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How to Write the Oregon State University Essays 2024-2025

Applicants to the Honors College at Oregon State University will need to respond to one essay prompt, as well as four short-response questions with a limit of 100 words each. Any time you’re applying to a more selective program within the university as a whole, you want to make sure your strengths come across fully, and the essays are a fantastic opportunity to contextualize your more objective achievements like grades, awards, and so on.

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Oregon State University Supplemental Essay Prompts

Honors college applicants.

Prompt 1: Choose a specific connection that you consider interesting or unique; describe and explain the connection and its parts and why that connection is meaningful or significant. You can choose from activities, academic subjects, concepts, natural or human phenomena, etc. Write an original essay that clearly and completely addresses the prompt above in 450-500 words in order for your Honors College application to be considered. Making connections and drawing insights from those connections is a central part of the Honors College experience. (450-500 words) ‌ 

Short Answer Prompts: Please address your experience in each category below, keeping in mind how you could contribute to the future community of excellence at OSU. Respond to all four questions and limit answers to 100 words per question.

Describe any special interests and how you have developed knowledge in these areas. Give examples of your creativity- the ability to see alternatives; take diverse perspectives; come up with many, varied, or original ideas; or willingness to try new things. (100 words)

Describe a significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to address this challenge. include whether you turned to anyone in facing the challenge, the role the person played, and what you learned about yourself. (100 words), osu remains committed to creating an inclusive environment and dismantling systems that perpetuate discrimination at various levels. how, specifically, will you contribute to furthering this commitment (100 words), articulate the goals you have established for yourself and your efforts to accomplish these. give at least one specific example that demonstrates your work ethic/diligence. (100 words), honors college applicants, prompt 1, choose a specific connection that you consider interesting or unique; describe and explain the connection and its parts and why that connection is meaningful or significant. you can choose from activities, academic subjects, concepts, natural or human phenomena, etc., write an original essay that clearly and completely addresses the prompt above in 450-500 words in order for your honors college application to be considered. making connections and drawing insights from those connections is a central part of the honors college experience. (450-500 words).

This prompt invites you to explore a specific connection between two or more things that you find interesting or meaningful. Your goal should be to demonstrate your ability to think creatively and across disciplines, and draw insights from seemingly disparate ideas. 

This is also a great opportunity to show off your unique way of looking at the world. The key to a strong response is to not only describe the connection, but also delve into why it’s significant to you.

The broadness of this prompt may seem overwhelming, but take a breath! Here are some questions to help get you thinking about what you might write about. 

• Have you noticed two areas of your life that are unexpectedly related? Maybe you or someone else was surprised by how similar they are, how one influenced the other, or how lessons learned in one context could be applied to another. 
• Have you ever connected two concepts that you had previously seen as unrelated? What led you to make this connection? Why does it stand out in your memory as significant?
• Are there any connections that you have discovered or learned about that shape your understanding of a topic, your community, or even the world? 
• Is there a connection that is particularly significant to you, your worldview, your values, or goals? 

You can use these questions to generate a list of possible topics. We recommend shooting for 5-10–especially for this kind of nuanced prompt, giving yourself more options means you can compare and contrast them, to determine which is truly the strongest. When you’re ready to narrow down your initial list, think about the following considerations. 

First, your topic should be specific and unique. Talking about how art and science connect is not a strong choice, because art and science are each huge fields, and lots of students see some overlap between them. 

A much stronger choice would be writing about how looking at cells under a microscope gave you a much deeper appreciation for the forms and colors of abstract art. Take advantage of the space given to you – with up to 500 words, you have the room to lay out complex connections. In fact, Oregon State tells you directly that’s exactly what they want you to do!

You’ll also want to pick a connection that you have a personal link to. The point of any college essay is to show the admissions committee more about who you are, not just tell them about something you care about. For the above example, the intersection between microbiology and abstract art could be used to show the author’s attention to detail, love of research, and/or open-mindedness about different art forms.

Finally, you want to hint at how this connection you see will allow you to make positive contributions to the Honors College. Oregon State isn’t expecting you to have the next four years fully planned out, but showing that you’ve already thought about how this aspect of your identity would be an asset to the Honors College community is often the thing that takes an essay from good to great.

This may sound like a lot to keep track of, but if you take your brainstorming seriously, incorporating all of these elements can happen quite naturally. Let’s look at some hypothetical student topics that would make strong responses for this prompt. 

• A student passionate about both music and math could explore the connection between musical rhythms and mathematical patterns. They might describe how learning about sequences and series helped them conquer a difficult piece, and why they find beauty in the intersection of rhythm and structure. They might talk about how they look forward to using these insights to help make math less intimidating to artistically minded students. 
• A student interested in environmental science and neuroscience could discuss the relationship between green spaces in cities and mental health. They could explain how their experience volunteering in a community garden taught them to see parks as a key element of public well-being, and how this insight drives their future goals of participating in community gardening at and around Oregon State.
• A student who loves literature and psychology might write about how reading classic novels helped them understand human behavior. They could describe how analyzing characters’ motivations in books like Crime and Punishment deepened their understanding of moral dilemmas and decision-making processes in real life. Perhaps they plan to start a book club on their floor, so that they can get to know others through their connections to fictional characters. 

As you refine your choice of topic, remember that you’ll need to provide specific examples of your points, so make sure you’ll be able to do so. Note that all of the above examples reference particular moments in the student’s life that illustrate how they first made this connection, and why it became so meaningful to them. 

Describing what learning the piano was like for you is far more effective than just stating “I had always seen math and music as separate fields, but when I learned the piano, that changed.” Instead, you could say something like:

“My fingers flew across the black and white keys, trying desperately to keep up with Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. For weeks now, every time I started getting close to the third movement, I would make a mistake I couldn’t recover from. As my left hand slipped, that familiar frustration started crackling in my chest. 

But then, in a fraction of a second, my math lesson from the previous day popped into my head: sometimes, a sequence of numbers doesn’t follow the pattern you expect. This time, rather than giving up, I added a quick series of notes which aren’t in the sheet music, but would connect my mistake to the next measure.”

By immersing us fully in this moment alongside them, the student allows us to see exactly how they think, and ensures that they will stand out even from other students who might be exploring a related topic.

Honors College Applicants, Short Response 1

With just 100 words, you’ll need to choose your topics for these next four prompts carefully, to ensure you’re able to clearly communicate what you want to say even in such a short space. To start, this one focuses on your unique interests and creativity, so you’ll want to select a topic that demonstrates your out-of-the-box thinking. 

Your brainstorming for the prompt above could actually come in handy here. Although you don’t want to write about the same thing, as repeating yourself wastes your precious space, you could potentially write about one of the other options you were considering.

Alternatively, you could ask yourself the following questions, to kick off your brainstorming:

• Examples: Rock climbing, crocheting, Scottish folklore
• Tracking the popularity of various bird seeds at your birdfeeder, doing a painting on your ceiling that incorporates the stain caused by water damage
• Training your pet ferret to roll over, analyzing Shakespeare through the lens of immigration

Regardless of which topic you choose, you’ll want to explain what it is quickly, in around twenty words, so that you can spend the bulk of the response explaining what this particular interest says about who you are more broadly. You’ll also want to use specific, anchoring details to make your essay come alive for your readers–describing your creativity in a creative way can take the essay to the next level.

Let’s look at an example of what a strong response might look like. 

“Last summer, fascinated by sustainable architecture, I built a small model home using recycled materials. I researched eco-friendly construction techniques, such as repurposing materials, and implemented those ideas in my model by using worn out dishrags as insulation and plastic bottle caps as roof shingles. I tested my model by leaving it outside in a rainstorm, and was thrilled when not a single drop got through! This project not only deepened my understanding of sustainable practices, but also pushed me to be attentive to detail and see function rather than solely form.”

‌This example is specific in showing the student’s creativity–it doesn’t just mention the recycled model home project, but also gives details about particular materials they repurposed. We can see that they have a deep knowledge of architectural practices and sustainable design, and an appreciation for both the beauty and necessity of building. 

Hopefully, this essay demonstrates that even in just 100 words, you can seamlessly incorporate many elements, to craft a response that makes a genuine impact on your reader.

Honors College Applicants, Short Response 2

To respond to this prompt, you may want to check out our Overcoming Challenges essay breakdown, as this is an example of that archetype. This supplement, however, is only 100 words, so the response will have to be much shorter than your typical Overcoming Challenges essay. As a result, you’ll want to focus on just the most important aspects of this kind of prompt. 

Helpfully, the basic structure your response should take is laid out in the prompt itself: you should describe an important challenge you’ve faced, the way that you handled this problem, and who or what might have helped you through it. Then, you should reflect on how you might have grown or learned about the world and yourself through this process. 

Given the abbreviated length, you should spend around twenty words describing the problem, forty to fifty describing your response and the resources you used, and the last twenty to thirty words reflecting on the broader impact this challenge and resolution had on you. Note that these are just approximations–every response will be different, but if you’re struggling to stay within the count, this is a good blueprint.

Before you start worrying too much about length, though, here are some guiding questions to help you come up with an appropriate problem to write about.

• Have you faced a challenge where you had to rely on external support or resources to work through it?
• Have you dealt with a challenge that changed your perspective or worldview?
• Are there any obstacles you’re particularly proud of having gotten past? 
• What adverse circumstances have taught you the most about yourself?

Make sure to pick something that you can effectively unpack in 100 words. This is a very short response, so you probably won’t be able to do justice to a long and involved story, even if it was deeply meaningful to you. You still want to pick something significant to you, of course–if you don’t really care about this problem, the admissions committee won’t either–but the problem should be relatively straightforward.

That said, you want to avoid cliché topics like moving to a new place, suffering a sports injury, or working through a difficult class. While you don’t need to find something that admissions officers have absolutely never seen before, as that’s practically impossible, there are some topics that are just too overused.

Here are some examples of experiences that could work well:

• Doing a major group project where the members all had different ideas about what your final presentation should look like, so you organized a meeting with your teacher so she could help you find a middle ground
• Spilling water on your final painting for an art class, and brainstorming ideas with your classmates about how to incorporate the huge blotch into the piece
• Tutoring at an elementary school where many students don’t speak English, and reaching out to language instructors at your local university to learn how to use image-based instructional methods

If your story is not as unique as you might like, that’s okay. Try to find an angle that’s particular to you, or reflect on the experience in a way that demonstrates your unique worldview, values, and personality. There’s no one way to stand out from the crowd, but you want to make sure you incorporate something that shows admissions officers what you have to offer that nobody else does.

After selecting your story, try to pick a few key details to make your account compelling and anchored in something real. You don’t have a ton of room, but even saying something like “The hallway rang with a mix of languages, from Spanish to Korean to Arabic,” rather than “When I arrived at the school, I heard a lot of different languages,” goes a long way.

Honors College Applicants, Short Response 3

‌This prompt asks you to reflect on your personal experiences, beliefs, and values, and explain how you will actively contribute to making OSU more inclusive. To get started, you’ll want to identify a moment or experience where you actively worked towards inclusivity, to demonstrate your personal investment in diversity.

To brainstorm, consider when diverse experiences, identities, or perspectives have made a difference in your own life, or in the lives of those close to you. You don’t have to have created the environment that made this mingling possible yourself, so long as you still learned what a positive diverse environment looks like, and took away lessons that you could bring to Oregon State with you.

While describing past experiences is important, you want to do that relatively quickly, as the real key to this essay is explaining how you will work to embrace diversity on Oregon State’s campus. You’ll want to reflect on what your past experiences taught you about how to make a community more inclusive, and how you plan to put those lessons into action. As always, specificity is crucial, to show that diversity is a genuine value of yours.

Let’s look at some hypothetical examples of what a strong response might include. 

• A student with a foster sibling might write about their efforts to change the language teachers and administrators at their school used around families and parents, and how they hope to start a club or movement on campus around awareness and celebration of nontraditional families. 
• A computer science student passionate about the outdoors might talk about how through coding classes at OSU, they hope to create an app to upload accessibility descriptions to trail maps, to make hiking more accessible to those with disabilities. 
• A student interested in neuroscience might write about how they can’t wait to join clubs and initiatives focused on mental health and lead outreach efforts to struggling students, because in high school they volunteered for a crisis hotline, which taught them that people with mental illnesses must be involved in designing the support systems that are supposed to help them. 
• A student from a rural area might talk about how being from a small town allowed them to get involved in local government even while still in high school, and how they hope to join OSU’s student government and host informal activities like barbeques to encourage all students to have a voice in what happens at the school.

Each of these students has a specific vision for how they will show up for underrepresented students at Oregon State. Even if you haven’t had a chance to do activism work in high school, or don’t have a super specific plan for what you hope to do in college yet, that’s okay–just write about a past experience that taught you about diversity, and how those lessons will guide your future on Oregon State’s campus.

Honors College Applicants, Short Response 4

Here, the qualities you want to demonstrate are your capacity for hard work, dedication, and attention to detail. You’ll also want to showcase a goal you’ve set yourself, to show how those qualities are going to help you grow and develop in college.

First, you’ll want to pick a clear, focused goal. Something like “become a better writer” is a worthy goal, but it’s also one where measuring progress is hard, and one without a clear point at which you could say you’ve “accomplished” it.

Reading the classics for a better understanding of technique, writing 500 words every day for a month, or submitting a piece of work for publication are more specific ways of articulating the same idea as this vague goal.

Your goal should also be relatively ambitious. Choosing something like getting better at chores, or achieving a high score in a video game, may not be taken seriously by an admissions committee. On the other hand, choosing something drastic, like becoming the president of the United States or winning a Nobel Peace Prize, will also come across as disingenuous, so make sure you aim for the middle ground.

The best essay will focus on a goal that is achievable, but also demonstrates that you have confidence and self-motivation, and are eager to employ those traits in service of what matters most to you. You should also be able to cite concrete steps you’ve already taken that prove you’re currently working towards your goal. Your essay might even show grit and perseverance if you’ve overcome setbacks or worked through hardship in pursuit of your goal.

Covering all these bases might sound overwhelming, so let’s look at an example of an essay that puts all these things together. 

“Growing up without much money didn’t just mean going without the 64 pack of crayons. It meant that when I came home after school, my parents were too busy to help me with homework. As a high schooler, I wanted to give others the support I hadn’t had, so I co-founded a free tutoring program at the library for low-income students. Managing volunteers and developing lesson plans while doing my own work has required strong organization skills and the sacrifice of free time, but my efforts have helped over 30 students improve their grades, which is more than worth it.”

This student clearly tells us about how their background shapes their goals: feeling lost academically inspired them to help prevent others from feeling that way. They then explain a step they’ve already taken–starting a tutoring program–that shows they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. They come across as empathetic, altruistic, and genuinely appreciative of education and the opportunities it provides, and they also clearly place a high value on equity.

Whatever story you tell, choose something that showcases your best qualities, your capacity for growth and reflection, and, of course, your readiness to work hard to achieve your dreams. 

Where to Get Your Oregon State Essay Edited For Free

Do you want feedback on your Oregon State University essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

Need feedback faster? Get a free, nearly-instantaneous essay review from Sage, our AI tutor and advisor. Sage will rate your essay, give you suggestions for improvement, and summarize what admissions officers would take away from your writing. Use these tools to improve your chances of acceptance to your dream school!

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I'm a bit lost when it comes to the format of college essays. Can anyone share some sample college essay formats? I'm just trying to get an idea of what the proper format should look like so I can start working on mine. Thanks!

Sure thing! When it comes to college essays, there isn't a strict format that you are required to follow. However, most essays follow a general structure to ensure organization and cohesiveness. I'll provide an example outline of a college essay format that you can use as a guide:

1. Introduction

- Begin with a hook: Start your essay with an engaging sentence or anecdote to captivate your reader's attention. This can be a brief story, a rhetorical question, a quote, or a powerful statement.

- Introduce the topic: Briefly mention the aspect of your life or experience you'll be discussing in your essay.

- Connect to the thesis: End your introduction with a thesis statement that reflects the central theme or main idea of your essay. This should directly tie into your essay's topic.

2. Body Paragraphs (2-3 paragraphs)

- Each body paragraph should focus on one specific idea or moment within your chosen topic.

- Start with a topic sentence: This sentence should succinctly summarize the main point of the paragraph and connect back to your thesis statement.

- Provide examples and personal anecdotes: Use specific examples, experiences, or descriptions to support your main point. This adds depth and meaning to your essay.

- Explain the significance: Be sure to explain why your examples matter, how they have shaped your growth, and their effect on your personality or values.

- Transition to the next paragraph: Use smooth transitions between paragraphs to create a coherent flow of ideas throughout the essay.

3. Conclusion

- Restate the thesis: Briefly reiterate your thesis statement using different phrasing.

- Summarize main points: Recap your main points or experiences from the body paragraphs, touching upon how they support your thesis.

- End with insight: Close your essay by reflecting on what you've learned from your experiences or how they have shaped important aspects of your life. This can be a call-to-action, a powerful declaration, or a glimpse into your future aspirations.

Keep in mind that your essay should be formatted with a 12-point font (preferably Times New Roman or Arial), double-spaced, with 1-inch margins. This structure should give you a good starting point as you work on your essay. Remember, the most important aspect is to demonstrate your personality, values, and growth through your writing. Good luck!

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