Tufts University is a renowned research institution located in the Greater Boston area. With an acceptance rate around 10%, Tufts is a highly selective university. Known for having a strong engineering program, diverse and collaborative research opportunities, and an impactful Classics department, among other robust academic offerings, Tufts attracts many highly qualified applicants every year. Their accomplished alumni include Shashi Tharoor, Tracy Chapman, William Hurt, Anthony Scaramucci, among others. Hoping join their ranks? First, you’ll need to nail your Tufts supplemental essays. Let’s dive in.
Tufts’ 2024-2025 Prompts
Tufts sets two prompts for each applicant. The first essay prompt is required for all applicants. The second essay prompt depends on which school you are applying to. If you’re applying to the School of Arts & Sciences or the School of Engineering, you have three prompts to choose between. If you’re applying to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, your essay prompt is set for you.
Now, let’s break the prompts down.
Required Essay Question
- Please complete the following statement: “I am applying to Tufts because…” (50-100 words)
Choose One: Applicants to the School of Arts & Sciences or the School of Engineering Essay Questions
- It’s cool to love learning. What excites your intellectual curiosity, and why? (200-250 words)
- How have the environments or experiences of your upbringing – your family, home, neighborhood, or community – shaped the person you are today? (200-250 words)
- Using a specific example or two, tell us about a way that you contributed to building a collaborative and/or inclusive community. (200-250 words)
Applicants to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts
- Art has the power to disrupt our preconceptions, shape public discourse, and imagine new ways of being in the world. What are the ideas you’d like to explore in your work? (200-250 words)
General Tips
Writing your Tufts supplemental essays isn’t easy, in part because many students fear their essays will sound just like everyone else’s. So let’s dive into some general tips that will help your essays stand out from the crowd.
Get creative.
Now, it might sound obvious to get creative when you’re trying to write a stand-out essay. But many students fear that they’ll cross too many lines and get booted from the admissions pile because they were too creative. Frankly, this is less likely than writing an essay that seems unoriginal. At minimum, a creative essay is more memorable than the rest of the essays in the pile.
However, when creativity goes too far, the essay sacrifices substance for style, or fails to adequately respond to the prompt. Occasionally, students who try to get creative end up sounding cocky. If you genuinely compose a response to the prompt at hand, focus on writing sentences that give the reader substance, and maintain a humble tone, then creativity can only help you.
What does it mean to get creative, though? Remember that you have a wealth of rhetorical and literary devices at your disposal. Feel free to use alliteration, metaphor, parallel structures, anaphora, and other devices in your Tufts supplemental essays. Search up “rhetorical devices list” for inspiration, and work the devices into your writing where they feel natural and add meaning, instead of distracting from the content.
Ground your essays.
Many students let their college essays get very abstract, thinking that they sound more philosophical and intelligent when they do so. This often isn’t the case, resulting in an essay that shares very little about who you are as a person. If you choose to go the abstract route, though, you’ll still want to ground your essay in concrete details.
This means describing real-life scenes, people, and events. If you write about “loyalty,” write about someone who has been loyal to you. If you write about “community,” tell the reader who your community is, where you find this community, what makes them a distinct group, and so on. As you read through your essay draft(s), look for abstract nouns (nouns that can’t be touched, seen, heard, tasted, or smelled). Consider the ways you can surround or even replace those abstract nouns with concrete descriptions, and your essay will feel more grounded.
Stay structured.
No matter how creative or expansive an essay you write, it should still have a structure. A beginning, a middle, and an end make an essay feel like it’s “gone somewhere.” In other words, after reading your essay, the reader should have the sense that they have learned or changed their perspective about something. Ideally, the reader learns something about you or your worldview. Learning something from an essay helps the reader feel like their time was well-spent in reading it. An essay with structure makes that progression of thought or ideas clear.
Many students ensure that their essays are structured by composing an outline prior to drafting. Whether you choose to outline or not, after completing your essay draft(s), review your essay to confirm that it has a structure of some kind. Does your essay express all of its points in the first sentence or two, or do you continue providing new information to the reader throughout the body paragraphs (if the essay is long enough to have them)? If the latter, you’re golden. If the former, look for areas where your essay might be repetitive and more substance can be incorporated.
Required Essay Question
Please complete the following statement: “I am applying to Tufts because…” (50-100 words)
This is your “Why Tufts?” essay. In fewer than 100 words, you need to clarify your primary motivation(s) for applying to Tufts. Before you begin writing this essay, you’ll need to conduct some research. Understand what attracts you to Tufts before you try to distill those motivations into so few words. If you’re stuck on what to write, try filling in these blanks with as specific answers as you can:
- Tufts offers _________ academic program, which most schools don’t offer.
- The Tufts community is characterized by the following qualities: _________, _________, and _________. These qualities attract me because I value _________.
- Professor _________ teaches _________ course, and I hope to take this course because _________.
- In my future career, I hope to achieve _________. Tufts will help me get closer to accomplishing this goal due to _________ and _________.
- The _________ extracurricular/co-curricular program interests me because _________. By participating in this program, I will be able to _________, which is meaningful to me because _________.
After filling in the blanks for some of these sentences, you should have a foundation for why you want to attend Tufts. Rewrite the sentences you filled in, in your own words, with as much added specificity as you can fit in 50-100 words.
Choose One: Applicants to the School of Arts & Sciences or the School of Engineering Essay Questions
It’s cool to love learning. What excites your intellectual curiosity, and why? (200-250 words)
If you love to learn, then this is the prompt for you. Before you begin writing, try brainstorming a list of things that excite your intellectual curiosity. These things could be subject areas you’ve learned about in school or watched dozens of videos about on YouTube. You could write about the bugs in your sidewalk that you’ve always found fascinating, or the summer research project you conducted under a professor at a university. Whatever you choose to write about, let your passion shine through.
The second part of this question is the “why.” After you’ve told the reader what excites your intellectual curiosity, you need to explain why this is so. What are the questions you want to answer, big or small? What drives you to keep learning? And what parts of yourself do you learn about along the way? You should feel empowered to show, instead of tell, the reader why these topics are intellectually exciting to you. Describe an occasion when you lost all track of time or made a discovery. The joy, sense of accomplishment, and passion demonstrated by these occasions can serve to elucidate your “why” to the reader.
How have the environments or experiences of your upbringing – your family, home, neighborhood, or community – shaped the person you are today? (200-250 words)
We’re all products of our times, families, cultures, and geographies. If you feel comfortable writing about your background and upbringing, then this is the prompt for you. You can write this essay from a couple different directions. If you already know that you want to write about the religion you grew up in or the neighborhoods you moved between, then start there and work forward to identify how those experiences shaped the person you are today.
If you’re unsure what aspects of your background you’d like to focus on, consider the person you are today. What are your defining characteristics? Who do you turn to for advice? What are your strengths and weaknesses? In what ways do you feel you have gained perspective and maturity?
After considering those questions, look back into your past and try to identify what influenced you, or, alternatively, led you to choose a different path or way of life than the one(s) you saw around you. Maybe your eagerness to study economics comes from watching the people around you struggle economically. Perhaps you developed a patient spirit as a result of watching your younger siblings every day after school. Whoever you are, consider how your environment shaped you. Then do your best to write as authentically and clearly as you can.
Using a specific example or two, tell us about a way that you contributed to building a collaborative and/or inclusive community. (200-250 words)
Ideally, this essay is focused and to-the-point. Describe a specific way, or two at most, that you have personally worked to build community. Maybe you’ve engaged in a community service project that brings together individuals with different cultural backgrounds. Perhaps you started an inclusive club at your school. Or maybe you’ve captained an athletic team and strove to build community among your teammates, despite any differences between the individual players in background, identity, or personal experience. You can interpret the word “community” broadly here and write about any experience building connections between groups of people that has been important to you.
Whatever you choose to write about, be specific and explain your role in the community-building effort. What impact did you strive for? What impact did you have? If possible, quantify this impact. If you can’t quantify the impact (e.g., we raised $600, 150 people were involved, and we worked on the project 4 hours per week), then just be as specific as you can be. Then, take the time to reflect on the experience, considering the following questions:
- What did you learn from this experience?
- How has your perspective shifted as a result of this experience?
- What lessons did you learn?
Answering at least one of these questions near the end of your essay will help round out your story to show your maturity and growth as a result of this process. This will indicate to the reader that your future at Tufts will also involve growth and learning through community engagement. Remember, the reader can only speculate as to who you will be at Tufts. In other words, this essay is your chance to show who you are and how you’ve been evolving, therefore implying how you’ll evolve in the future.
Applicants to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts
Art has the power to disrupt our preconceptions, shape public discourse, and imagine new ways of being in the world. What are the ideas you’d like to explore in your work? (200-250 words)
This prompt asks you to compose an essay that is akin to an artist’s statement. However, you need not refer to art that already exists in order to effectively respond to this prompt. Instead, the reader hopes to get a sense of the art you will produce in the future. This is because what you will create in the future and the ideas you will explore next in your creative endeavors will in turn influence your Tufts experience. In other words, the directions you’d like to take your artistic work next provide a glimpse into your future at Tufts.
The SMFA admissions team seeks to build a well-rounded, thoughtful, and ambitious class of artists and creatives. In your courses, you will be encouraged to take risks and try new techniques and styles. What will make your art different than your classmates, though, even if you’re asked to complete the same assignment, will be the ideas driving your work. The thoughts that keep you up at night, your vision for the future, your dreams of what art could or should be, and so on. Whether consciously or subconsciously, the topics and questions that interest you will impact the art you create. By identifying these ideas for the reader, you show your clarity of vision and preparedness to take on a challenging art curriculum. You can also differentiate yourself from the crowd by sharing unique and authentic ideas that don’t look like anyone else’s.
Ideally, the ideas you share here are specific and include some concrete details, even if they are not fully actualized ideas (and they definitely don’t have to be!). In addition, remember that whatever you write about in this essay is not a contract to create art exploring the ideas you choose to write about here. If you’re accepted into SMFA, then you will very likely continue to evolve as an artist and ultimately explore different ideas than what you write about here. But the admissions team hopes to see where you’re starting from, so share the curiosities and thought processes that drive your art today, whether they relate to themes, cultures, inspirations, mediums, genres, or anything else.
If you need help polishing up your Tufts supplemental essays, check out our College Essay Review service. You can receive detailed feedback from Ivy League consultants in as little as 24 hours.
