Honors College Admissions

You should request a letter of recommendation from two recommenders who can comment meaningfully on your academic qualifications, leadership abilities, and character strengths. Recommendation letters need to be emailed to honors@mc.edu. Additional information for recommendation letter writers can be found here.

You should submit a resume of no more than two pages that highlights your academic and extracurricular involvement and achievements during high school.

You should respond to both of the following prompts in a separate essay of no more than 700 words. Please fit onto a single page and at the end of the essay list your total word count. Your essays will be evaluated based on a combination of content, organization, creativity, and substance.

1. The society in which we find ourselves over the past number of decades has trended away from a generative nature, and progressively more toward a consumptive and egocentric mode of operation. Additionally, studies reveal that society is trending ever increasingly toward markers of despair. In such a society, what do you see as the role of gratitude? Where do you believe gratitude comes from? How might gratitude be an antidote to despair?
2. In the Christian worldview, two of humankind’s original main roles were to rightly relate with God, and to cultivate and steward the world in which they were placed. In Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, the main character remarks about a group of students stating “They went to school, apparently, to learn to say over and over again, regardless of where they were, what had already been said too often. They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works – although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself.” Considering this statement from Jayber Crow, please reflect upon the statement by pastor Goodie Bell:  “In order to be good stewards, we must reclaim our identity as creatures.” Elaborate on what you see as the relationship between “His works”, “our identity as creatures”, and being “good stewards”.