Application Information
Admission to the Honors College is competitive for first-year, transfer, and current student applicants. Simply meeting the academic invitation criteria will not guarantee admission. When crafting each class, the Honors College considers program space and applicants’ fit. Selection criteria may include but are not limited to overall fit within the Honors College to create a well-rounded class, content and quality of the Honors essays, academic achievement, academic program of study, and extracurricular, employment, or leadership activities.
Honors Application Activities and Involvement
Applicants are asked to highlight their involvement in up to four extracurricular, employment, service, or leadership activities. We encourage applicants to select activities demonstrating a depth of involvement, highlighting their contributions to the organization, or connecting the activity to their academic or professional goals.
Honors Application Essays
The Honors College application essays allow you to address the admissions committee in your own voice. We have a deep interest in knowing why you are considering joining the Honors College, and your essays will let us better see you as a future scholar in our honors community. The essays will also assess your ability to write critically and effectively, which are key skills for success in the Honors curriculum.
Keep the following in mind:
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Exceptional responses will go above and beyond answering the prompt. They may include and reflect on personal experiences to support the applicant’s desire for Honors membership and demonstrate a researched understanding of the Honors College benefits, values, or program outcomes.
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Your essay should closely examine your ideas about your education and the Auburn Honors College experience.
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Your essay may take creative and intellectual risks but should address and integrate all prompt elements.
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Your essay should give the admissions committee insight into how you think, how you reason, and what you value.
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Be succinct, but make sure you thoroughly address the prompt.
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Proofread your submission. You may want to consider drafting your essays in a Word document first so that you can review and revise if necessary.
2025 First-Year Essay Prompts
Answered by each applicant, 600-word limit
The Honors College aspires to provide Auburn students the means to experience, explore, engage, and elevate their dreams. Describe an academic dream you hope to achieve. How has this dream shaped your educational or professional goals? How will the Honors experience, benefits, and resources help you accomplish this dream? How will you contribute to the community of Honors scholars?
Each applicant will choose one prompt, 600-word limit
- “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” – Albert Einstein. Write about a philosophical or ethical question, scientific theory, literary text, work of art, performance, or something else that piqued your curiosity. What questions has this inspired you to answer? What actions have you taken to become more knowledgeable about the subject? What strategies have you used to address answers that you find unsatisfying?
- Sometimes food gains a seasoning of cultural meanings. People crave hot dogs at a ballpark who might otherwise disdain them. In the 1970s, one company tried to identify their brand with patriotic Americanism using the jingle “Baseball, Hotdogs, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet.” Marcel Proust wrote his seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past (the English title) to probe a whole cultural experience and the idea of involuntary memory, for which the emblematic example early in the first volume was a powerful reaction to the taste of a madeleine (a small cake) that called forth a rush of memories from his childhood. Is there a food in your personal experience or in the larger communities of which you are a part that carries important cultural meaning for you or for your networks? Why? What is involved in such a connection? What meaning could you attribute to it that reaches beyond an individual experience? Be bold and speculative in thinking about what that food connection might embody.
- Describe a time you were faced with a challenge or hardship. What steps did you take to face this challenge? Were you successful? What did you learn from this experience?
