Write an original essay of about 600 words (within 4,000 characters) responding

Write an original essay of about 600 words (within 4,000 characters) responding to one of the
following questions. Please indicate, by writing the question number, which one you are
answering. Use new paragraphs where appropriate to clearly present your thinking; ample space
is provided.
Your essay should give us some insight into you and your thought processes—and therefore
whether you are a good fit for NUS College. Thus, your essay should be your own work. Note that
the National University of Singapore expects academic integrity of all its students (including
prospective students); you can find guidelines on what constitutes plagiarism (including the use
of generative Artificial Intelligence) here. Not only does using AI constitute plagiarism, but doing
so results in essays that we consider generic and uncommitted, and unable to give us insights
into you and your thinking processes. We know this from our rigorous testing of these questions.
In the next section, you will have to affirm that your responses are your own, or declare the help
you have received.
Not only should your essay be original, but we urge you not to reuse essays you have written for
other occasions and purposes.
All the questions typically ask you to:
demonstrate how you think, about a specific subject or example;
and therefore, more generally, how you think thinking works.
You will have to provide the example, which can come from anywhere (pop culture, everyday life,
the academic realm) and from any discipline (whether the humanities, social sciences, sciences,
etc). If you do choose a technical subject, you should write about it using more generalist
language. On the whole, you should assume an intelligent but non-specialist audience. Because
we also want to know about you and your interests, you should use a personal and individualized
example. Therefore, your essay may first need to explain or narrate your personal relationship to
your example.
Following your explanation of how you came by your example, we would then like you to be, in
roughly equal measures, analytical and reflective.
Being analytical may require you to consider various facets of an issue, but it usually
means that, overall, you take a firm stance, and have a clear, reasoned, committed, and
distinct view and argument.
Being reflective means that you are able to carefully draw some larger conclusions that go
beyond the personal, or that you consider the status of your own analysis.