grew up working a register, not a person who has only theorized about money. I need their instinct for how a line moves and how a dollar feels to a customer counting coins, because a stand that runs slow or feels charitable will empty out by week two. ³Second, I would seek a quiet researcher, the kind who reads zoning code for fun, to find out which permits we need and which church parking lot we are allowed to borrow. I am loud and I move fast, so I want a teammate who slows me down before I get us fined. ⁴Third, I would bring on a grandmother from Beacon Street herself, because no skill matters more than trust, and she has fifty years of it on that block. She is the expertise. The rest of us are logistics. ⁵What I bring is the thing that holds a team together: I notice when someone has gone silent in a meeting and I ask them what they see before the loud people decide. I have run a debate club and a fundraiser, and both taught me that a group is only as smart as its quietest member is willing to be. ⁶I do not need the most impressive people in the room. I need the right four, each carrying something I cannot, all of us close enough to one bus stop to actually feed it.⁷

1Opens with one concrete, local issue instead of a global abstraction like 'world hunger.' WSU rewards specific over impressive, and a named street signals the applicant actually knows this problem firsthand.
2States a narrow, achievable goal. The Honors prompt asks you to assemble a team for an issue, and grounding it in a real intervention makes the skills you later request feel earned rather than decorative.
3Each teammate is chosen for a precise, tested skill, and the reasoning ties straight back to the goal. This is the self-awareness about values WSU looks for: she knows dignity matters more than polish.
4Naming her own flaw (loud, fast) and recruiting someone to balance it shows genuine self-knowledge, and it models the collaborative humility honors committees prize.
5Elevating lived experience over credentials is exactly the 'specific over impressive' instinct, and it reframes who counts as an expert.
6This is the 'Cougs who pull people in' quality stated outright but shown through a specific habit (drawing out the quiet member), not just claimed.
7Closes by restating the team philosophy and circling back to the opening image, giving the 470-word essay a tight, deliberate shape.

Stuck? Start here

What is a problem you have actually watched happen, up close, more than once?
If you had to solve it tomorrow, what could you NOT do yourself, and who would you need?
For each person you would recruit, what is the real reason, what would they see or do that you cannot?

Before you submit

Most of my words are about the issue and the team's skills, not about famous dream teammates.
The issue is specific and ideally something I have personally encountered.
Every team member I name has a clear reason tied to the problem.

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