DePauw University supplemental essays

Program-specific prompts

These apply only if you are applying to the named program or school.

• Honor Scholar ProgramRequired500 words max

  Human or machine

  In October 2016, physicist Stephen Hawking said, "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks." Since then, AI has seen major breakthroughs. In October 2024, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two researchers (John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton) for their contributions to the machine learning that laid the foundations for Artificial Intelligence. With this context in mind, how does human intelligence differ from artificial intelligence (if it does)? And, do you agree with Prof. Hawking that we might now have reached the last big event in human history? How might we avoid the risks associated with AI?

  How to approach it

  An academic-interest prompt wants the origin story and the evidence, not the resume. Pick the moment the interest became yours, show one or two things you did about it on your own, and let the school see how you think when nobody assigns the work.

• Honor Scholar ProgramRequired500 words max

  Public health and government

  Public health scientist Thomas Oliver wrote in 2006: "[p]ublic health commonly involves governmental action to produce outcomes— injury and disease prevention or health promotion—that individuals are unlikely or unable to produce by themselves...[a] political community stresses a shared bond among members: organized society safeguards the common goods of health, welfare, and security, while members subordinate themselves to the welfare of the community as a whole. Public health can be achieved only through collective action, not through individual endeavor." This perspective may be widely accepted in public health, but it "runs counter to a fundamental emphasis on property rights, economic individualism, and competition in American political culture" as Oliver observes. Considering recent global health crises such as COVID, Ebola, Zika, obesity, and others that threaten us, what should the role of government or international organizations be in the regulation and promotion of individual and/or the public's health?

  How to approach it

  Community and identity prompts reward specificity over significance. A small, true community described from the inside beats a broad label described from the outside. End on what you carry from it into a campus, not on a moral.

• Honor Scholar ProgramRequired500 words max

  The writer's task

  "Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another. By virtue of that power, it is political, regardless of content." ––Barbara Kingsolver, DPU '77 "As writers, our services are needed as human beings. . . . I don't want to write anything that is consolation. I don't want to console. I want us to feel just a tiny fraction, a tiny fraction more than we do in our deeply comfortable American lives despite all the pain and suffering. . . . I want us to feel uncomfortable and be disoriented." ––Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, 20 Nov. 2024 What do you see as the writer's task? Ca. 1579, in The Defence of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney argued that a writer's task is to move an audience. Quoting Virgil's Aeneid (6.129), Sidney explains, "to be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know, hoc opus, hic labor est ("This is the task, this is the work to be done"). Would a writer's role, as you define it, support or contradict Sidney's belief that writers should inspire readers to take action in the world? How does your own view either support, qualify, or refute the views expressed above by two contemporary writers, a novelist and a poet respectively?

• Honor Scholar ProgramRequired500 words max

  Respond to the photograph

  What does this image say to you? You may take any approach or perspective you like in responding to the photograph. That is, you could tell a story based on the photo, look at it as a piece of art, or comment on the economic, political, social, or environmental meanings it might convey.

  How to approach it

  Community and identity prompts reward specificity over significance. A small, true community described from the inside beats a broad label described from the outside. End on what you carry from it into a campus, not on a moral.