Harvard University, the nation’s oldest college, is recognized worldwide as one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning, with centuries of history and an extensive alumni network ranging from Conan O’Brien to Sheryl Sandberg and beyond. With faculty who are leading experts in their fields and a diverse and motivated student body, Harvard is the worthy dream school of many a college applicant.
Admissions officers at Harvard receive tens of thousands of applications each year, and the College boasted a record low acceptance rate of 3.13% for the 2021-2022 admissions cycle. Many applicants display academic excellence and extracurricular involvement across the board, so the supplemental essays provide applicants with a valuable opportunity to stand out among their peers.
Approaching these essays can seem like a daunting task, but with a methodical approach and careful execution, they can elevate an application to the next level. In this article, we will provide you with a number of strategies and tips for how to write the Harvard supplemental essays.
General Tips
Harvard College has three supplemental essay prompts, two limited to 150 words and one of unspecified length. The only required essay among these is one of the two short-response essays, but we strongly advise that all applicants attempt each of the three essays. The requirements and benefits of responding to each prompt will be discussed later on, but overall, more writing means more chances to demonstrate your strengths and make your application stand out!
As with any application, remember to think of your supplemental essays and your Common or Coalition Application materials as a portfolio designed to represent you as wholly as possible. In practice, this means using each of your essays to their fullest advantage by discussing different aspects of yourself in each one. It is important to avoid redundancy in your essays and in your application overall. Instead, think of each essay as a new opportunity to present a unique side of yourself!
Also, as you compose these essays, be true to yourself. If the prompt asks for a discussion of an activity or experience that was important to you, then really dig into the effects it had on your goals, your mindset, your everyday life. If you decide to respond with a description of something that brings you joy, choose a topic that truly inspires you, instead of trying to conform to what you believe the admissions officers want to see. Genuine and honest writing is compelling, and, on the flip side, forced or unenthusiastic writing appears as just that. Allow yourself to come shining through in your words!
And with that, let’s get into a more detailed look at each prompt.
Harvard’s 2022-2023 Prompts
Short Response (150 words)
- Your intellectual life may extend beyond the academic requirements of your particular school. Please use the space below to list additional intellectual activities that you have not mentioned or detailed elsewhere in your application. These could include, but are not limited to, supervised or self-directed projects not done as school work, training experiences, online courses not run by your school, or summer academic or research programs not described elsewhere. (Optional.)
- Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. (Required.)
Essay Prompt
You may wish to include an additional essay if you feel that the college application forms do not provide sufficient opportunity to convey important information about yourself or your accomplishments. You may write on a topic of your choice, or you may choose from one of the following topics:
- Unusual circumstances in your life
- Travel, living, or working experiences in your own or other communities
- What you would want your future college roommate to know about you
- An intellectual experience (course, project, book, discussion, paper, poetry, or research topic in engineering, mathematics, science or other modes of inquiry) that has meant the most to you
- How you hope to use your college education
- A list of books you have read during the past twelve months
- The Harvard College Honor code declares that we “hold honesty as the foundation of our community.” As you consider entering this community that is committed to honesty, please reflect on a time when you or someone you observed had to make a choice about whether to act with integrity and honesty.
- The mission of Harvard College is to educate our students to be citizens and citizen-leaders for society. What would you do to contribute to the lives of your classmates in advancing this mission?
- Each year a substantial number of students admitted to Harvard defer their admission for one year or take time off during college. If you decided in the future to choose either option, what would you like to do?
- Harvard has long recognized the importance of student body diversity of all kinds. We welcome you to write about distinctive aspects of your background, personal development or the intellectual interests you might bring to your Harvard classmates.
If none of these options appeal to you, you have the option to write on a topic of your choice.
Harvard’s Short Responses
Your intellectual life may extend beyond the academic requirements of your particular school. Please use the space below to list additional intellectual activities that you have not mentioned or detailed elsewhere in your application. These could include, but are not limited to, supervised or self-directed projects not done as school work, training experiences, online courses not run by your school, or summer academic or research programs not described elsewhere. (150 words)
This optional short-response essay provides applicants with the opportunity to discuss an experience that did not fit neatly into the “activities” portion of their application. Specifically, students are encouraged to discuss an activity that enriched them intellectually. Harvard as an institution is highly invested in diverse forms of intellectual productivity, from problem-solving in artistic endeavors to hardcore STEM innovation in fields like computer science and engineering. If you feel you have an experience that fits this prompt, we highly suggest detailing it here.
In addition to the broad categories listed in the prompt itself, specific examples of activities that could qualify for discussion in this essay include the following:
- Learning to code through an online course and then developing a website using your newfound skills
- Visiting an art museum each weekend and talking with curators about the exhibition process
- Designing and conducting behavioral training with dogs up for adoption at a local shelter
- Developing and teaching a curriculum for an after-school enrichment program at an elementary school in your area
- And more!
Each of these experiences is an appropriate response to this prompt because they demonstrate an investment of time in your own personal development and learning. They are especially strong, though, because they also present how you used that personal growth to engage with a community, serve others, or create innovations of your own.
The prompt asks for a “list,” and a concise list format is certainly acceptable. However, if applicants want to expand somewhat on the activities they mention, doing so will not harm the application. Keep in mind that the word limit is quite small, though, at only 150 words maximum.
If you feel that you do not have an experience that fits this description, leaving this section blank will not inherently harm your application. Of the two optional prompts, this one is certainly the more truly optional. Nevertheless, a well thought out response to an additional essay question is always another valuable opportunity to stand out, and we recommend giving it a shot.
Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. (50-150 words)
Prompt 2 is the classic “extracurricular activities” essay prompt, but it differs from many others in its unusually concise word limit: 50-150 words. One might also wonder how this prompt differs from Prompt 1. In addition to being required, this prompt specifically asks that you elaborate on an activity or work experience already mentioned in your application, presumably the “activities” section of your Common or Coalition Application. Prompt 1, on the other hand, asks about an experience not listed elsewhere in your application. Prompt 1 lends itself to more amorphous, independent projects and endeavors, whereas Prompt 2 can be used to describe any sort of activity, so long as it had a meaningful impact on you.
Choosing a worthy activity is the first step in answering this prompt, and we recommend that you begin by compiling a short list of the activities that you are most passionate about. Think about what you gained from your participation in these activities, and focus on those that you feel had the greatest impact on who you are today. How did each of these activities change your outlook on your future, your interests, your priorities?
Another approach to selecting an activity could be to consider which activities you have the most potent, meaningful anecdotal memories associated with, and then describe them in short form in this essay. Follow this anecdote (which should be no longer than a sentence or two) with a deeper look into the impact the experience had on you.
For this essay, remember that brevity is your superpower – embrace colons, dashes, and semicolons, leaving behind unwieldy conjunctions and wordy transitions.
Harvard’s Essay Prompt
Upon first glance, this third prompt may seem wildly overwhelming, given its unspecified word limit and wide variety of prompts and topics to choose from. Before we give tips on how to respond to each of the prompt options, let’s review a few general reminders:
- Choose a topic that genuinely interests you. As mentioned in the introduction, readers can tell when your enthusiasm is genuine. Choosing a topic that you love will not only make writing this essay exponentially earlier, it will also show through in your narrative voice and make your essay infinitely more compelling.
- Don’t feel obligated to write a novel. An essay without a word limit may seem like an invitation to ramble on and on, but the most effective essays are often concentrated and focused within the range of 500-800 words. Work on developing your message without unnecessary extrapolation or tangents that add little to your essay.
- Optional means strongly encouraged. Don’t dismiss this essay just because it isn’t required; think of it as another valuable opportunity to share stories about yourself with the admissions office and to help them get to know you better.
- Get creative! Harvard provides so many prompt suggestions because they want to see an essay that you feel truly reflects you. Keep an open mind as you consider which prompt to respond to, and if you have a clear idea that you feel doesn’t fit neatly into any one prompt, there’s always the option to “write on a topic of your choice.”
Now let’s get into the prompt options:
1. Unusual circumstances in your life
With an applicant pool of many thousands of students from all over the world, truly “unusual circumstances” can be hard to come by. Some students may be tempted to write about their experience as a child of immigrants or as a perfectionist in an academically challenging setting; while these circumstances undoubtedly informed their experiences, they are not “unusual” in and of themselves.
One way to respond to this prompt in a stand-out way could be to describe instead how you responded to these more common circumstances in an unusual way, thereby creating your own “unusual circumstances.” For instance, maybe you used your experiences as a child of immigrants to inform the actions you took as a member of the student government at your school.
Another method to develop a promising response is to get specific. Perhaps an unusual circumstance in your life was created by a confluence of several more usual circumstances: maybe within the span of one week your sister was diagnosed with diabetes, you became president of the Science Honor Society, and the COVID-19 lockdown began.
Whatever circumstances you decide to describe, be sure you also analyze how they affected you and how you responded to and grew from them.
2. Travel, living, or working experiences in your own or other communities
For this prompt, we specifically caution applicants against falling back on the so-called “mission trip” trope. Experiences in communities of different socioeconomic backgrounds from your own can be valuable and provide a wealth of essay opportunities, so long as the essay avoids tones of saviorism or self-righteousness. If you decide to describe such an experience, be sure to focus on what you learned and how you grew, not how you improved a community from some position of superiority or authority.
Also, if you decide to describe experiences of travel, living, or working within your own community, be sure to differentiate this experience from the rest of your life within your own community. How was this particular experience different in an impactful way?
3. What you would want your future college roommate to know about you
This prompt inherently invites a tone of comfortability and familiarity that the others may not. The informality of writing a letter to a future roommate lends itself to a more casual, conversational style of essay, which can be fitting for topics that may relate more to the everyday. Examples of such topics could include your unique style of studying and how you came to develop it after a long period of trial and error, how you have made a habit of reading a chapter of a book before bed as a healthy, constructive coping mechanism for daily stress, or the deeper significance of the decorations you plan to bring for your dorm.
Feel free to discuss vulnerabilities and imperfections here, but be sure to counter these with a discussion of your strengths as well. Remember, even though it is structured as a letter to a future roommate, the audience is still ultimately the admissions office at Harvard.
4. An intellectual experience (course, project, book, discussion, paper, poetry, or research topic in engineering, mathematics, science or other modes of inquiry) that has meant the most to you
This prompt somewhat resembles the first optional short-answer essay, and we caution applicants against describing the same or similar experiences in this essay if they responded to that question. Remember, your application is a portfolio of components that should complement each other, not repeat the same sorts of information over again.
However, the similarities between these two questions could also provide an opportunity for some applicants to describe the breadth of intellectual experiences they have engaged in. For example, if you described an independent research project you conducted using PubMed in the first essay, but you also wanted to discuss your experience composing a piece for your orchestra or jazz band, this could be the place to explore that second experience and its importance to you in a longer-form essay.
5. How you hope to use your college education
This prompt encourages applicants to consider their goals for the future, both during college and beyond. While Harvard recognizes that students’ plans for after college may still be in flux, they like to see a demonstrated motivation to improve oneself and the surrounding community. If you are an applicant that has a specific dream that you hope to materialize using the opportunities and resources available to you at Harvard, this could be a fitting prompt for you.
A caution for responding to this prompt: if you decide to describe a goal you have for the future, try to be as specific as possible. The benefits of specificity are a running theme across prompts, but especially in this one. Many applicants default to broad, global-scale goals such as “combating climate change,” “working toward a cure for cancer,” or even simply “wanting to change the world.” These goals are honorable, but they tell us little about your specific motivations because they encapsulate so many possible paths and passions.
One useful course of action for responding to this prompt could be to research what is actually offered at Harvard, including coursework, student organizations, labs and faculty research, and beyond. If any of your findings inspire you, consider including them in your essay. Doing so demonstrates both an interest and a commitment to investigating all that Harvard has to offer (trust me, there’s a lot).
6. A list of books you have read during the past twelve months
The power of a strong response to this prompt lies in (a) how you connect the books on your list and (b) how you decide to describe or analyze each of the titles in a brief manner. A response to this prompt could list a series of books you read on a certain topic, with short passages beneath each title describing your impressions and how they contributed to your perspective on the topic.
Alternatively, you could list books on a variety of topics and tie them together using a ranking system. You could rank them purely on your enjoyment of their content and then explain your reasoning, or you could get creative with your ranking criteria. For instance, did some of the books have a particularly inspiring representation of antiracism? Or, on a more lighthearted note, were some of the books particularly effective at making you laugh? Think outside the box in regards to how you arrange and reflect on your list.
7. The Harvard College Honor code declares that we “hold honesty as the foundation of our community.” As you consider entering this community that is committed to honesty, please reflect on a time when you or someone you observed had to make a choice about whether to act with integrity and honesty.
Of course, a description of any engagement in particularly risky or illegal behavior is not encouraged as a response to this prompt. Instead, consider situations where the right and wrong were particularly hard to discern, or where you or someone you observed experienced a conflict of interest that ultimately had to be addressed.
The most important aspect of a response to this prompt would be the analysis of your internal thought process as the choice progressed. How did you react to being faced with a difficult choice, and how did you ultimately come to a conclusion? How did your decision inform your future behaviors? If you are discussing a decision faced by someone else, how did their choice compare with your perceptions of the situation, and how did you react to their choice? What might you have done differently?
Harvard knows that honesty and integrity are the ideals, so you don’t have to justify the rightness of being honest in this essay. Instead, focus on the actions you took and the conclusions you came to as you pursued these ideals in your particular context.
8. The mission of Harvard College is to educate our students to be citizens and citizen-leaders for society. What would you do to contribute to the lives of your classmates in advancing this mission?
To be a citizen-leader means to contribute meaningfully to the lives of those around you through engagement and productive, problem-solving dialogue. In a college context, “contributing to the lives of your classmates” means facilitating your collective learning and sharing diverse perspectives on issues you face, both large and small. In other words, how would you collaborate with your peers to solve problems and overcome shared challenges?
This question can, or course, be taken to mean a variety of things. Example responses to this prompt could include a discussion of how you aim to initiate academic and casual discussion of underrepresented issues, such as the stigma faced by people with learning disabilities. Again, feel free to get specific in your responses to this prompt. Pick an issue or value of yours that you truly care about sharing, and explore how you would do so on a college campus and beyond.
9. Each year a substantial number of students admitted to Harvard defer their admission for one year or take time off during college. If you decided in the future to choose either option, what would you like to do?
This prompt is a golden opportunity for those already considering a gap year between high school and college. If this applies to you, take this space to explain what inspired you to choose this path. It could be that your mother needs help at home with your younger brother who has special needs, or it could be that you are planning to travel to India to be with a grandmother whom you haven’t seen since childhood. Regardless of the reason, be sure to explore why this experience will be meaningful, important, and beneficial for you, as well as for any others who may be involved.
For those not already planning to take time off, this prompt could also be approached from a more speculative position. If you were to take time off, how would you spend it, and how would doing so be more valuable to you than going straight through with your formal education? It is important to consider what you would gain from your experiences during your time off, instead of simply describing what it is you would like to do.
Ultimately, you must ask yourself: what would you take away from this experience that would affect your perspective in college and make you an even stronger student and community member?
10. Harvard has long recognized the importance of student body diversity of all kinds. We welcome you to write about distinctive aspects of your background, personal development or the intellectual interests you might bring to your Harvard classmates.
This prompt somewhat resembles the first prompt for the long-form essay (unusual circumstances in your life) in that truly “distinctive” attributes are hard to pick out from among an applicant pool of tens of thousands from all over the world.
However, this does not mean that an effective response to this prompt is impossible. Instead, applicants will have to be more creative about choosing and describing their distinctive qualities. For instance, the interplay of several different aspects of one’s background or interests could create a unique cocktail that stands out much more than an essay about one attribute on its own. Consider exploring how your collective experiences have come together to shape who you are today, and how that dialogue between all the influences that shape you make you truly unique.
If none of these options appeal to you, you have the option to write on a topic of your choice.
Lastly, if you feel that none of these prompt options properly address the ideas or themes you wish to discuss, then the option to write on a topic of your choice may be the best option for you. This avenue allows for the most creative freedom; however, it is important that applicants choosing this path have a clear sense of the message they want to convey and the structure through which they plan to do so. Essays without a pre-written prompt still must have a question or line of inquisition to which they respond. However, the freedom that comes with designing your own prompt can lead to a successful discussion of unique perspectives, so long as the essay remains true to and focused on the inspiration that led you to create your own topic in the first place.
If you need help polishing up your Harvard supplemental essays, check out our College Essay Review service. You can receive detailed feedback from Ivy League consultants in as little as 24 hours.
