As a trained English teacher who has continued to keep a foot in the classroom throughout my career, I’ve long struggled with verb forms in student essays. In particular, when providing guidance to students on supplemental essays -- especially those of the “why us?” variety that so many universities request -- there seem to be two major schools of thought: first, there are those who employ the future tense (indicative mood), and, second, there are those who use the subjunctive mood. 

Consider the following sentence from a recent essay I reviewed with a student. She presented it as such:

Studying under a world class faculty will give me the opportunity to engage with the leading minds in the field. 

This sentence is one that employs the future tense, indicative mood whereas it would seem that it should employ the subjunctive mood because it is considering the hypothetical situation of his being admitted and enrolling at this university. In that case then, it could be argued that the sentence should be:

Studying under a world class faculty would give me the opportunity to engage with the leading minds in the field. 

Of course, I would love for all of my students to know when and how to apply the appropriate grammatical structures, but I wonder whether some of these choices students are making in these regards have to do with more intentional or responsive considerations. 

It might be argued that the indicative mood sounds more confident, almost as if it is inevitable that they will be admitted, which is what my student argued, so is this a potential tactic of argumentation or style rather than merely grammatical accuracy? While not technically correct as students write about futures in which they enroll at a particular university (a hypothetical), employing the indicative mood could convey a greater sense of confidence to an envisioned admissions reader. For example, the sentence opener “When I enroll at Bowdoin, I will…” (future) could be seen to reflect a greater amount of faith that this future will happen than the more grammatically appropriate, “If I were to enroll at Bowdoin, I would…” 

Additionally, in line with one criticism of some admissions writing, it also might be considered that word count could help make this decision? The subjunctive can often contain more words. 

In any case, deep, grammatical thoughts on a Thursday!