Let’s talk about Boston College. With a 13.9% acceptance rate for the Class of 2029, BC is a competitive and academically rigorous private liberal arts school in the Jesuit Catholic tradition. While some have misconceptions about its religious affiliation, BC welcomes — and actively seeks — students of all backgrounds, whether they practice another faith or none at all. Jesuit values champion intellectual curiosity and service to others, so while does identify as practicing Catholicism or being raised as Catholic, the more notable self-selective qualities of the community are not active church attendance or adherence to any particular denomination but rather scholastic excellence and passion for social justice.
The stats back this up: BC is an and a . Boston is an exciting urban hub on the East Coast, and BC offers a true campus experience with access to the city; students enjoy the benefits of a tight-knit, socially conscious community while getting a top-tier education developed with personal purpose and professional applicability in mind.
BC is test-optional, but, as we’ve covered, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get in. The average standardized test scores for admitted students range from 1440 to 1540 for the SAT and from 33 to 35 for the ACT. Admittedly, we can assume this range is higher than it would be if BC required all applicants to submit scores, because students who scored at or above a college’s reported median are more incentivized to submit their test results. However, this isn’t a small sample size that highly skews the average; two years ago, submitted test scores.
There’s no way around it: the standard for admission is high, and you’ll need to meet it to secure a spot. BC is a popular destination for high-achieving, academically ambitious students who want to make an impact, and, year after year, we help clients get in.While grades and scores are fairly black and white, the supplemental essay gives you more agency to make creative choices, show your personality, and set yourself apart. In this post, we’ll break down the writing section so you can see how we set up our students for acceptance to their top-choice school.
Writing Strategy
First, let’s how BC introduces their writing supplement to get a broad sense of the requirements. :
We would like to get a better sense of you. Please respond to one of the first four prompts below (400 word limit). Students applying to the Human Centered Engineering major should respond to Prompt #5 instead.
The guidelines here are straightforward. The word limit here is not optional. The essay you submit may not be longer than 400 words, and you should make good use of the space you’re given — so your essay should not be shorter than 350 words, either.
If you’re applying as a Human Centered Engineering major, your only option is Prompt #5, and you can head straight to our advice about it at the end of this blog post. Everyone else has their pick of Prompts #1-#4, but not all your options here are equally strategic. When advising students who were later admitted to BC, we guided them to the choice best-suited to help them shine. We’ll walk you through each of the prompts below, so make sure you read through each of them to identify the pros and cons for your application before writing your essay. This decision matters!
1. Strong communities are sustained by traditions. Boston College's annual calendar is marked with both long-standing and newer traditions that help shape our community. Tell us about a meaningful tradition in your family or community. Why is it important to you, and how does it bring people together or strengthen the bonds of those who participate?
The first few sentences here don’t directly relate to the question you’re being asked, but it does tell you important information about why you’re being asked. In sharing a BC value, admissions is telling you what they’re looking for — students who care about honoring legacy and upholding community ties through shared ritual. While your essay won’t speak to BC’s specific traditions, the way you write about a tradition of your own demonstrates why you’d be an excellent addition to their campus and how you’d contribute to school culture.
We’ll let you in on the guidance we’ve given successful BC applicants in the past: while the tradition you highlight can be anything, you’ll want to select something specific and personal to you. This is true for several reasons. The first is that it ensures you check all the boxes you’ve got to cover in your response, most importantly why this tradition is important to you; the second is that it will allow you to stand out and give a better understanding of what you care about and how you think. If, for example, you write about opening presents on Christmas morning, you’ll technically be answering the question, but we’re not learning anything about you since almost everyone who celebrates Christmas does the same. At best, it’s forgettable; at worst, the lack of originality and creativity in the approach gives the impression that you didn’t put much effort in.
And, while you need to take the prompt and its focus on tradition seriously, the topic you choose does not need to be serious to make a great essay! We’ll tell you the same thing we tell our clients to take the pressure off brainstorming. Your tradition does not need to be “formal” or emotionally intense to be meaningful. In fact, it’s the small things — the inside jokes that turn into annual family activities — that are more illuminating and personalizing.
Opening presents on Christmas? Not so groundbreaking. Opening presents on Halloween because it’s your mom’s favorite holiday? Delightful. It’s unexpected, it’s endearing, and, while light-hearted, it can have deep significance. It might be something you joke about on the surface, but it also speaks to your mom’s legacy and your relationship to her. How this became a way to spend time with your mom, eating candy and watching scary movies, once you’d outgrown trick-or-treating. How it helps you remember the zeal with which your mother approached putting together your costume every year as a kid, which is really a sign of how she supports and cheers you on in everything, reminding you that you can be anything you want to be — whether that’s a benevolent witch, an astronaut, a classical pianist, or the first female president of the United States. Now that? That’s an essay we want to read!
2. The late BC theology professor, Father Michael Himes, argued that a university is not a place to which you go, but instead, a "rigorous and sustained conversation about the great questions of human existence, among the widest possible circle of the best possible conversation partners.” Who has been your most meaningful conversation partner, and what profound questions have you considered together?
Okay, we admit that this prompt is fascinating, but you need to take care in how you answer it to avoid common pitfalls. Again, the set-up to the actual question itself gives you important information. BC is looking for the kind of person who views doubt as an opportunity to grow, an invitation to seek more knowledge in pursuit of answers; that means they want someone open-minded, thoughtful, capable of respecting and listening to others, and humble enough to change their mind. They’re looking for someone curious, smart, and collaborative. If you choose to tackle this prompt, you need to make sure your essay speaks to how you embody those qualities.
Every year, clients come to us with their first draft of this essay, and we help them reimagine their response, ensuring that their best attributes come through in how they frame their answer. The mistake we see most often is an essay that, despite being beautifully written and philosophically resonant, fails to communicate anything about the applicant who wrote it. Yes, you need to identify the conversation partner who has most impacted you, but it can’t be all about them or the knowledge they’ve imparted.
This essay should not become a profile of a person you admire or a deep-dive of a topic you find interesting; it should be an anecdote that shows why dialogue matters, how you show up to a conversation in good faith, the way you speak your mind but intentionally create space for others to do the same. The best way to do this is to choose a concrete example, a conversation that left a big impact on you and is representative of the types of conversations you tend to have with this person. That way, you don’t bite off more than you can chew in 400 words, you don’t get lost in generalizations or abstract concepts, and you can illustrate the unique qualities you possess that make you a meaningful conversation partner, too.
3. In her July 2009 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?
This option is another prompt that definitely has merit but comes with a caveat. The biggest risk is that, in relaying an experience where someone defined you by a single story, you’re addressing a misconception someone had about you because of an aspect of your identity. Ironically, that means you might spend the essay focusing on that aspect of your identity when the whole point is to show why none of us should be defined by one part of who we are.
Let’s go through a hypothetical to get at this question more clearly. Maybe you’re from the American South, and it bothers you that people jump to conclusions when they learn you grew up in a red state. They treat you like you must be narrow-minded or uneducated, and they ask if you ride a horse to school. Those are unfair assumptions, definitely, and an essay about setting everyone straight by explaining that you have a driver’s license already and highlighting your achievements could be triumphant and funny depending on how you write it. Still, though, this narrows you down to a label, characterizing you primarily by what you are not. This is a completely valid, perhaps wonderful piece of writing about how you’re not what most expect from a Texas girl, but you’re still being distilled into and identified with a category.
The way to do this right is to make sure you push through “the single story” you want to debunk by taking your essay one step further, elaborating on what you are not by revealing what you are. In talking about an experience where someone flattened you through their assumptions or reduced you to one dimension, make sure you include all the things they left out. Recognizing the complexity and full humanity of every person is the real point of Adichie’s talk, and writing this essay with that in mind will allow you to exhibit a rich and compelling portrait of yourself as a multi-faceted applicant.
4. Boston College’s Jesuit mission highlights “the three Be’s”: be attentive, be reflective, be loving – core to Jesuit education (see A Pocket Guide to Jesuit Education). If you could add a fourth “Be,” what would it be and why? How would this new value support your personal development and enrich the BC community?
Prompt #4 has some of the same drawbacks — it’s easy for students to get pedantic or moralizing here and spend more time talking about the virtue they’re hoping to represent with a fourth “Be” than about their plans to better themselves and their community. There’s no need to force a response, so if this prompt doesn’t elicit an authentic response from you, don’t choose it in an attempt to win points with admissions officers. If BC thought that responding to this question is the only way to prove you’d be a good fit for the school and its Jesuit ethos, they wouldn’t give you three other options. An uninspired essay is the worst kind, so don’t waste the opportunity a supplemental essay gives you by submitting something that sounds like it was inauthentic and painful to write.
If you are genuinely fired up about this option, that’s great! Just make sure that you don’t spend the essay explaining your addition or lecturing. Tell a story that shows the importance of this quality; make sure your essay conveys something about you by illuminating why you chose the fourth “Be” that you did; aim to evoke an emotional response in your reader so that they leave with a fuller conception of who you are and why they should root for you. You’re going for maturity, thoughtfulness, and maturity in vibe — avoid coming off like a hall monitor, and you’ll be good.
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’re applying to the HCE program, this is the only prompt that matters as far as you’re concerned. You still only need to write one essay for BC, but there’s no choice involved — this is the question you’re required to answer!
When working with aspiring engineers, they’ve often told us they find this prompt overwhelming and have trouble starting. The key here, as we’ve informed them, is to simplify: the prompt says “societal problems,” but of course it feels impossible to address multiple deeply entrenched, interdependent social issues and your proposed solutions to them with a mere 400 words. Instead, choose one societal problem and identify aspects of the HCE curriculum that are unique to BC’s engineering program and would prepare you to address that one problem. Because multiple factors feed into almost any social injustice or structural dilemma, you’ll be able to talk about a variety of challenges, satisfying that plural “problems” from the prompt while providing a cohesive, complete response.
It’s easier to approach this response by identifying the many underlying causes of nutritional deficiencies and proposing several angles from which to consider and combat hunger and malnourishment, for example, than it is to provide a succinct and complete answer to this question that brings together climate change and maternal health outcomes.
No matter what you choose, though, create a personal connection beforehand. Tell a brief story that establishes why you care about this topic and how you discovered this academic field when seeking solutions. That allows you to grab readers’ attention before segueing into the specifics of HCE and how you’d leverage the resources at BC to make positive social change.
And that’s all, folks — everything you need to know to write a knock-out supplement and complete your BC application!
For personalized essay support from professionals who have been getting students into Boston College for years, contact us today.