Boston University Essays 2025-2026
If you are applying to Boston University for regular decision or ED II, you are in the right place. In this article, we will cut through the ambiguity and noise surrounding how to approach Boston University’s supplemental essays enabling you to show the university how you will both benefit from its extensive offerings and enrich the academic and social experience of your peers, two of the main factors Boston University and other elite colleges consider when evaluating applicants.
Boston University requires that you to respond to one of the two prompts.
1a. Reflect on a social or community issue that deeply resonates with you. Why is it important to you, and how have you been involved in addressing or raising awareness about it? (300 words)
For this essay, start with a vivid first-person hook that places the reader directly in the moment, either showing yourself actively addressing a real-world problem or experiencing something that clearly motivates you to take action. This motivating experience does not need to be your origin story. As a rule, the events you write about in your college essays should be as recent as possible. That gives admissions officers the clearest picture of who you are now and who you will be as a student and community member on their campus.
If you choose to begin by showing yourself tackling a real-world problem, either explain why this problem or activity is so meaningful to you, or continue your description by introducing a challenge you faced while working on it. If you introduce a challenge, describe how it felt to navigate that obstacle, especially in light of your personal reasons for being involved in the first place.
If you start with a motivating experience rather than direct action, explain how that experience drives you to address a real-world issue and how you became involved in trying to solve it. A key part of this essay is convincing the reader that the problem you chose is genuinely consequential. Vividly illustrate its human impact and show how your work has tangibly improved people’s lives.
Conclude by demonstrating how your experience addressing this problem has shaped your future goals, or how it reframed an earlier event in your life that led you to pursue this kind of real-world impact.
1b. What about being a student at BU most excites you? How do you hope to contribute to our campus community? (300 words)
This is both a "why Boston University" essay and a "why you" essay. They are asking why you want to attend Boston University and also why Boston University should admit you. If only more colleges were this straightforward. For this essay, you want to start with a vivid anecdote that demonstrates either a value of yours that will lead you to contribute to Boston University in a tangible way, or that provides motivation for why a very particular and well-represented academic specialty of Boston University appeals to you.
From there, you should either show tangibly how you'll contribute to specific student spaces at Boston University, such as clubs, seminar-style classes, common student spaces, professors' labs, or enrich the experience of students taking part in enshrined Boston University traditions. Alternatively, discuss research opportunities in which you name specific undergraduate research programs, professors you'd like to work with, and institutes dedicated to tackling real-world problems or researching academic subfields. You want to demonstrate to Boston University that you have a clear vision of how you will contribute to the Boston University student community, so be very specific.
Show them what you'll talk to students about, what you'll do if you see a student suffering from test anxiety or facing any other challenge, or how you'll create a new organization on campus using your past experience bootstrapping organizations. For the academic reasons for attending Boston University, focus on why contributing to the area you want to study at Boston University will either result in knowledge that dramatically alters how we view our relationship to the world or makes a tangible impact on the lives of real people.
To conclude this essay, show them a vision of how you'll positively impact the world in tangible ways, enabled by both benefiting from Boston University's academic opportunities and contributing to the Boston University community.
If you want your college admissions essays to be the decisive factor that gets you into your dream school, schedule a free consultation with an admissions expert today to have all of your questions answered.
