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Letter of Motivation

Prospective Students stripe

LAS Application – Letter of Motivation Guideline

The letter of motivation is an important part of your LAS application. It is your opportunity to share what motivates you to study LAS in Freiburg and what drives your desire to learn about the world. And it gives us the opportunity to get to know you a bit better as a person and young scholar – beyond your academic achievements and grades.

The letter of motivation must be no longer than 500 words and written in English. As stated in the Admissions Regulations, your motivation letter will be evaluated according to the following three criteria:

  1. Convincing presentation of your own study interests regarding the contents of the LAS study program,
  2. structured and clear writing, and
  3. formal correctness and spelling.


Keep in mind that you do not need to present yourself as the perfect candidate – nobody is. Most of all, we advise you to be honest with yourself and with us. We encourage you to use the letter as an exercise in finding out what you want learn and how studying LAS in its various facets at UCF is related to this.

While you are free to structure your letter any way you like, we kindly ask you to address the following points (the suggested length is just that: a suggestion):

  1. What is your understanding of an interdisciplinary Liberal Arts and Sciences education? (50 words)
  2. Why do you want to study LAS in Freiburg? (50-100 words)
  3. Why and what do you want to learn? Since LAS is about tackling complex challenges, you should tell us about intellectual or academic questions that you find particularly interesting or inspiring. (50-100 words)
  4. How do these interests relate to the LAS Core and to one of the LAS Majors? (50-100 words)
  5. How does your interest in specific parts of the LAS program in Freiburg relate to your previous experiences (e.g. stays abroad, internships, school projects) or prior achievements? (50-100 words)
  6. If you have interests and ideas for which you think LAS would be a great starting point, these should be mentioned in the letter as well. (50 words)