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Washington State: The activity / values essay (Honors College)

400-500 words

At the WSU Honors College we realize that applicants cannot be reduced to their academic transcripts. Pick one activity or experience and explain how it illustrates an important aspect of who you are and how it reflects on your own values or those of your community.
What it’s really asking

Choose a single activity or experience and show what it reveals about your character and your values, or your community's. This is a WSU Honors College essay, required only if you apply to Honors. The emphasis is on one experience, examined for meaning, not a tour of your achievements.

Why they ask it

The Honors College says it outright: it does not want a second copy of your transcript. This prompt tests self-awareness. Can you take something you did and articulate what it says about who you are? Strong answers name a value and earn it through a real, specific story. Weak answers describe an activity and stop there.

Three ways in
Pick the honest one

Choose the experience you would still mention if no college were watching, the one that genuinely shaped how you act, even if it would never make a resume.

Find the value first

If you know you value patience, or honesty, or showing up, search your memory for the single scene that proves it. The value points you to the story, not the other way around.

Embrace the unglamorous

Reffing little-league games, closing shift at a diner, teaching a sibling to read, these reveal character better than the prestigious activity that everyone else lists too.

✕  Weak opening

“Throughout my four years of high school, I have been involved in many activities that have shaped me into the person I am today.”

✓  Strong opening

“By my third Saturday refereeing eight-year-olds' soccer, I had learned that the parents, not the kids, were the actual game I was officiating.”

✦ Annotated example · The closing-shift cook. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
Every Friday at 9:40 p.m., I am the last cook scraping the flat-top at Nadia's Diner, and I have learned more about who I am from that twenty minutes than from any award I could list. 1The flat-top is the part nobody wants. It is greasy, it is loud with the dishwasher, and the customers are already gone, so there is no one to perform for. 2I started the job to pay for my car. I stayed because of the people on the other side of the pass-through window. There is Marcus, who has cooked here for nineteen years and who taught me to fold an omelet by guiding my wrist, not by giving orders. 3There is Dao, who speaks more Lao than English and who I cover for when the ticket printer jams faster than she can read it. We have a system: I tap the counter twice and she knows the fryer is mine for a minute. We have never discussed it. We just built it. 4What the diner illustrates about me is that I would rather be useful than visible. In school I am the one who reformats the group slides at midnight and never mentions it, and for a long time I worried that was a weakness, that I should be louder about what I do. 5The diner cured me of that worry. Marcus does not fold a perfect omelet so a stranger will praise him. He does it because a stranger is going to eat it, and the work is the respect. 6That is the value my community runs on, the unglamorous loyalty of people who show up for the late shift, and it is the value I want to carry into a classroom and a kitchen and a life. So I scrape the flat-top until it shines, knowing no customer will ever see it, because Dao will tomorrow morning, and she deserves a clean start.7
  1. 1Picks one humble, ongoing activity rather than a resume highlight. WSU explicitly rewards specific over impressive, and a closing shift at a diner is the kind of small, true thing that reveals character.
  2. 2Names exactly why this activity matters: it is unwitnessed. That framing sets up an authentic claim about values instead of a polished one.
  3. 3Specific named coworker and a tactile detail (guiding the wrist) make the relationship real. This is the 'pulls people in' value shown through how she absorbs and honors mentorship.
  4. 4A wordless, improvised partnership demonstrates inclusion in action rather than as a slogan. It quietly says she pulls coworkers in across a language barrier.
  5. 5Connects the activity to a broader, honest self-portrait, and admits a real insecurity. That self-awareness about values is precisely what the Honors College asks the essay to reveal.
  6. 6Lets a mentor articulate the value so it lands as something learned, not preached. The aphorism ('the work is the respect') feels earned by the scene.
  7. 7Closes by widening from the diner to community and future, then snapping back to one concrete, generous image. The ending re-earns the whole essay's claim about quiet usefulness.
Stuck? Start here
  • What is the one experience you would still talk about if it could not go on any application?
  • What single value does it prove, and what exact moment proves it?
  • Have you actually named that value in the essay, or only described the activity?
Before you submit
  • I wrote about ONE activity, not several.
  • I named the value out loud rather than hoping the reader infers it.
  • The story is a specific scene, not a general summary of the whole activity.

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