The University of Notre Dame, consistently ranked the #1 university in Indiana, is a private Catholic research institution open to applicants of all faiths. Their academics, commitment to service, and inclusive student community all attract nearly 30,000 applicants yearly, only 12% of whom are admitted. Notre Dame’s accomplished alumni include Condoleezza Rice, Nicholas Sparks, Regis Philbin, and Orson Scott Card, among others. Hoping to join their ranks? First, you’ll need to nail your Notre Dame supplemental essays. Let’s dive in.
Notre Dame’s 2024-2025 Prompts
All applicants must write four supplemental essays as part of their Notre Dame application. The first prompt is required for all applicants. The other three essay prompts must be selected from a list of five prompts.
Required Essay Question
This essay question is required for all applicants to Notre Dame.
- Everyone has different priorities when considering their higher education options and building their college or university list. Tell us about your “non-negotiable” factor(s) when searching for your future college home. (150 words or fewer)
Choose Three: Short Essay Questions
All applicants must choose three of the following prompts to respond to.
- How does faith influence the decisions you make? (50-100 words)
- What is distinctive about your personal experiences and development (eg, family support, culture, disability, personal background, community)? Why are these experiences important to you and how will you enrich the Notre Dame community? (50-100 words)
- Notre Dame’s undergraduate experience is characterized by a collective sense of care for every person. How do you foster service to others in your community? (50-100 words)
- What compliment are you most proud of receiving, and why does it mean so much to you? (50-100 words)
- What would you fight for? (50-100 words)
General Tips
In different ways, each of the Notre Dame supplemental essays ask you to explore your values. As a result, you may find it beneficial to explore what your values are before you begin writing these essays. What is important to you, and why? How do your values differ from those of your family, community, or culture? And how have your values emerged from your family, community, or culture?
Answering these questions for yourself is not only a valuable philosophical exercise but may be helpful in getting you into the right mindset for answering these essay prompts. Notre Dame is evidently looking for thoughtful, introspective applicants who can compose considerate responses to complex questions. Cultivating self-awareness in yourself, as well as a personal set of values, will help you become the student the Notre Dame admissions team is seeking.
Of course, your personal set of values is likely evolving and will continue to evolve. Whatever values and personal philosophy you hold now won’t necessarily be the same after you graduate from Notre Dame. Thus, as you engage in this self-reflective activity and compose your Notre Dame supplemental essays, keep an open mind. Write about your own perspective, in this moment, versus about what values you believe everyone should hold or about the human experience in general.
Required Essay Question
Everyone has different priorities when considering their higher education options and building their college or university list. Tell us about your “non-negotiable” factor(s) when searching for your future college home. (150 words or fewer)
This essay prompt is a roundabout way of confirming that Notre Dame is the right school for you. The admissions team will review your “non-negotiable” factor(s) and evaluate whether you could be satisfied at Notre Dame. Thus, it’s important that you research whether Notre Dame will fulfill your “non-negotiable” factor(s) before writing this essay.
The factor(s) you choose to write about can be academic, non-academic, or both. For instance, if you wish to study engineering, then whether or not the school you’re applying to has an engineering program would be a non-negotiable factor for you. Thankfully, Notre Dame does have engineering program! Alternatively, if your proximity to family is a non-negotiable factor for you, consider what the outer limits of your proximity to family are permissible to you, and whether Notre Dame would fit within those limits. If so, then it’s still a school worth applying to for you, and you should bring up that factor in your essay.
Remember to use specificity when writing about your non-negotiable factor(s), and elaborate upon why they are important to you. That way, the reader will understand exactly what is non-negotiable to you, and they will be able to empathize with your reasoning.
Choose Three: Short Essay Questions
How does faith influence the decisions you make? (50-100 words)
This prompt is appropriate for an applicant whose faith is a significant part of their life. If faith doesn’t serve a meaningful role in your life, then you may want to select a different prompt to answer. That way, you can ensure that all of your Notre Dame supplemental essays are imbued with meaning and show the reader who you really are.
Before embarking on writing your response to this question, your time would be well-spent researching faith at Notre Dame. Understanding Notre Dame’s history as a Catholic institution that welcomes all faiths will inform your response. After all, one of the decisions you’re making that could be discussed in this essay is your decision to apply to Notre Dame, even choosing to answer this prompt among the other Notre Dame supplemental essays.
What is distinctive about your personal experiences and development (eg, family support, culture, disability, personal background, community)? Why are these experiences important to you and how will you enrich the Notre Dame community? (50-100 words)
This is a multi-part question in which each part deserves a full and thoughtful response. Because you only have 50-100 words in which to compose your response, you may want to outline your essay before you begin to ensure that you respond to each part of the prompt. Let’s break down what you need to bring up in this essay:
- The distinctive qualities of your personal experiences and development, which can include
- family support
- culture
- disability
- personal background
- community
- The significance to you of those distinctive qualities of your personal experiences and development
- The ways that these distinctive qualities will impact the way you move through the Notre Dame community
- and to be specific, how they will lead you to serve or contribute to the Notre Dame community
Consider limiting the scope of your response to just one or two distinctive and specific qualities of your personal experiences and development. This prompt can truly be answered by any applicant; everyone has unique stories to tell. Your story doesn’t look exactly like anyone else’s. Identify one or two things that make you unique, and provide the requisite nuance and details about them in this essay. Then, share their significance to you and your development. Lastly, express how these factors that have transformed and influenced you as a person will impact or inspire your contributions to the Notre Dame community.
Notre Dame’s undergraduate experience is characterized by a collective sense of care for every person. How do you foster service to others in your community? (50-100 words)
Whether you have extensive community service experience or not, this essay is a great place for you to share the ways you have served others in your life. This could be through providing childcare in your own family, volunteering locally, mentoring younger students at your school, or any other activity you regularly engage in that involves serving others.
Remember, you can understand the word “community” expansively. Perhaps you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community and you have served other members of the community, even if they are not geographically near you. Or perhaps you are involved in a sport and have served others who play this sport, not just in your hometown or on your team. In other words, “community” is not bound by geography, but by one or more shared qualities.
What values drive you to serve others? How do you feel when you serve others? What have been the long-term or large-scale impacts of your service? Start by answering these questions for yourself and let your responses guide your essay.
What compliment are you most proud of receiving, and why does it mean so much to you? (50-100 words)
There are a few explicit and implicit parts to this essay prompt. Let’s break it down:
- Who complimented you?
- What exactly was the compliment?
- When and where did you receive this compliment?
- Why was this person compelled to compliment you? Alternatively, what were the circumstances under which you received this compliment?
- How did receiving this compliment make you feel?
- Did your feelings around receiving this compliment change over time? If so, how and why?
- Why did this compliment make you feel proud?
- Why was this compliment especially important to you?
- Bonus question: How does this compliment continue to impact you to this day?
Before writing your essay, try answering each of the above questions. Then, do your best to frame your essay around those answers. Focus on providing the necessary contextual details. Be as specific as you can within the limited words you have, and emphasize the significance of the compliment without engaging in false modesty.
What would you fight for? (50-100 words)
This prompt is broad and flexible: truly, you can write about anything that is important to you. You can go abstract with your response, writing about freedom or safety or love, for instance. Alternatively, you can write a more concrete response about how you’d fight for your family or something you’ve created, like an artwork or community.
The challenging part of this essay, for most applicants, will not be coming up with things you’d fight for, but rather narrowing your list down so that you can write a specific and nuanced response. Of course, you can also take the approach of writing as long a list of things you’d fight for as can fit in 50-100 words. If you write a diverse list without explaining any of the items, so as to create a multidimensional portrait of what is important to you, you’ll need to make sure each item is specific and doesn’t require a lot of context to understand. If you choose to focus on just one or two things you’d fight for, you’ll want to explain their significance to you, how you’d fight for them, and what fighting for them might look like
If you need help polishing up your Notre Dame supplemental essays, check out our College Essay Review service. You can receive detailed feedback from Ivy League consultants in as little as 24 hours.
