David Mabe

Senior Associate Dean of Admissions
(he/him/his)

Home Admissions & Aid Contact Us Find Your Counselor David Mabe

Email: dmabe@xiaoneizhi.com
Text: 540-254-5803
Regions: North Carolina (Coastal, Research Triangle), South Carolina

Short Answer Prompt

To help jumpstart your brainstorming and to demonstrate that we empathize with the challenges you face in applying to college, our staff has published their own responses to our supplemental short-answer prompts. We hope you’ll enjoy learning a bit about us and will feel more comfortable showcasing something new about yourself. Remember, these are optional, and you are asked to submit only one.

Prompt #3 (Max 250 Words or 2-Minute Video)
Reveal to us how your curious mind works by sharing something you spend considerable time thinking or learning about. I don’t go a day without thinking about the Great Filter. It’s wild. Basically, it’s a theory that boils down the development of advanced civilizations (like humankind) to a handful of key moments. For humans to exist as we do today — solving equations, building rockets, making TikToks — these key moments had to go exactly right. Over billions of years, we have eked through a series of tight squeezes. The explosion of single-cell life, the advent of complex organisms, even our learning to use tools or contemplate our own mortality — each of these advancements is so unbelievably unlikely that it boggles the mind. The Great Filter posits that our success is compoundingly rare, and that’s why we seem to be alone in the universe. But the universe is timeless and nearly infinite, right? Surely even hurdles that high have been cleared by someone else, somewhere else. So, the eeriest part of the theory is this: there are filters ahead, too. As hard as it was for life to burst forth from the hot dampness of primeval Earth, there could be something even harder in our future, something that has stunted other prosperous-but-lonely planets like ours. The Great Filter makes me feel small and grateful. Drifting through endless time and space, I’m here typing these words even though I shouldn’t be. And maybe I’m the only one doing it, or maybe there are others like me orbiting distant stars while contemplating the same giant, random, “empty” void. Either way, it’s wild.

Prompt #3 (Max 250 Words or 2-Minute Video)

Reveal to us how your curious mind works by sharing something you spend considerable time thinking or learning about.

I don’t go a day without thinking about the Great Filter. It’s wild. Basically, it’s a theory that boils down the development of advanced civilizations (like humankind) to a handful of key moments. For humans to exist as we do today — solving equations, building rockets, making TikToks — these key moments had to go exactly right.

Over billions of years, we have eked through a series of tight squeezes. The explosion of single-cell life, the advent of complex organisms, even our learning to use tools or contemplate our own mortality — each of these advancements is so unbelievably unlikely that it boggles the mind. The Great Filter posits that our success is compoundingly rare, and that’s why we seem to be alone in the universe.

But the universe is timeless and nearly infinite, right? Surely even hurdles that high have been cleared by someone else, somewhere else. So, the eeriest part of the theory is this: there are filters ahead, too. As hard as it was for life to burst forth from the hot dampness of primeval Earth, there could be something even harder in our future, something that has stunted other prosperous-but-lonely planets like ours.

The Great Filter makes me feel small and grateful. Drifting through endless time and space, I’m here typing these words even though I shouldn’t be. And maybe I’m the only one doing it, or maybe there are others like me orbiting distant stars while contemplating the same giant, random, “empty” void. Either way, it’s wild.

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