Boston College is a private research institution with a Jesuit history. Founded in 1863, Boston College began as an undergraduate liberal arts college, hence the name, but today maintains a graduate program as well. Their accomplished alumni include John Kerry, Lulu Wang, Lesley Visser, and Amy Poehler. Hoping to join their ranks? First, you’ll need to write your Boston College supplemental essay. Let’s dive in.
Boston College’s 2024-2025 Prompts
Boston College has set five prompts for its undergraduate applicants. But don’t worry, you only need to write a response to one of them. If you are applying to the Human-Centered Engineering major, you must select the fifth prompt. All other applicants can choose between the other Boston College supplemental essay prompts. In addition, each essay has a maximum length of 400 words.
Without further ado, here are the prompts:
- Each year at University Convocation, our incoming class engages in reflective dialogue with the author of a common text. What book by a living author would you recommend for your incoming class to read and why would this be an important shared text?
- At Boston College, we draw upon the Jesuit tradition of finding worthwhile conversation partners. Some support our viewpoints while others challenge them. Who fulfills this role in your life? Please cite a specific conversation you had where this conversation partner challenged your perspective or you challenged theirs.
- In her November 2019 Ted Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned viewers against assigning people a “single story” through assumptions about their nationality, appearance, or background. Discuss a time when someone defined you by a single story. What challenges did this present and how did you overcome them?
- Boston College’s founding in 1863 was in response to society’s call. That call came from an immigrant community in Boston seeking a Jesuit education to foster social mobility. Still today, the University empowers its students to use their education to address society’s greatest needs. Which of today’s local or global issues is of particular concern to you and how might you use your Boston College education to address it?
- Human-Centered Engineering (HCE) Applicants only: One goal of a Jesuit education is to prepare students to serve the Common Good. Human-Centered Engineering at Boston College integrates technical knowledge, creativity, and a humanistic perspective to address societal challenges and opportunities. What societal problems are important to you and how will you use your HCE education to solve them?
General Tips
Unless you are applying to the Human-Centered Engineering program at Boston College, you will need to choose between these prompts in order to write your essay. Let’s dive into why you might want to choose one of the prompts over the others.
Prompt 1 should be chosen by students whose worldviews have been impacted by texts they’ve read. If you’re a prospective student of Political Science who looks to Chomsky for inspiration on the regular, this might be the right prompt for you. Alternatively, if you are actually a prospective STEM student who loves to read and wants to demonstrate their textual analysis skills.
Prompt 2 is the right choice for students who seek to understand others’ points-of-view and foster meaningful discussion on controversial topics. Students interested in finding middle grounds, staying open-minded when speaking to people whose life experiences and perspectives are vastly different from their own, and letting their opinions evolve will be able to answer this prompt effectively.
Prompt 3 should be chosen by the student whose identity or identities have significantly impacted their life, whether repeatedly or on one significant occasion. If you have had to show resilience in your life in the face of discrimination, false assumptions, and so on as a result of your identity or identities, then this might be the chance for you to share that experience with the reader.
Prompt 4 is the right prompt for individuals who feel called to enact social change. If you see your Boston College education as a stepping stone toward your goals of bettering the world, then here’s your chance to share that experience with the admissions team.
Now that you have a sense of which prompt(s) might be right for you, scroll ahead to read the breakdown of each of the Boston College supplemental essay prompts!
Choose One: Boston College Short Essays
1. Each year at University Convocation, our incoming class engages in reflective dialogue with the author of a common text. What book by a living author would you recommend for your incoming class to read and why would this be an important shared text?
This prompt seeks to understand what kind of books you read, how you reflect upon them, and what lessons you have learned. Then, the reader hopes to learn why you wish to share these lessons with your classmates. Therefore, you’ll need to do some textual or literary analysis in order to effectively respond to this prompt. You may also want to provide a brief summary, a description of the text’s main points, or an illustration of whatever topic in the text is most important to your essay.
In other words, you need to clarify why you think this text should be shared with the reader, and to do this, some context about the text more broadly will be necessary. Remember, although you need to choose a book written by a living author, there will still be some context that the reader may not have. For instance, when was this book written? Where was this book written and/or where does it take place? And if it’s not already clear, in what language was it written?
Lastly, take some time to reflect upon the lessons you have learned from reading this book. Before you begin writing this essay, you may want to make a list of the main takeaways you hope to share with your peers. Then, structure the latter half of the essay around these takeaways. You can specify why, specifically, you think your classmates would find meaning or value in this text. Alternatively, you can explain why you think this text is worth reading.
2. At Boston College, we draw upon the Jesuit tradition of finding worthwhile conversation partners. Some support our viewpoints while others challenge them. Who fulfills this role in your life? Please cite a specific conversation you had where this conversation partner challenged your perspective or you challenged theirs.
In this essay, you should focus on one individual in your life who supports some of your viewpoints and challenges others. In addition, you should explain your relationship with this person and what you mean to each other. You may also want to describe briefly how your relationship with this person has evolved over time.
Then, focus on one specific conversation between you and this person when you disagreed about something. Explain how you disagreed, how this conversation began, and how it ended (or how it continues to this day). Did this person change your perspective? Did you change theirs? Have you found a middle ground, or are you at a standstill? Whether you ended the discussion agreeing to disagree, or both of your perspectives have evolved somewhat but not completely, it’s important that you express your open-mindedness and willingness to listen to others’ perspectives. These are the qualities that the admissions team is looking for.
3. In her November 2019 Ted Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned viewers against assigning people a “single story” through assumptions about their nationality, appearance, or background. Discuss a time when someone defined you by a single story. What challenges did this present and how did you overcome them?
If this prompt speaks to you, select a specific occasion when someone defined you by a single story. Because the prompt says “a time” and “someone,” you should write focus on one occasion and one person. In other words, a pattern of experiences is not what this essay prompt is seeking.
As you write this essay, you can either employ a narrative structure or a more expository structure. This means you can either write about this occasion in your life as though it is a story (with dialogue and scenes), or you can write the whole essay as a reflection on this experience. If you choose to write the essay as a story, then you should leave room for reflection upon the experience at the end of the story.
Lastly, you’ll need to leave room in your essay for discussion of the challenges presented by this experience, how you faced and overcame these challenges, and what you learned from the experience (this last topic can be the focus of your reflection). College admissions officers seek resilient students who can face the challenges the world throws at them and come out of the experience with knowledge. Demonstrating how you overcame these challenges and learned from them will give the reader confidence that you will also succeed in a challenging university environment.
4. Boston College’s founding in 1863 was in response to society’s call. That call came from an immigrant community in Boston seeking a Jesuit education to foster social mobility. Still today, the University empowers its students to use their education to address society’s greatest needs. Which of today’s local or global issues is of particular concern to you and how might you use your Boston College education to address it?
This prompt requires multiple pieces of information from you, both explicit and implicit. Let’s break it down:
- What local or global issue particularly concerns you?
- Why is this issue important? Why should it be addressed?
- Why is this issue important to you?
- What do you need to address this issue?
- How will Boston College help you address this issue?
In summary, what specific aspects of the Boston College education will give you what you need to address this issue that is important to you?
After answering each of these questions, you should have the components to compose this essay. Although not explicitly, this prompt seeks to understand why Boston College is a good fit for you. In other words, it’s a “Why Boston College?”-type essay. In this type of essay, it’s important to clarify not only why you want to attend Boston College, but also why it is the right school for you specifically.
5. Human-Centered Engineering (HCE) Applicants only: One goal of a Jesuit education is to prepare students to serve the Common Good. Human-Centered Engineering at Boston College integrates technical knowledge, creativity, and a humanistic perspective to address societal challenges and opportunities. What societal problems are important to you and how will you use your HCE education to solve them?
If you are applying to the Human-Centered Engineering program at Boston College, you must answer this prompt. If you are not applying to HCE, then you must choose one of the other prompts.
This prompt asks you to provide a list of societal problems that are important to you. Then, you must explain what aspects of the HCE will enable you to solve them. Of course, if a societal problem as broad as “world hunger” is important to you, you may be able to solve this issue for a group of people, or help society get closer to solving this problem, but the admissions team at Boston College does not expect you to have an entire solution to this vast, complex problem all mapped out and envisioned. After all, if it were that easy, a Boston College alum would have solved world hunger by now!
Instead, the admissions team anticipates that you will either have some societal problems in mind whose scope is small enough for you to reasonably tackle them upon graduation from Boston College; or, you are inspired to help work on solving some larger problem(s), but with the understanding that you as an individual will not solely invent and enact the solution.
You should focus only part of this essay on the societal problem(s) you wish to solve. Then, focus the rest of the essay on the aspects of the Boston College HCE education that will help you get closer to your goals. This prompt may not look like it at first glance, but it is actually a “Why Boston College?” essay. To be specific, it’s a “Why HCE?” essay that should zero in on the education’s applications to solving societal problems.
If you need help polishing up your Boston College supplemental essay, check out our College Essay Review service. You can receive detailed feedback from Ivy League consultants in as little as 24 hours.
