You can access the NELP application by clicking the green button above.
The heart of the NELP application is the Statement of Purpose. For ease of reference, the questions that make up the Statement of Purpose are included here as well:
A. What’s something that you’ve recently been curious about (interested in, obsessed with, gone way down the rabbit hole on...) and decided to learn more about? You can write about anything here—your new knitting hobby, a house of worship you recently walked into, 19th century French poetry, a mysterious stranger, an obscure YouTube channel, tarot cards, astrophysics, sports betting, whatever. What interests you about this thing, and what does this specific interest (and maybe the way you've approached it) potentially reveal about you?
B. For most students, the NELP experience, while rewarding and fun, includes adversity of various kinds—exposure to cold and wet weather, the hard physical work of maintaining camp, strenuous backpacking, occasional interpersonal conflicts, being away from friends and family and separated from technologies like cell phones, the academic rigor of a program that packs nine credits of upper-level work into 45 days, etc. How does challenge and discomfort play out in your life? How has it been a part of the way you learn? Please be honest and detailed about this, and please give us an example.
C. Tell us about something you’ve read recently that has been meaningful to you—a work of fiction, an article, an essay, a tweet, a psalm, a book of poems…. Why was it important to you?
D. What’s one of the strangest things you believe? Why do you believe it?
E. Tell us something else about yourself, something you haven’t yet touched on, that helps define or describe you and helps bring into focus the unique or strange or funny person you would be in the NELP community.
