The Honors Program at McDaniel College is a community of scholars who value deep thinking and exchange of ideas. Accordingly, as part of the application process, we invite you to begin intellectual exchanges with us by choosing one of the following quotations and responding to it in an essay of 250-300 words.
We are seeking to read your own unique reaction to the ideas in the passage, not simply a summary of what you think the quotation is saying. There are no right or wrong answers, and it is fine to address either all or only part of your chosen quotation. We look forward to receiving a piece of work that you are proud to call your own intellectual creation. You should feel free to engage with the quotation in whatever way is meaningful to you; this may be a reaction, a challenge, an explanation of what stands out for you and why, a connection you make to your field of interest, a story that parallels the ideas represented in the passage, a creative spin-off, or any other form of response.
Admission to the program is highly selective.
2022 Freshman Fall Fall
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* Although there is no official requirement for the length of your response, as a general guideline you should aim for 250 – 300 words).
Quotation #1
This quotation is from the commencement address given by President John F. Kennedy at Yale University in 1962.
"For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
Quotation #2
This quotation is from Joseph Meeker’s book The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic, 1992. This book is often regarded as the beginning of the new scholarly field of literary ecology, which compares the biological world with the imagined worlds that humans create in literature.
“If the lesson of ecology is balance and equilibrium, the lesson of comedy is humility and endurance. The comic mode of human behavior represented in literature is the closest art has come to describing man as an adaptive animal. Comedy illustrates that survival depends upon man’s ability to change himself rather than his environment, and upon his ability to accept limitations rather than to curse fate for limiting him. It is a strategy for living which agrees well with the demands of ecological wisdom, and it cannot be ignored as a model for human behavior if man hopes to keep a place for himself among the animals who live according to the comic mode.”
Quotation #3
This text is a true McDaniel College product, a poem written by McDaniel’s own Dr. Kathy Steele Mangan, Professor of English Emerita, and inspired by Dr. Cheng Huang, current Associate Professor of Biology. It was published in Mangan’s book Taproot, 2019.
Differentiation
My friend Cheng, geneticist (how swift-
ly we’re defined by what we do!) explains
his diagram of what he calls cell fate –
the way a single zygote will foreordain
its future functions (muscle, neuron, lens)
by assaying millions of cleavages.
The cell proliferates as it sends
cues to nearby cells, stringing lineages
microbiologists can trace to inquire:
How does one cell adopt one fate and not
another? What part of fate is desire,
I wonder. From what choices are we wrought?
Which divisions make us ourselves, alone
in our own skin, our brain, our blood and bone?
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