The University of Chicago supplemental essays are designed to test your creativity, reveal your curiosities, and highlight your unique spark. Known as the quirkiest prompts on the college essay circuit, the UChicago essays strike fear into the hearts of many aspiring Chicagoans. But in reality, the UChicago supplemental essays are one of the few places in a college essay where your personality can truly shine.
There are two UChicago supplemental essays. For the first essay, you’ll select from a series of prompts created by current students or create your own. For the second essay, you’ll explain why you want to attend UChicago and feel that it’s the right school for you. This blog post will guide you through answering each prompt so that you can approach your UChicago essays with confidence.
UChicago’s 2026-2027 Prompts
Supplemental Essay Questions
Each of the following questions has a limit of 1-2 pages.
- Food for thought: How do thoughts eat? – Inspired by Ernest Leong, Class of 2026
- The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, utilized origami-inspired techniques to compactly store and deploy its sunshield in space. Choose an artistic practice and use its principles to propose an elegant solution to a problem. – Inspired by Akhil Korra, Class of 2028
- Sometimes metaphors get mixed up. For one reason or another, one could say, “we’ll burn that bridge when we get there” or “the world is your china shop”. Make up your own mixed metaphor. Explain how it could make sense, be understood, or even applied. – Inspired by Julia Nieberg, Class of 2029
- The Olympics have long celebrated the pinnacle of human athletic achievement. But what if they expanded to honor the mundane? Imagine a new Olympic event built around an everyday activity like speed dishwashing or competitive grocery bagging. How is it scored, officiated, and judged? Why is it a worthy addition? – Inspired by Ewan Smith, Class of 2028
- AI: Allen Iverson. NASA, or the North American Saxophone Alliance. Share a potentially confounding, comedic, or captivating example of MIA (Mistaken Identity of Acronym) and tell us its backstory. – Inspired by Jeeho Byun, Class of 2030
- And, as always… the classic choose your own adventure option! In the spirit of adventurous inquiry, choose one of our past prompts (or create a question of your own). Be original, creative, thought provoking. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk, and have fun!
“Why UChicago?” Essay Question
- How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago. (1-2 pages)
General Tips
We need to address the elephant in the room. The UChicago supplemental essays do not have a word limit. Instead, you need to upload a document for each question with a 1-2 page answer. This raises a lot of questions for students. Is the page double- or single-spaced? Or 1.5-spaced? Times New Roman font or Comic Sans? How big should the margins be?
Relax. Unless formatting is essential to your essay in some way, just keep your margins, spacing, and font standard. Double-spaced is generally advised. Again, unless your formatting is part of the essay itself, you’ll want to make it so ordinary that it isn’t noticed.
UChicago Supplemental Essay Questions
Food for thought: How do thoughts eat? – Inspired by Ernest Leong, Class of 2026
This is the shortest prompt of the year, and also the most open. It hands you a metaphor (thoughts as living things that need feeding) and asks you to take it seriously. The best responses will commit to the premise: if thoughts eat, what is their food? Attention? Conversation? Silence? Other thoughts? Do some ideas starve while others gorge? Do they have a diet you can change? Pick an interpretation you can sustain for a page or two, and follow it wherever it leads.
Because the question is so abstract, ground it in your own mind. You could write about how a particular obsession of yours feeds on late-night reading, or how anxiety eats the thoughts around it, or how a good conversation is a shared meal for two minds. You could take a scientific angle (glucose, sleep, and what the brain literally consumes), a literary one, or a comic one. Whatever you choose, admissions officers should finish the essay knowing something about how your thinking works, not just how thinking works in general.
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, utilized origami-inspired techniques to compactly store and deploy its sunshield in space. Choose an artistic practice and use its principles to propose an elegant solution to a problem. – Inspired by Akhil Korra, Class of 2028
This prompt is an invitation to think like an engineer and an artist at once. UChicago gives you the model: origami, an art form with strict rules about folding, gave NASA a way to pack a tennis-court-sized sunshield into a rocket. Your job is to choose a different artistic practice, identify its underlying principles, and apply them to a problem that has nothing (or seemingly nothing) to do with art. The word “elegant” matters. UChicago isn’t asking for a workable fix; it’s asking for a beautiful one.
Start with a practice you actually know, because the essay lives or dies on how precisely you can describe its principles. A few pairings to spark ideas:
- Counterpoint in music, where independent melodic lines have to coexist, applied to scheduling a hospital’s operating rooms
- The rule of thirds in photography, applied to designing a less cluttered city intersection
- Improv comedy’s “yes, and” principle, applied to how a student government negotiates
- Kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing pottery with gold, applied to how a school handles student failure
Then work through the solution with real rigor. Explain the problem, show how the principle maps onto it step by step, and be honest about where the analogy strains. That last move is what separates a clever essay from a thoughtful one, and UChicago is looking for both.
Sometimes metaphors get mixed up. For one reason or another, one could say, “we’ll burn that bridge when we get there” or “the world is your china shop”. Make up your own mixed metaphor. Explain how it could make sense, be understood, or even applied. – Inspired by Julia Nieberg, Class of 2029
Mixed metaphors are usually a mistake, which is exactly why this prompt is fun: UChicago wants you to make one on purpose and then defend it. Invent a phrase by splicing two idioms (the prompt’s examples combine “cross that bridge when we get there” with “burn that bridge,” and “the world is your oyster” with “a bull in a china shop”), and then do the real work of the essay: explain how your new phrase could make sense, when someone might say it, and what it captures that neither original idiom does.
The strongest responses treat the metaphor as a lens rather than a punchline. Maybe “the early bird gets the worm in your shoe” describes the downside of being the first to try something. Maybe your mixed metaphor comes from a bilingual household where idioms collide every day, or from a coach who mangled sayings so consistently that the team adopted them. Use the phrase to say something true about how you see the world, and let the humor do the rest.
The Olympics have long celebrated the pinnacle of human athletic achievement. But what if they expanded to honor the mundane? Imagine a new Olympic event built around an everyday activity like speed dishwashing or competitive grocery bagging. How is it scored, officiated, and judged? Why is it a worthy addition? – Inspired by Ewan Smith, Class of 2028
This prompt asks for world-building with a straight face. Choose an ordinary activity and design a full Olympic event around it: the rules, the scoring, the officials, the controversies, the legendary athletes. The more seriously you treat the absurd premise, the funnier and more impressive the essay becomes. Think about the difference between a timed event and a judged one, what counts as a foul, and what a perfect 10 in your event would actually look like.
Choose an activity you know intimately, because the details are where the essay comes alive. If you’ve folded fitted sheets at a laundromat job, waited tables, packed a family of six into a minivan, or parallel parked on a hill every morning, you already know the technique that would separate gold from silver. Then answer the last question honestly: why is it worthy? Your answer might be playful (dignity for the dishwashers of the world) or genuinely thoughtful (what we choose to celebrate says something about what we value), and the best essays manage both.
AI: Allen Iverson. NASA, or the North American Saxophone Alliance. Share a potentially confounding, comedic, or captivating example of MIA (Mistaken Identity of Acronym) and tell us its backstory. – Inspired by Jeeho Byun, Class of 2030
Acronyms are compressed language, and this prompt is about what happens when the compression fails. UChicago wants an example of a Mistaken Identity of Acronym, whether it confounded you, made you laugh, or captivated you, and then it wants the backstory. That backstory is the essay. A list of funny acronym collisions is a party trick; a story about the afternoon you spent convinced your grandmother’s “LOL” meant “lots of love” (and what happened when you found out otherwise) is a personal essay.
Look for an acronym that sits at the intersection of two worlds you belong to: a scientific field and a fandom, a language you speak at home and one you speak at school, a sport and a subject. Then tell the story with specifics: who was confused, what they assumed, and what the mix-up revealed. If you want to stretch, you can use the acronym as a way into a bigger idea about jargon, belonging, or how communities mark their insiders. Just make sure the reader learns something about you along the way.
And, as always… the classic choose your own adventure option! In the spirit of adventurous inquiry, choose one of our past prompts (or create a question of your own). Be original, creative, thought provoking. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk, and have fun!
Like the open-ended Common App essay question, this prompt presents both opportunities and challenges. Unlike the rest of the UChicago supplemental essays, this prompt doesn’t require you to discuss anything in particular. That said, like the rest of the prompts, you can and should still focus on yourself, your interests, your background, your worldviews, your opinions, and so on. Remember, your college application is the opportunity to show who you are to an admissions team so that they’ll fall in love with you as a thinker and human being, and then admit you to their prestigious academic institution. Thus, your supplemental essays should ultimately function in service of that goal.
Note that this prompt gives you the opportunity to dive into past UChicago supplemental essays, if any of those speak to you. Therefore, if none of the prompts officially set for this year’s applicants feel fitting for you, but you’d still like a bit of structure when approaching this essay, you can read through past prompts to see if you can find inspiration in one of them instead.
Regardless of what approach you take when writing this essay, remember to keep things organized. The hardest part about writing an essay without a prompt is staying on topic. Pick your topic, identify the message you’d like to communicate to the reader, and/or outline your intentions for the essay. It’s essential that either before or after you draft this essay, you organize it. The essay can be about anything you like, but it must say something specific and meaningful, and it should be cohesive. But don’t afraid to be bold!
“Why UChicago?” Essay Question
How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.
Like many colleges and universities, UChicago’s admissions officers want to know why you specifically want to attend UChicago. What programs, courses, professors, clubs, or opportunities are available to you only at UChicago? What aspects of the campus culture speak to you? Why do you see yourself as a part of UChicago’s community?
Note that prompt’s emphasis on specificity. Use concrete details and sentences which could apply to no other institution than UChicago. Indicate how your unique future plans would be best served by learning and studying at UChicago. If you’re stuck, read through their website, watch videos about UChicago, and visit the campus if you’re able. Good luck!
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