How to Write the Cooper Union Essays 2024-2025
Applicants to Cooper Union have three required supplemental essays, in which you will write about your interest in the school, your interest in your intended major, and your interest in a topic of your choice. There is also an optional prompt where you can elaborate on some aspect of your background that you haven’t had room to discuss elsewhere in your application.
With how competitive college admissions have become, your essays are one of the chief ways admissions officers will be able to distinguish you from other applicants and decide whether or not they want you at their school. In this post, we’ll cover how you can write essays that will impress admissions officers at Cooper Union.
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Cooper Union Engineering Supplemental Essay Prompts
Prompt 1: The Cooper Union is a small, highly specialized, and academically challenging school in New York City. Beyond these traits, what specific aspects of our community and resources excite you? In what ways are you inspired to contribute to and benefit from our learning community? (350 words)
Prompt 2: What drives your interest in pursuing your chosen major (e.g., Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or Computer Science)? How do you envision engaging with Cooper’s labs, research opportunities, and faculty? (350 words)
Prompt 3: If you were to give a 30-minute lecture on a specific topic to an audience, what would your topic be and why? Why does this topic interest you, and what do you want others to understand or appreciate about it? (250 words)
Prompt 4 (optional): Students often ask us how and where they can include additional information or documents. You may use this space to include a resume, a summary of notable accomplishments, activities, leadership roles, awards, a research abstract, a link to a digital portfolio, links to online projects/videos, etc. You may upload or type your response. Please limit the response to two pages. (800 words)
Prompt 1
The Cooper Union is a small, highly specialized, and academically challenging school in New York City. Beyond these traits, what specific aspects of our community and resources excite you? In what ways are you inspired to contribute to and benefit from our learning community? (350 words)
If you haven’t already read our general post on “Why School?” prompts, we recommend checking it out before you get started on your response.
Also remember that even if you have responded to this prompt for another school, you shouldn’t just change the name of the school and copy and paste your essay. As the prompt itself notes, Cooper Union is a specialized college with opportunities that can’t be found elsewhere, and your essay should reflect that uniqueness.
The key to writing a truly unique essay is thinking about specific reasons why you are interested in Cooper Union, and then researching offerings at the school that would allow you to pursue those interests.
For example, say you are interested in using engineering to expand solar power usage. Part of your essay could be focused on your desire to participate in Cooper Union’s study abroad program in Guatemala, where you can work with a team to make a solar-powered drip irrigation system.
Alternatively, say you’re interested in making transportation more efficient. You could write about how Cooper Union’s Chem-E-Car and Hyperloop teams would give you invaluable hands-on experience with transportation-related projects, and give you the opportunity to make a difference in this sphere even as an undergrad.
As you brainstorm for this essay, you may not be able to think of specific opportunities like those mentioned above. That’s okay—there’s only so much you can learn from emails and brochures. On Cooper Union’s website, the clubs page, course catalog, and study abroad listings are some good places to find examples for your essay.
Keep in mind that you should only include opportunities that reflect a genuine interest in Cooper Union. Don’t just pick things that sound cool and then try to make up a personal connection, as that will likely make your essay feel stilted and disingenuous.
You also want to make sure your essay isn’t just a list of things you’re excited about at Cooper Union, even if you’re genuinely excited about all of them. The admissions officers know what their school offers. What they don’t know is why you are interested in these particular opportunities out of everything offered at Cooper Union, or indeed at every other college.
To illustrate what we’re talking about here, say you’re writing about the study abroad program in Guatemala. Instead of just describing your excitement about working on a solar power project, show your reader why you’re interested in solar power.
For example, maybe you grew up in a sunny part of the country, and you’ve always been disappointed by your local government’s inability to make solar power part of the infrastructure, so you want to learn about how to turn an idea into a reality.
This personal connection will show your reader that you’re informed about local environmentalism movements, and eager to learn skills that will help you make the change you wish to see in the world. Remember that the point of a college essay is to teach your reader something about your personality or character, and the personal connection is where that happens, not in the description of the opportunity itself.
In order to make sure you have the space to provide this kind of detail, you should select 3-5 opportunities at Cooper Union to focus your essay on.
While this may seem obvious, remember that these opportunities should be related to engineering, as this is a supplement for engineering majors. While researching, you will likely find many things unrelated to engineering that excite you, and as a student you will absolutely be able to pursue these things. Just don’t focus this particular essay on, say, the dance team.
Prompt 2
What drives your interest in pursuing your chosen major (e.g., Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or Computer Science)? How do you envision engaging with Cooper’s labs, research opportunities, and faculty? (350 words)
Like the first prompt, this prompt is one of the college essay archetypes: the “Why Major?” prompt. We recommend reading our general post on these prompts as well, if you haven’t already.
Additionally, you may have already written a response to one of these prompts for another school. While you may include some similar elements, like the “Why School?” prompt you want your essay to feel fresh and unique, not like a template. Engineering programs are not the same at every school.
There are three primary things you want your essay to accomplish:
- Show your reader how you have developed your interest in your major
- Describe your goals for the future
- Explain how the major at Cooper Union specifically will help you reach those goals
We’ll now talk through each of these points, and provide some tips on how to do these things successfully.
First, as you think about how you became interested in your major, remember that, like with any college essay, a strong anecdote goes a long, long way. Say an applicant, Amanda, is intending on majoring in civil engineering. Below are some examples to illustrate how she might begin her essay.
Weak example: “When I was a kid, I always loved building roads with my set of blocks. When I got older, I started thinking about how I could build those same roads, but life-sized.”
Strong example: “‘Amanda, dinner!’ My mom’s voice floated up the stairs to my room, where I sat in the middle of a spider web of wooden roads and train tracks. In my mind, however, this was not just a toy. This was the future of transportation in Los Angeles.”
Even though the information communicated here is the same, the strong example immediately pulls your reader into the essay, and the writing has an energy that the weak example is missing. Particularly in an essay of this length, you want to be engaging, and if your tone is dry, the actual points you’re making may be lost on your reader.
Next, think about how you see yourself utilizing your degree in the future. If we keep going with the Amanda example, she might want to be a city planner with a focus on sustainable living. The next question is: how will Cooper Union help you do this?
For Amanda, she might write about how Cooper Union has facilities for wastewater, soil, and hazardous waste analysis, and by studying samples from different areas, she would be able to learn how to minimize a city’s impact on the environment.
Remember that you have already written a “Why School?” supplement, and the school-specific opportunities you cite here should be different from those you mentioned in that essay. You only get so many chances to share yourself with the admissions committee, so you never want to waste one by being redundant.
Prompt 3
If you were to give a 30-minute lecture on a specific topic to an audience, what would your topic be and why? Why does this topic interest you, and what do you want others to understand or appreciate about it? (250 words)
While the first two prompts are fairly conventional, this one is much more open-ended, and as a result will require more creativity. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—these more unconventional essays can be a lot of fun to write. You just want to make sure you give yourself enough time to craft a strong response.
As you brainstorm what you want to write about, the most important thing is to be honest. Don’t worry about what you think will impress the admissions committee, as most of your application is already focused on showing off your talents and accomplishments. Instead, we recommend using this prompt to showcase part of your personality that might not come across in your GPA or activities list.
If you’re having trouble brainstorming, here are some open-ended questions that will hopefully help you think of passions you have that can carry a 250-word essay:
- What do you most enjoy talking about?
- What kinds of things do you share first with people you haven’t met before?
- If your best friend was describing you to someone else, what would they say your interests are?
Once you pick a topic, you want to identify anecdotes that illustrate what your interest in this topic says about you. You want to use your topic as a tool to showcase part of your character or personality.
For example, say you choose to write about your love for baseball, despite the sport’s declining popularity amongst young people. What you don’t want to do is compare baseball to basketball, and psychoanalyze the reasons why young people prefer the latter.
While this essay might be interesting to read, the admissions committee will learn more about the popularity of different sports leagues than about you.
Instead, you could write about how your dad often worked night shifts when you were little, but during baseball season he would take a night off once a month to take you to a game, and these were some of the only times you were able to bond with your dad.
While most of your friends think baseball is boring, to you the slower pace of the game represents a respite from the chaos of everyday life, and an opportunity to genuinely enjoy someone else’s company and connect with them over hot dogs and cotton candy.
This second approach shows your reader that your family is important to you, and that you value balance in your life. Baseball is just the lens you use to illustrate these qualities to your reader. As you revise your essay, the most important thing to ensure is that the essay is about you, not baseball (or whatever you’re writing about).
Prompt 4 (Optional)
Students often ask us how and where they can include additional information or documents. You may use this space to include a resume, a summary of notable accomplishments, activities, leadership roles, awards, a research abstract, a link to a digital portfolio, links to online projects/videos, etc. You may upload or type your response. Please limit the response to two pages. (800 words)
Although this prompt is optional, we always recommend you take advantage of all the opportunities you have to make your case for admission. This prompt allows you to provide additional information that showcases your achievements, skills, and passions, so this is your chance to present aspects of your candidacy that may not fit elsewhere, to give Cooper Union admissions officers a fuller picture of who you are.
While the prompt is quite open-ended, that doesn’t mean you can write about anything you want–use this space wisely. You want to highlight the most relevant and impressive aspects of your background that align with your intended field of study and your overall application narrative, and that you haven’t already discussed elsewhere.
This last point is crucial: don’t just use this prompt to repeat something you’ve already said in another part of your application. That doesn’t mean you can’t reference things that are briefly mentioned somewhere else. For example, you could describe some of your extracurricular achievements that didn’t fit into the Common App’s activities list, but you wouldn’t want to just repeat that list exactly.
While we do generally encourage you to complete optional prompts, for this one, if you genuinely don’t have anything new to include or elaborate on, then you don’t need to respond. This is a more factual supplement, which isn’t designed to include reflection, so if you just don’t have anything else to say, leave it blank–you don’t want to seem like you’re forcing anything.
That being said, this is a great way to attach anything that you want considered for your application that didn’t quite fit anywhere else. Because there are so many ways to effectively answer this prompt, there is no single structure or formula to follow, but we’ll get into what your response could look like to inspire you and give you an idea of how to take advantage of this space.
Just as the prompt says, there are several different formats to consider: a resume, digital portfolio, online project, etc. This space should complement the rest of your application, by fitting into the broader narrative you have. For example, if you’re interested in mechanical engineering, maybe you include a video of yourself testing out a slingshot you designed in your physics class.
You could also write about something that might be more of a hobby than a formal involvement, but is still highly relevant to understanding who you are and why you’re a good fit for Cooper Union. For example, if you’re a Fine Arts applicant, you could describe repainting your family’s bird feeder each season, using natural dyes, to be more inviting to birds.
Another good option is a writing sample. Essays or research papers you received positive feedback on can be a great way to make yourself stand out. If the accomplishment you want to include is physical and unavailable online, like a competition you won or experience you had, you could write a summary of what you did. Just make sure it’s detailed, focused, and concise–this space isn’t designed for lengthy reflection.
That said, whatever you decide to include, it is a good idea to briefly explain its significance. Don’t just list awards or activities, but explain why they matter and what they demonstrate about your abilities or character. You might also want to demonstrate impact by highlighting how your contributions or leadership roles have made a difference, whether in your school, community, or a specific project.
Again, though, this should all be done concisely–this isn’t a full essay. For example, with your slingshot video you might say:
“This project taught me the importance of choosing your building materials wisely, and inspired me to learn more about how various polymers hold tension.”
Or, for the birdfeeder example, after describing what you actually did, you could add:
“This project showed me the importance of designing spaces for those who use them. I’ve now tried to use this skill in other areas of my life as well, like when setting up movie nights at the senior center where I volunteer, by including posters of actors who were famous when the residents were young, rather than those who are currently popular.”
Most of all, keep it organized. Structure your response clearly – if you’re providing a summary of different items (e.g., a resume), consider using bullet points or headings to make the information easy to digest.
Whatever structure you use, it should be concise and focused. With up to 800 words or two pages, you have room to elaborate if necessary, but avoid rambling or including irrelevant details. Unlike other supplements, you don’t need to use 100% of your space–every word or attachment should directly connect to the strength(s) you’re highlighting.
Where to Get Your Cooper Union Essays Edited For Free
Do you want feedback on your Cooper Union essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool, where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.
Need feedback faster? Get a free, nearly-instantaneous essay review from Sage, our AI tutor and advisor. Sage will rate your essay, give you suggestions for improvement, and summarize what admissions officers would take away from your writing. Use these tools to improve your chances of acceptance to your dream school!
