• 1990s
• 1995-1996
• 1996-1997
• 1997-1998
• 1998-1999
• 1999-2000
• 2000s
• 2001-2002
• 2003-2004
• 2004-2005
• 2005-2006
• 2006-2007
• 2007-2008
• 2008-2009
• 2009-2010
• 2010s
• 2010-2011
• 2011-2012
• 2012-2013
• 2013-2014
• 2014-2015
• 2015-2016
• 2016-2017
• 2017-2018
• 2018-2019
• 2019-2020
• 2020s
• 2020-2021
• 2021-2022
• 2022-2023
• 2023-2024
• 2024-2025
• Unknown Year

1990s

1995-1996

1. Modern improvisational comedy originated in Hyde Park on the campus of the University of Chicago with the Compass Players. Here is a chance to play an improve game yourself (and to complete a college application in the bargain). Improvise a story that meets all of the following requirements,
1. Your story must begin with the sentence, "I never knew they could do that with ordinary string," and it must have an ending other than death.
2. Its characters must not have superpowers.
3. It should describe a daring rescue from some dilemma, whether physical, intellectual, interpersonal, or moral.
4. You have to mention the University of Chicago, but please, no accounts of an erstwhile high school student applying to the University - this is fiction, not autobiography.
5. These items must be included : a rubber ball, a domesticated animal, the name of a famous, and the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Please keep your narrative under five pages. (It's supposed to be short story)

1996-1997

1. As some of you know, modern improvisational comedy originated in Hyde Park on the campus of the University of Chicago with the Compass Players. Here is a chance to play an improve game yourself (and to complete a college application in the bargain). Construct a dialogue or story that meets the following requirements,
1. Your story should involve two people meeting at the frozen food section of a supermarket, and incorporate your favorite country music song. (We know you have one!)
2. Your story must include in its narrative or dialogue each of these four lines taken from pages 1, 13, 31, and 107 of the novel Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.
1. When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things.
2. How true is that words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean.
3. Ah the long winter in Chicago --- the lights, the crowd, the amusement! This was a great pleasing metropolis after all.
4. Several times, their eyes accidentally met, and then there poured into hers such a flood of feeling as she had never before experienced.
3. You may arrange the required lines in any order and style you like. All we ask is that you please keep the story to no more than three pages.

Note: The intrepid among you may want to strike out on your own. Tell us what book other than Sister Carrie you have chosen and pick one line each from pages 1, 13, 31, and 107. Have fun! (We insist!)

1997-1998

1. Modern improvisational comedy originated in Hyde Park on the campus of the University of Chicago with the Compass Players. Some of the Players went on to form the Second City comedy troupe, precursor to the Saturday Night Live show on TV. With this essay option we invite you to test your own improvisational powers by putting together a story, play, or dialogue that meets all of the following requirements,
1. You must begin with the sentence, "Many years later, he remembered his first experience with ice."
2. All five senses - sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell - have to figure in the plot.
3. You have to mention the University of Chicago, but please, no accounts of an erstwhile high school student applying to the University - this is fiction, not autobiography.
4. These items must be included : a new pair of socks, a historical landmark, a spork (the combination spoon and fork frequently seen among airline flatware), a domesticated animal, and the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Have fun, and try to keep your brilliance and wit to three pages.

2. Elvis is alive! Okay, maybe not, but here in the Office of College Admissions we are persuaded that current Elvis sightings in highway rest areas, grocery stores, and laundromats are part of a wider conspiracy involving five of the following : the metric system, the Mall of America, the crash of the Hindenburg, Heisenberg'' uncertainty principle, lint, J.D. Salinger, and wax fruit. Help us get to the bottom of this evil plot by constructing your own theory of how and why five of these items and events are related. Your narrative may take any form you like, but try to keep your theory to under two pages.

1998-1999

1. Names have a mysterious reality of their own. We may well feel an unexpected kinship with someone who shares our name or may feel uneasy at the thought that our name is not as much our own as we imagined. Most of us do not choose our names; they come to us unbidden, sometimes with ungainly sounds and spellings, complicated family histories, allusions to people we never knew. Sometimes we have to make our peace with them, sometimes we bask in our name's associations. Ruminate on names and naming, your name, and your name's relationship to you.
2. The late William Burroughs once wrote that "language is a virus from outer space." He's right, of course, and this leaves us wondering what else came here with it. Could this finally explain such improbable features of modern life as the Federal Tax Code, non-dairy creamer, Dennis Rodman, and the art of mime? Name something that you assert cannot have originated any other way. Offer a thorough defense of your hypothesis for extraterrestrial origins, including alternate explanations and reasons for eliminating them from consideration.

1999-2000

1. Landscape is a slippery word. It means more than scenery painting, a pleasant rural vista, or ornamental planting around a country house. It means shaped land, land modified for permanent human occupation, for dwelling, agriculture, manufacturing, government, worship, and for pleasure. —John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580–1845

In light of Stilgoe’s definition of landscape, think about the landscape (or cityscape) in which you live. In an essay, tell us how this landscape defines and is defined by you and your community. How does it reflect the society in which you live? How has the landscape changed or been altered since you’ve lived in it?

2. Having observed the recent success of television shows about young people, the University of Chicago has decided to pitch a pilot proposal to the networks. That is as much as we are sure of now, so we are taking this opportunity to get help from the intended audience: you.

In the tradition of the University of Chicago school of improvisation and its offshoot, the Second City comedy troupe, help us out by creating a story for your proposal. Remember that this is Chicago, so it is better to err on the side of intellectual pretension than on the side of pure silliness. Please bear in mind that Felicity has already been done.

Keep your proposal to two or three pages. We know that Aristotle is out of fashion, but including a beginning, middle, and end might help you structure the story.

3. The late–eighteenth-century popular philosopher and cultural critic Georg Lichtenberg wrote, “Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc. . . . at times before they’re worn out and at times—and this is the worst of all—before we have new ones.”

Write an essay about something you have outgrown, perhaps before you had a replacement—a friend, a political philosophy, a favorite author, or anything that has had an influence on you. What, if anything, has taken its place?

2000s

2001-2002

1. Each new incarnation of Survivor makes us wonder about this thing called television and these creatures called human beings. But we want to set aside those big questions and ask you to play a bit for our shared enjoyment. Use your imagination to produce a version of Chicago Survivor. Use as your location the lush Gothic campus, laboratories, libraries, gymnasia, and residence halls of a Major American University. Establish a setting, make your rules, identify some players (select from all of human history), and take us through a trial and its results. Profundity will be rewarded and true wit will certainly count in your favor, but too much intimate familiarity with the actual show may be a strike against you.
2. I often think how lucky I was to have been an only child. I had enough business sense, even at an early age, to realize that had I had a number of brothers and sisters, I would have been lucky to get a share of a single family pony, instead of which I was, for a short time, the proud possessor of three.

—by Iris Kellett of County Kildare, Ireland

Sibling relationships are among the most complicated and meaningful in our lives, as any number of literary works (e.g., Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, J. D. Salinger's Franny & Zooey, Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother) attest. Compose an essay about your relationship with one or more of your siblings, or about other relationships between brothers and sisters. If you are an only child, you may wish to elaborate on the perspective of Ms. Kellett, telling us about how you felt to have been the only child—rich in ponies or love, bereft of the siblings you imagine would have enriched your life—or giving some other response that can only be your own.

3. In a pivotal scene of a recent American film, a videographer—a dark and mysterious teen-aged character—records a plastic bag blowing in the wind. He ruminates on the elusive nature of truth and beauty, and suggests that beauty is everywhere—often in the most unlikely places and in the quirky details of things. What is something that you love because it reflects a kind of idiosyncratic beauty—the uneven features of a mutt you adopted at the pound, a drinking glass with an interesting flaw, the feather boa you found in the Wal-Mart parking lot? These things can reveal (or conceal) our identity; so describe something that tells us who you are (or aren't).

2003-2004

1. Storytelling is an integral part of the formation of our identities. The stories that our parents and our communities tell us about themselves and the world form our first map of the universe. At some point, we begin to tell our own stories to ourselves and to others. Tell us a story you tell. Your story does not have to be either true or a story you would think to tell anyone but yourself; but the story must be your own, and its telling should have significance to you. Your story should also be significant to a listener who might tell a story about you.
2. How do you feel about Wednesday?
3. The Sudanese author Tayeb Salih wrote, “Turning to left and right, I found I was halfway between north and south. I was unable to continue, unable to return.” If he is unable to choose, the character faces the threat of being frozen in place or torn between two states. Describe a halfway point in your life: a moment between your own kind of ‘north’ and ‘south.’ Tell us about your choice, your inability to choose, or perhaps your folly in thinking there was ever a choice to be made.
4. In his book Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll imagines a fantastic, nonsensical world for Alice after she walks through a misty mirror. Physicist Stephen Hawking has speculated that a black hole, not a looking glass, might someday take us to many parallel universes. Three years ago, The Matrix mixed a bit of science with Carroll’s fiction to create Thomas Anderson, a contemporary Alice who discovers that the ‘real’ world is in fact a computer-generated dream. Explore the idea of a parallel world through the eyes of a philosopher, an artist, a theologian, a psychologist, or a scientist, or from any perspective you choose. How would you find this alternate reality? Who or what would take you there (by choice or by accident)? Would you or could you be a different person in each world?

2004-2005

1. One of the very nicest things about life, as Luciano Pavarotti once said, is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating. Pavarotti, in all of his well-fed wisdom, suggests that eating and meals are a separate kind of activity often a break from the work and play of life. Yet food and meals sustain our lives in many ways every day. Tell us about an ordinary food or meal that may seem mundane to the rest of the world but holds special meaning for you. Think about how the food is prepared, packaged, or served and by whom. Do you eat it in a distinctive manner? At a special time? In a certain place or with select company? Most importantly, explain how this everyday food sustains or satisfies you in a way that another food or meal could not.
2. If you could balance on a tightrope, over what landscape would you walk?
3. In his autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela writes, There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. Tell us about an unchanging place to which you have returned. In what way has the place never changed? How does its constancy reveal changes in you?
4. Albert Einstein once said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Propose your own original theory to explain one of the 16 mysteries below. Your theory does not need to be testable or even probable; however, it should provide some laws, principles, and/or causes to explain the facts, phenomena, or existence of one of these mysteries. You can make your theory artistic, scientific, conspiracy-driven, quantum, fanciful, or otherwise ingenious, but be sure it is your own and gives us an impression of how you think about the world.

1. Love

2. Non-Dairy Creamer

3. Sleep and Dreams

4. Gray

5. Crop Circles

6. The Platypus

7. The Beginning of Everything

8. Art

9. Time Travel

10. Language

11. The End of Everything

12. The Roanoke Colony

13. Numbers

14. Mona Lisa's Smile

15. The College Rankings in U.S. News and World Report

16. Consciousness

2005-2006

1. Have you ever walked through the aisles of a warehouse store like Costco or Sam’s Club and wondered who would buy a jar of mustard a foot and a half tall? We’ve bought it, but it didn’t stop us from wondering about other things, like absurd eating contests, impulse buys, excess, unimagined uses for mustard, storage, preservatives, notions of bigness . . . and dozens of other ideas both silly and serious. Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard.
2. People often think of language as a connector, something that brings people together by helping them share experiences, feelings, ideas, etc. We, however, are interested in how language sets people apart. Start with the peculiarities of your own personal language - the voice you use when speaking most intimately to yourself, the vocabulary that spills out when you’re startled, or special phrases and gestures that no one else seems to use or even understand, and tell us how your language makes you unique. You may want to think about subtle riffs or idiosyncrasies based on cadence, rhythm, rhyme, or (mis)pronunciation.
3. “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust,” wrote the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’ We want to hear your thoughts on justice as it relates to this ‘human personality’ that Dr. King mentions.
4. In a book entitled The Mind’s I, by Douglas Hofstadter, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett posed the following problem: Suppose you are an astronaut stranded on Mars whose spaceship had broken down beyond repair. In your disabled craft there is a Teleclone Mark IV teleporter that can swiftly and painlessly dismantle your body, producing a molecule-by-molecule blueprint to be beamed to Earth. There, a Teleclone receiver stocked with the requisite atoms will produce, from the beamed instructions, you—complete with all your memories, thoughts, feelings, and opinions. If you activate the Teleclone Mark IV, which astronaut are you—the one dismantled on Mars or the one produced from a blueprint on Earth? Suppose further that an improved Teleclone Mark V is developed that can obtain its blueprint without destroying the original. Are you then two astronauts at once? If not, which one are you?

2006-2007

1. The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you-

Then, it will be true.

“Theme for English B" by Langston Hughes

Perhaps you recognize this poem. If you do, then your mind has probably moved on to the question the next line poses: "I wonder if it's that simple?" Saying who we are is never simple (read the entire poem if you need evidence of that). Write a truthful page about yourself for us, an audience you do not know - a very tall order. Hughes begins: "I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem. I am the only colored student in my class." That is, each of us is of a certain age and of a particular family background. We have lived somewhere and been schooled. We are each what we feel and see and hear. Begin there and see what happens.

2. University of Chicago alumna and renowned author/critic Susan Sontag said, "The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions." We all have heard serious questions, absurd questions, and seriously absurd questions, some of which cannot be answered without obliterating the very question. Destroy a question with your answer.
3. Means "mind that does not stick."

- Zen Master Shoitsu (1202-80)

4. Superstring theory has revolutionized speculation about the physical world by suggesting that strings play a pivotal role in the universe. Strings, however, always have explained or enriched our lives, from Theseus's escape route from the Labyrinth, to kittens playing with balls of yarn, to the single hair that held the sword above Damocles, to the basic awfulness of string cheese, to the Old Norse tradition that one's life is a thread woven into a tapestry of fate, to the beautiful sounds of the finely tuned string of a violin, to the children's game of cat's cradle, to the concept of stringing someone along. Use the power of string to explain the biggest or the smallest phenomenon.

2007-2008

1. "Don't play what's there, play what's not there." -- Miles Davis (1926-91)
2. In his book Having Everything Right: Essays of Place, Kim Stafford describes the Kwakiutl tribe of British Columbia assigning place-names based on the natural characteristics of a location, the events that took place there, or the feelings that the site instilled. "Where Salmon Gather," "Sound of Dripping Water," and "Where Dzo'noq!wa Cried Out Oh," were among the names the Kwakiutl people assigned to their surroundings. He'lade, translating to "Place Having Everything Right," was of particular meaning, as it was the name universally given to exceptional locations. What is your he'lade?
3. You are hosting a brunch of historical, literary, or other disreputable persons (think: Mad Hatter's Tea Party). What is your menu? Who are your guests? In answering this question, imagine a scenario: We want some exposition, serious or silly, we would accept some dialogue, and we are willing to trust you to respond in such a way that your brain power, your imagination, your sense of taste, and your capacity to tell a story reveal something true about you.
4. The Cartesian coordinate system is a popular method of representing real numbers and is the bane of eighth graders everywhere. Since its introduction by Descartes in 1637, this means of visually characterizing mathematical values has swept the globe, earning a significant role in branches of mathematics such as algebra, geometry, and calculus. Describe yourself as a point or series of points on this axial arrangement. If you are a function, what are you? In which quadrants do you lie? Are x and y enough for you, or do you warrant some love from the z-axis? Be sure to include your domain, range, derivative, and asymptotes, should any apply. Your possibilities are positively and negatively unbounded.

2008-2009

1. “At present, you need to live the question.”—Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from German by Joan M. Burnham.
2. The short film, Powers of Ten, begins with an aerial shot of a couple picnicking in a Chicago park. The camera zooms out 10 meters. It then zooms out again, but the degree of the zoom has increased by a power of 10; the camera is now 100 meters away. It continues to 1,000 meters, then 10,000, and so on, traveling through the solar system, the galaxy and eventually to the edge of the known universe. Here the camera rests, allowing us to examine the vast nothingness of the universe, a black void punctuated sparsely by galaxies so far away they appear as small stars. The narrator comments, “This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception.” Then the camera reverses its journey, zooming in to the picnic, and—in negative powers of 10—to the man’s hand, the cells in his hand, the molecules of DNA within, their atoms, and then the nucleus both “so massive and so small” in the “vast inner space” of the atom.

Zoom in and out on a person, place, event or subject of interest. What becomes clear from far away that you can’t see up close? What intricate structures appear when you move closer? How is the big view related to the small, the emptiness to the richness?

3. Chicago author Nelson Algren said, “A writer does well if in his whole life he can tell the story of one street.” Chicagoans, but not just Chicagoans, have always found something instructive, pleasing and profound in the stories of their block, of Main Street, of Highway 61, of a farm lane, of the Celestial Highway. Tell us the story of a street, path, road—real or imagined or metaphorical.
4. Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab (both national laboratories managed by the University of Chicago) have particle accelerators that smash bits of atoms together at very high energies, allowing particles to emerge that are otherwise not part of the everyday world. These odd beasts—Z bosons, pi mesons, strange quarks—populated the universe seconds after the Big Bang, and allow their observers to glimpse the fabric of the universe.

Put two or three ideas or items in a particle accelerator thought experiment. Smash ‘em up. What emerges? Let us glimpse the secrets of the universe newly revealed.

2009-2010

1. How did you get caught? (Or not caught, as the case may be.)
2. The late-eighteenth-century popular philosopher and cultural critic George Lichtenberg wrote, "Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc. at times before they're worn out and at times-and this is worst of all-before we have new ones." Write an essay about something you have outgrown, perhaps before you had a replacement-a friend, a political philosophy, a favorite author, or anything that has had an influence on you. What, if anything, has taken its place?
3. "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust," wrote the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail." What is "human personality?" Is it obvious what uplifts and what degrades it? Can law be justified on the basis of it? We want to hear your thoughts on justice as it relates to this "human personality."
4. From game theory to Ultimate Frisbee to the great Chicago Scavenger Hunt, we at the University of Chicago take games seriously. We bet you do, too. Even if "just a game," sport, play, and other kinds of games seem to share at the very least an insistence that we take seriously a set of rules entirely peculiar to the circumstance of the game. You might say, in order to play a game we must take it seriously. Think playfully-or play thoughtfully-about games: how they distract us or draw us into the world, create community and competition, tease us and test us with stakes both set apart from and meaningful to everyday life. Don't tell us about The Big Game; rather, tell us about players and games.

2010s

2010-2011

1. Find x.
2. Dog and Cat. Coffee and Tea. Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye. Everyone knows there are two types of people in the world. What are they?
3. Salt, governments, beliefs, and celebrity couples are a few examples of things that can be dissolved. You’ve just been granted the power to dissolve anything: physical, metaphorical, abstract, concrete… you name it. What do you dissolve, and what solvent do you use?
4. “Honesty is the best policy, but honesty won’t get your friend free birthday cake at the diner.” - Overheard in the city of Chicago.

Does society require constant honesty? Why is it (or why is it not) problematic to shift the truth in one’s favor, even if the lie is seemingly harmless to others? If we can be “conveniently honest,” what other virtues might we take more lightly?

2011-2012

1. What does Play-Doh™ have to do with Plato?
2. Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment, Analysis, Conclusion; since the 17th century, the scientific method has been the generally accepted way to investigate, explore, and acquire new knowledge. The actual process of intellectual discovery, however, is rarely so simple or objective. The human mind often leaps from observation to conclusion with ease, rushes headlong into hypothesis-less experiments, or dwells on the analysis, refusing to conclude.

Tell us about your non-scientific method. (Diagrams, graphs, and/or visual aids allowed within your essay.)

3. Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, “Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it.” Give us your guess.
4. While working at the Raytheon Company, Percy Spencer noticed that standing in front of a magnetron (used to generate microwave radio signals) caused a chocolate bar in his pocket to melt. He then placed a bowl of corn in front of the device, and soon it was popping all over the room. A couple of years later, Raytheon was selling the first commercial microwave oven.

Write about a time you found something you weren’t looking for.

5. In the spirit of adventurous inquiry, pose a question of your own. If your prompt is original and thoughtful, then you should have little trouble writing a great essay. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk, and have fun.
6. Don’t write about reverse psychology.

2012-2013

1. “A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.” –Oscar Wilde.

Othello and Iago. Dorothy and the Wicked Witch. History and art are full of heroes and their enemies. Tell us about the relationship between you and your arch-nemesis (either real or imagined).

2. Heisenberg claims that you cannot know both the position and momentum of an electron with total certainty. Choose two other concepts that cannot be known simultaneously and discuss the implications. (Do not consider yourself limited to the field of physics).
3. Susan Sontag, AB'51, wrote that “[s]ilence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.” Write about an issue or a situation when you remained silent and “…I [was] eager to escape backward again, to be off to invent a past for the present.“ –The Rose Rabbi by Daniel Stern

Present: pres·ent

Something that is offered, presented, or given as a gift.

Let’s stick with this definition. Unusual presents, accidental presents, metaphorical presents, re-gifted presents, etc. — pick any present you have ever received and invent a past for it.

4. So where is Waldo, really?

2013-2014

1. Winston Churchill believed “a joke is a very serious thing.” From Off-Off Campus’s improvisations to the Shady Dealer humor magazine to the renowned Latke-Hamantash debate, we take humor very seriously here at The University of Chicago (and we have since 1959, when our alums helped found the renowned comedy theater The Second City).

Tell us your favorite joke and try to explain the joke without ruining it.

2. In a famous quote by José Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher proclaims, “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia” (1914). José Quintans, master of the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, sees it another way: “Yo soy yo y mi microbioma” (2012).

You are you and your..?

3. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.– Don DeLillo, Libra. What is history, who are “they,” and what aren’t they telling us?
4. The mantis shrimp can perceive both polarized light and multispectral images; they have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom. Human eyes have color receptors for three colors (red, green, and blue); the mantis shrimp has receptors for sixteen types of color, enabling them to see a spectrum far beyond the capacity of the human brain. Seriously, how cool is the mantis shrimp: http://www.mantisshrimp.uchicago.edu What might they be able to see that we cannot?

What are we missing?

5. How are apples and oranges supposed to be compared? Possible answers involve, but are not limited to, statistics, chemistry, physics, linguistics, and philosophy.

2014-2015

1. What’s so odd about odd numbers?
2. In French, there is no difference between “conscience” and “consciousness”. In Japanese, there is a word that specifically refers to the splittable wooden chopsticks you get at restaurants. The German word “fremdschämen” encapsulates the feeling you get when you’re embarrassed on behalf of someone else. All of these require explanation in order to properly communicate their meaning, and are, to varying degrees, untranslatable. Choose a word, tell us what it means, and then explain why it cannot (or should not) be translated from its original language.
3. Little pigs, french hens, a family of bears. Blind mice, musketeers, the Fates. Parts of an atom, laws of thought, a guideline for composition. Omne trium perfectum? Create your own group of threes, and describe why and how they fit together.
4. Were pH an expression of personality, what would be your pH and why? (Feel free to respond acidly! Do not be neutral, for that is base!)
5. A neon installation by the artist Jeppe Hein in UChicago’s Charles M. Harper Center asks this question for us: “Why are you here and not somewhere else?” (There are many potential values of “here”, but we already know you’re “here” to apply to the University of Chicago; pick any “here” besides that one).

2015-2016

1. Orange is the new black, fifty’s the new thirty, comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll, ____ is the new ____. What’s in, what’s out, and why is it being replaced?
2. “I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.” –Maxine Hong Kingston. What paradoxes do you live with?
3. Joan of Arkansas. Queen Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Babe Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Mash up a historical figure with a new time period, environment, location, or occupation, and tell us their story.
4. “Art is either plagiarism or revolution.” –Paul Gauguin. What is your “art”? Is it plagiarism or revolution?
5. Rerhceseras say it’s siltl plisbsoe to raed txet wtih olny the frist and lsat ltteres in palce. This is beaucse the hamun mnid can fnid oderr in dorsdier. Give us your best example of finding order in disorder. (For your reader’s sake, please use full sentences with conventional spelling).

2016-2017

1. What is square one, and can you actually go back to it?
2. Once, renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg said: ‘There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.’ Whether it’s Georges Seurat’s pointillism in ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,’ the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls, quantum physics, or any other field of your choosing, when can the parts be separated from the whole and when can they not?
3. The ball is in your court — a penny for your thoughts, but say it, don’t spray it. So long as you don’t bite off more than you can chew, beat around the bush, or cut corners, writing this essay should be a piece of cake. Create your own idiom, and tell us its origin — you know, the whole nine yards. P.S.: A picture is worth a thousand words.
4. Alice falls down the rabbit hole. Milo drives through the tollbooth. Dorothy is swept up in the tornado. Neo takes the red pill. Don’t tell us about another world you’ve imagined, heard about, or created. Rather, tell us about its portal. Sure, some people think of the University of Chicago as a portal to their future, but please choose another portal to write about.
5. Vestigiality refers to genetically determined structures or attributes that have apparently lost most or all of their ancestral function, but have been retained during the process of evolution. In humans, for instance, the appendix is thought to be a vestigial structure. Describe something vestigial (real or imagined) and provide an explanation for its existence.

2017-2018

1. ‘The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.’ – Joseph Joubert

Sometimes, people talk a lot about popular subjects to assure ‘victory’ in conversation or understanding, and leave behind topics of less popularity, but great personal or intellectual importance. What do you think is important but under-discussed?

2. Due to a series of clerical errors, there is exactly one typo (an extra letter, a removed letter, or an altered letter) in the name of every department at the University of Chicago. Oops! Describe your new intended major. Why are you interested in it and what courses or areas of focus within it might you want to explore? Potential options include Commuter Science, Bromance Languages and Literatures, Pundamentals: Issues and Texts, Ant History… a full list of unmodified majors ready for your editor’s eye is available here: https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/academics/majors-minors.
3. Earth. Fire. Wind. Water. Heart! Captain Planet supposes that the world is made up of these five elements. We’re familiar with the previously-noted set and with actual elements like hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, but select and explain another small group of things (say, under five) that you believe compose our world.
4. The late New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham once said, ‘Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life. I don’t think you could do away with it. It would be like doing away with civilization.’ Tell us about your ‘armor.’
5. Fans of the movie Sharknado say that they enjoy it because ‘it’s so bad, it’s good.’ Certain automobile owners prefer classic cars because they ‘have more character.’ And recently, vinyl record sales have skyrocketed because it is perceived that they have a warmer, fuller sound. Discuss something that you love not in spite of but rather due to its quirks or imperfections.

2018-2019

1. In 2015, the city of Melbourne, Australia created a “tree-mail” service, in which all of the trees in the city received an email address so that residents could report any tree-related issues. As an unexpected result, people began to email their favorite trees sweet and occasionally humorous letters. Imagine this has been expanded to any object (tree or otherwise) in the world, and share with us the letter you’d send to your favorite.
2. You’re on a voyage in the thirteenth century, sailing across the tempestuous seas. What if, suddenly, you fell off the edge of the Earth?
3. The word floccinaucinihilipilification is the act or habit of describing or regarding something as unimportant or of having no value. It originated in the mid-18th century from the Latin words “floccus,” “naucum,” “nihilum,” and “pilus”—all words meaning “of little use.” Coin your own word using parts from any language you choose, tell us its meaning, and describe the plausible (if only to you) scenarios in which it would be most appropriately used.
4. Lost your keys? Alohomora. Noisy roommate? Quietus. Feel the need to shatter windows for some reason? Finestra. Create your own spell, charm, jinx, or other means for magical mayhem. How is it enacted? Is there an incantation? Does it involve a potion or other magical object? If so, what’s in it or what is it? What does it do?
5. Imagine you’ve struck a deal with the Dean of Admissions himself, Dean Nondorf. It goes as follows: you’re guaranteed admission to the University of Chicago regardless of any circumstances that arise. This bond is grounded on the condition that you’ll obtain a blank, 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, and draw, write, sketch, shade, stencil, paint etc., anything and everything you want on it; your only limitations will be the boundaries of both sides on the single page. Now the catch… your submission, for the rest of your life, will always be the first thing anyone you meet for the first time will see. Whether it’s at a job interview, a blind date, arrival at your first Humanities class, before you even say, “hey,” they’ll already have seen your page, and formulated that first impression. Show us your page. What’s on it, and why? If your piece is largely or exclusively visual, please make sure to share a creator’s accompanying statement of at least 300 words, which we will happily allow to be on its own, separate page.

(PS: This is a creative thought experiment, and selecting this essay prompt does not guarantee your admission to UChicago.)

2019-2020

1. Cats have nine lives, Pac-Man has 3 lives, and radioactive isotopes have half-lives. How many lives does something else—conceptual or actual—have, and why?
2. If there’s a limited amount of matter in the universe, how can Olive Garden (along with other restaurants and their concepts of food infinity) offer truly unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks? Explain this using any method of analysis you wish—physics, biology, economics, history, theology… the options, as you can tell, are endless.
3. A hot dog might be a sandwich, and cereal might be a soup, but is a __ a __?
4. “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” – Jessamyn West
5. UChicago has international campus centers around the world, but we don’t have any interplanetary, interstellar, or interdimensional campuses… yet! Propose a spot in time or space, in this or any universe, for a new UChicago campus. What types of courses would be taught at this site? What cultural experiences await students who study there?
6. “Don’t be afraid to pick past prompts! I liked some of the ones from previous years more than those made newly available for my year. Also, don’t worry about the ‘correct’ way to interpret a question. If there exists a correct way to interpret the prompt I chose, it certainly was not my answer.”

2020s

2020-2021

1. Who does Sally sell her seashells to? How much wood can a woodchuck really chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Pick a favorite tongue twister (either originally in English or translated from another language) and consider a resolution to its conundrum using the method of your choice. Math, philosophy, linguistics... it's all up to you (or your woodchuck).
2. What can actually be divided by zero?
3. The seven liberal arts in antiquity consisted of the Quadrivium — astronomy, mathematics, geometry, and music — and the Trivium — rhetoric, grammar, and logic. Describe your own take on the Quadrivium or the Trivium. What do you think is essential for everyone to know?
4. Subway maps, evolutionary trees, Lewis diagrams. Each of these schematics tells the relationships and stories of their component parts. Reimagine a map, diagram, or chart. If your work is largely or exclusively visual, please include a cartographer's key of at least 300 words to help us best understand your creation.
5. "Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" - Eleanor Roosevelt. Misattribute a famous quote and explore the implications of doing so.
6. Engineer George de Mestral got frustrated with burrs stuck to his dog’s fur and applied the same mechanic to create Velcro. Scientist Percy Lebaron Spencer found a melted chocolate bar in his magnetron lab and discovered microwave cooking. Dye-works owner Jean Baptiste Jolly found his tablecloth clean after a kerosene lamp was knocked over on it, consequently shaping the future of dry cleaning. Describe a creative or interesting solution, and then find the problem that it solves.

2021-2022

1. What if the moon were made of cheese? Or Neptune made of soap? Pick a celestial object, reimagine its material composition, and explore the implications. Feel free to explore the realms of physics, philosophy, fantasy…the sky is the limit!
2. What’s so easy about pie?
3. In Homer’s Iliad, Helen had a “face that launched a thousand ships.” A millihelen, then, measures the beauty needed to launch one ship. The Sagan unit is used to denote any large quantity (in place of “billions and billions”). A New York Minute measures the period of time between a traffic light turning green and the cab behind you honking. Invent a new unit of measurement. How is it derived? How is it used? What are its equivalents?
4. "There is no such thing as a new idea" - Mark Twain. Are any pieces of art, literature, philosophy, or technology truly original, or just a different combination of old ideas? Pick something, anything (besides yourself), and explain why it is, or is not, original.
5. It's said that history repeats itself. But what about other disciplines? Choose another field (chemistry, philosophy, etc.) and explain how it repeats itself. Explain how it repeats itself.

2022-2023

1. Was it a cat I saw? Yo-no-na-ka, ho-ka-ho-ka na-no-yo (Japanese for “the world is a warm place”). Może jutro ta dama da tortu jeżom (Polish for “maybe tomorrow that lady will give a cake to the hedgehogs”). Share a palindrome in any language, and give it a backstory.
2. What advice would a wisdom tooth have?
3. You are on an expedition to found a colony on Mars, when from a nearby crater, a group of Martians suddenly emerges. They seem eager to communicate, but they're the impatient kind and demand you represent the human race in one song, image, memory, proof, or other idea. What do you share with them to show that humanity is worth their time?
4. UChicago has been affiliated with over 90 Nobel laureates. But, why should economics, physics, and peace get all the glory? You are tasked with creating a new category for the Nobel Prize. Explain what it would be, why you chose your specific category, and the criteria necessary to achieve this accomplishment.
5. Genghis Khan with an F1 racecar. George Washington with a SuperSoaker. Emperor Nero with a toaster. Leonardo da Vinci with a Furby. If you could give any historical figure any piece of technology, who and what would it be, and why do you think they’d work so well together?

2023-2024

1. Exponents and square roots, pencils and erasers, beta decay and electron capture. Name two things that undo each other and explain why both are necessary.
2. “Where have all the flowers gone?” – Pete Seeger. Pick a question from a song title or lyric and give it your best answer.
3. “Vlog,” “Labradoodle,” and “Fauxmage.” Language is filled with portmanteaus. Create a new portmanteau and explain why those two things are a “patch” (perfect match).
4. A jellyfish is not a fish. Cat burglars don’t burgle cats. Rhode Island is not an island. Write an essay about some other misnomer, and either come up with and defend a new name for it or explain why its inaccurate name should be kept.
5. Despite their origins in the Gupta Empire of India or Ancient Egypt, games like chess or bowling remain widely enjoyed today. What modern game do you believe will withstand the test of time, and why?
6. There are unwritten rules that everyone follows or has heard at least once in their life. But of course, some rules should be broken or updated. What is an unwritten rule that you wish didn’t exist? (Our custom is to have five new prompts each year, but this year we decided to break with tradition. Enjoy!)

2024-2025

1. We’re all familiar with green-eyed envy or feeling blue, but what about being “caught purple-handed”? Or “tickled orange”? Give an old color-infused expression a new hue and tell us what it represents.
2. "Ah, but I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now” – Bob Dylan. In what ways do we become younger as we get older?
3. Pluto, the demoted planet. Ophiuchus, the thirteenth Zodiac. Andy Murray, the fourth to tennis's Big Three. Every grouping has something that doesn’t quite fit in. Tell us about a group and its unofficial member, why (or why not) should it be excluded?
4. "Daddy-o", "Far Out", "Gnarly": the list of slang terms goes on and on. Sadly, most of these aren’t so "fly" anymore – “as if!” Name an outdated slang from any decade or language that you'd bring back and explain why you totally “dig it.”
5. How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? What is the total length of chalk used by UChicago professors in a year? How many pages of books are in the Regenstein Library? These questions are among a class of estimation problems named after University of Chicago physicist Enrico Fermi. Create your own Fermi estimation problem, give it your best answer, and show us how you got there.

Unknown Year

1. For a Chinese Bureaucrat in imperial times, a citizen of ancient Rome, a South Sea Islander, or an Onondaga Clan mother among the Iroquois, precise knowledge of one's descent from an ancestor was essential for understanding his or her role in society. However, in the modern United States, it is possible to have a role in society with little or no knowledge of one's ancestors.

Write an essay about one or more of your ancestors and try to imagine what it means that you and this ancestor are kin. Alternatively, what does it mean that you, like some of us, are without knowable ancestors or that you feel no meaningful connection to those ancestors whom you do know?

2. There are many kinds of times : geological, biological, or astronomical time, for example, and human time in its countless varieties including springtime, periods of grief, musical measures, computing time, epochs in history, game time, or party time. Mechanisms for keeping time have included springs and gears, water clocks, and calendars of every sort - solar and lunar, and even among the Andaman Islanders, a calendar of scent based on the blossoming of fragrant plants.

Write an essay about time. You may approach this essay as a poet -essayist who tries to capture the qualities of our human experience in time, as a historian, as a religious believer, or perhaps as a philosopher. You may even wish to invent a new measure of time. Feel to be serious or fanciful.

3. The Kinaaldá ceremony marks the transition from childhood to adulthood for a Navajo girl. Over the course of four nights and five days, the girl must prove herself by completing a series of tasks patterned on the career of the goddess, Changing Woman. Throughout out the ritual, the initiate is repeatedly massaged by older women of good character, for tradition states that at the time of her initiation, a girl's body should become soft again as it was at birth. In that way can she be totally receptive to the hands, minds, and speech of those who instruct her in the ways of life as an adult member of the community.

In many cultures the transition from childhood to adulthood is marked by a formal religious ceremony rich in meaning for its participants. But in modern industrial societies there is no ritual or religious event to mark the transition, or else the observance pales in comparison to what was once a crucial event in a person's life. Does this mean that after thousands of years of practicing ceremony and ritual, initiation into adulthood is no longer necessary? Does it mean that we experience initiation in different, subtle ways? Has something been lost because we are no longer formally initiated into adult life? What exactly does it mean to come of age today?

4. What is something that you love because it reflects a kind of idiosyncratic beauty?
5. UChicago professor W. J. T. Mitchell entitled his 2005 book What Do Pictures Want? Describe a picture, and explore what it wants.