Featured Supplemental Essay Prompt For University of Richmond Applicants:

By the time you graduate from college, there will be jobs that don’t exist today. Describe one of them and how Richmond might prepare you for it. 650 Word Maximum.

Successful Supplemental Essay Example From Our Accepted Alumni Student:

Starting at a young age, my brother and I volunteered at the local soup kitchen cooking breakfast for those in need. We sorted daily donations and then decided on a menu that was possible with the available ingredients. Because we were kids, the kitchen staff liked to have my brother and I bring the plates to the visitors. When I began working at the soup kitchen, I was too young to understand harrowing experiences that many of the regular visitors had experienced.

With every visitor I spoke with, I formed relationships and learned their stories. I constantly volunteer even as I got older and my relationship with the visitors grew. I made sure a meal was packaged for Chris, so he could take it home to his mother who wasn't healthy enough to walk to the soup kitchen.

I know that there are so many families who are not able to purchase food, who are unable to make meals for themselves, or who are not healthy enough to walk to soup kitchens.

A job of the future would be a Food Access Counselor—who is both a helper and a programmer who monitors the movement of artificial intelligence that can serve Food Access Counselors.

Barriers to food access are poverty and food deserts—factors that are prominent, disturbing, and large-scale in the United States today. Food Access Counselors would be able to automate several aspects of getting nourishment to those in need.

First, Food Access Counselors can help companies and restaurants assess whether the food they wish to donate is safe for human consumption. As regulations for donating food are understandably strict, the food access robot could quickly analyze and assess food quality and quantity. Second, Food Access Counselors can automate delivery of food to high-poverty areas and spaces with food deserts and food insecurity. Drones can deliver the food to homes in need.

The position would require a high level of empathy, programming skills, and understanding of underserved people and regions. The human operator of the system would need to contact all food pantries and soup kitchens in the area, restaurants, and companies, to create an inventory list that can continue to be auto-populated with an app. The human operator of the system would also need to contact all individuals in the region to find who is in need of food access service. They would be able to begin by creating a list of individuals by contacting government agencies for those in need, but would also need to conduct community outreach to find families who may not want to document themselves as in need of food assistance.

This future job would hopefully remove shame from asking for nourishment, which every human being deserves.

A University of Richmond education would prepare me for this job of the future, through exploring the Environmental Studies program, the Economics program, or the Global Studies program. I would love to explore the course Introduction to Environmental Studies, which would allow me to understand human behaviors that lead to scarcity. I would love to further my understanding with Environmental Economics, Topics in Environmental Ethics, and Environmental Law and Policy, all of which could help advance my understanding of ethical and legislative constraints on our current societal imbalances. Through Economics and Global Studies courses, I can also investigate how we can reduce food waste, improve access to others, and model our systems after those in countries who succeed in feeding all citizens.

All programs at the University of Richmond embrace an interdisciplinary perspective, which is essential to me and this future role. Learning effective programming skills, community outreach and communications, scientific foundations for human biology and the environment, and foreign language skills, are all important to me. At the University of Richmond, I know that I would be able to become a global citizen who can continue to help others throughout my entire life.