We've moved the NELP Application online, and it will be available by clicking the button above!
The real core of the application asks for five little chunks of writing about yourself--you'll get to this about halfway though the application, and you can read below the five questions/prompts you're asked to respond to if you want to start thinking about them now. (The application will ask you to upload a pdf with your answers.)
From the NELP 2021 Application:
In a separate document, please respond to items A through E below, labeling each part of your Statement of Purpose A-E to correspond with these questions. Your answers all together should probably yield a total of between three and five double-spaced pages of writing. You can upload this document as a pdf file at the bottom of this page.
What are we looking for in your responses? Mostly we’re trying to get a detailed, specific picture of what makes you complicated, interesting, and distinctive. We are particularly interested in what excites you intellectually and creatively. We want to know what you’re curious about. We want to know how you express yourself creatively. We want to know how you relate to the world around you and the people and things in it. Above all, we want to see you—as a complicated and singular person—begin to appear on the page. The most illuminating responses to these questions are usually candid, inquisitive, and direct—and they move well beyond the predictable responses that some people might give in response to these questions and topics.
A. What are the most important ideas or values at play when you make big decisions? What really drives your decision-making? What are you dedicated to? What sets your trajectory from Point A to Point B, and how does this affect how you work as a student, community member, reader, and/or thinker?
B. What’s the strangest thing—maybe one of the strangest things—you believe? Why do you believe it?
C. For most students, the NELP experience, while rewarding and fun, includes adversity of various kinds: exposure to cold and wet weather, the hard and physical work of maintaining camp, strenuous backpacking, occasional interpersonal conflicts, being away from friends and family and separated from technologies like cell phones and email—not to mention the academic rigor of a program that packs NINE credits of upper-level work into 45 days. How does challenge, pressure, and even discomfort work in your mind, heart, and/ or life? How is it or how has it been a part of the way you learn? Please be honest and detailed about this, and give us an example.
D. Tell us about something you’ve read recently that has been meaningful to you. Why was it important?
E. Tell us something else about yourself, something you haven’t yet touched on, that helps define or describe you.
