Emory University, located three miles from downtown Atlanta, GA, is a renowned private research institution. Students at Emory receive a diverse and interdisciplinary education, involving applied learning, impactful research, and service. Emory’s accomplished alumni include Carl Hiaasen, Bernice King, Keri Hilson, and Ernie Harwell. Hoping to join their ranks? First, you’ll need to nail your Emory supplemental essays. Let’s dive in.
Emory’s 2025-2026 Prompts
Emory requires applicants to write two short essays. The first essay prompt is required for all applicants. For the second prompt, applicants can choose between four different prompts.
Required Short Essay Question
- What academic areas are you interested in exploring at Emory University and why? (200 words or fewer)
Choose One: Short Essay Questions (150 words or fewer)
- Emory University has a strong commitment to building community. Tell us about a community that you have been part of where your personal participation helped to change or shape the community for the better.
- Reflect on a personal experience where you intentionally expanded your cultural awareness.
- Emory University’s unique mission calls for service to humanity. Share how you might personally contribute to this mission of service to humanity.
- In a scholarly community, differing ideas often collide before they converge. How do you personally navigate disagreement in a way that promotes progress and deepens meaningful dialogue?
General Tips
The Emory supplemental essays must be clear, succinct, and engaging in order to stand out from the crowd. Let’s discuss some ways to promote clarity in your writing.
Read each sentence aloud.
After you’ve completed the first draft of one of your Emory supplemental essays, read it aloud. If you feel comfortable doing so, read it aloud to someone whose opinion you trust. When you read your writing aloud, underline each sentence that you find yourself stumbling over. Such sentences may require simpler wording. Consider whether each sentence connects to the previous sentence, asking your listener for guidance.
Avoid excessive descriptors.
Adjectives, adverbs, adjectival phrases, adverbial phrases… while useful, descriptive language can also bog down your writing. If you use more than one adjective or adverb to modify another word, double-check that none of those descriptive words have overlapping meanings. If they do, you should feel empowered to cut the fluff.
You can also focus on employing verbs that can do the work of both a verb and a descriptor. For instance, instead of writing, “I read the book carefully,” you could write, “I pored over the book.” Furthermore, you may want to avoid using any modifiers with verbs of speech (”say/said,” “ask/asked,” etc.). Modifying verbs of speech often distracts from the speech itself.
Avoid passive voice.
Passive voice is a helpful tool for providing emphasis, but many students overuse it in their college essays. If you focus on using the active voice over the passive voice, your essay will likely require fewer words to communicate the same meaning. Therefore, you’ll have extra words left over to provide more details and reflection.
With those general tips out of the way, let’s dive into the prompts.
Emory Required Short Essay Question
What academic areas are you interested in exploring at Emory University and why? (200 words or fewer)
This is a fairly standard essay question about your academic interests and prospective major(s). That said, notice how the wording of this prompt includes the phrase “at Emory University.” Not only should you name the academic areas that interest you and explain why they interest you, but you should also express how and/or why you wish to pursue these interests are Emory.
In other words, this prompt has a mini “Why Emory?” prompt baked into it. Before answering this question, research the specific academic, co-curricular, and extracurricular opportunities available to students at Emory with the same academic interests as yourself. Then, write a response to this prompt that includes both your personal reasons for pursuing these academic areas, as well as your reasons for pursuing them at Emory specifically.
Choose One: Short Essay Questions (150 words or fewer)
Emory University has a strong commitment to building community. Tell us about a community that you have been part of where your personal participation helped to change or shape the community for the better.
This prompt seeks to understand how the communities you’ve been a part of have shaped the person you are today. Moreover, you are expected to share the positive impacts you’ve made on others. In other words, this prompt is multilayered. Let’s break down what you need to do in order to effectively respond to this prompt:
- Describe one community you have been a part of.
- Describe your participation in this community.
- Explain how you positively impacted this community through your participation.
- Provide a brief reflection on your experience as a part of this community.
- Indicate how your positive impact on this community has in turn impacted you.
Before writing your first draft of this essay, you may want to attempt short responses to each of the mini-prompts listed above. After you have responded to each of those points, you can knit together each of your responses into a cohesive essay using transitional phrases and words.
Reflect on a personal experience where you intentionally expanded your cultural awareness.
This prompt aims to explore a particular occasion when you sought to become more culturally aware. You can interpret this prompt broadly. Whether you traveled to a new place to meet the people there and learn about their life experiences or stayed home and learned a foreign language, you should focus on your intentions in pursuing this cultural awareness.
For instance, did you hope to better connect with your grandparents’ previously unfamiliar culture? Did you attend religious services seeking to better empathize with your friend who practices a different religion than you? Or perhaps you read a book or watched a documentary about your coworker’s home country. However you pursued this greater cultural awareness, be specific and descriptive about the experience itself. Then, make some room for reflection regarding the ways this experience impacted you.
Emory University’s unique mission calls for service to humanity. Share how you might personally contribute to this mission of service to humanity.
Unlike the other Emory supplemental essays, this prompt specifically asks you to describe the experience you envision for yourself at Emory. Further, this prompt necessitates research into Emory’s core mission, as well as the service opportunities available to Emory students. You may also want to do some research regarding service project in general that interest you. If you don’t feel driven to pursue service in college, then perhaps select a prompt for one of the other Emory supplemental essays.
Note the prompt’s use of the word “personally.” This prompt should speak to you as an individual, your unique interests, and your motivations for pursuing service. Thus, be sure to clarify in this essay what service to humanity means to you. It’s important to not only describe what service you hope to engage in, but also why you wish to engage in service.
In a scholarly community, differing ideas often collide before they converge. How do you personally navigate disagreement in a way that promotes progress and deepens meaningful dialogue?
This prompt asks you to demonstrate your intellectual maturity and collaborative skills within academic settings. Emory wants to understand how you handle conflict constructively, particularly when dealing with differing viewpoints or ideas that matter intellectually.
The key to responding effectively lies in selecting a concrete, meaningful example where you encountered genuine intellectual disagreement and actively worked to bridge differences. Strong examples might include a classroom debate where you helped mediate between opposing sides, a group project where team members had fundamentally different approaches, or a community discussion where you guided conversation through controversial territory. It’s best to avoid trivial conflicts or situations where you simply compromised to keep peace. Instead, focus on moments where substantive ideas were at stake and your intervention helped create progress.
Your essay should demonstrate a thoughtful personal philosophy about disagreement. This might involve active listening techniques where you seek to understand opposing viewpoints before responding, finding common ground by identifying shared values amid differences, or asking clarifying questions that help all parties articulate their positions. Show that you recognize disagreement as an opportunity for learning rather than a problem to solve quickly. Emory particularly values students who acknowledge complexity and resist oversimplifying nuanced issues.
If you need help polishing up your Emory supplemental essays, check out our College Essay Review service. You can receive detailed feedback from Ivy League consultants in as little as 24 hours.
