How to Write the Hamilton College Essays 2024-2025
You might recognize Hamilton College for its namesake—Alexander Hamilton—but like the man who lent his name to the school, Hamilton College has so much to offer beyond just a powerful name. The combination of an excellent liberal arts education with the serene surroundings of upstate New York attracts thousands of applicants each year.
Hamilton has just one supplemental essay prompt this year, which is technically optional, but we strongly encourage you to respond to it. Hamilton has become much more selective in recent years, with its acceptance rate going from over 20% to under 12%, and this essay is a fantastic opportunity to set yourself apart in a competitive applicant pool by showing what you have to offer beyond the numbers.
Read this Hamilton essay example written by a real student to inspire your writing.
Hamilton College Supplemental Essay Prompt
At Hamilton, we each bring different backgrounds and perspectives, and we teach one another about the world through our individual and shared experiences. In the spirit of Hamilton’s motto, Know Thyself, please reflect on your unique perspective and how Hamilton might shape it, as well as how your perspective will shape Hamilton. (350 words, optional)
For this prompt, Hamilton wants to know about an aspect of your background or personality that will influence how you will interact with the Hamilton community. This is your opportunity to communicate what makes you unique and how that will be an asset at Hamilton. It might help you to consult our guide to writing a diversity essay, even though this prompt isn’t exactly the same thing.
Since the word count is relatively short, students might be tempted to just focus on how Hamilton will shape their perspective and how their perspective will shape Hamilton, but we caution against this. Rather than writing a cookie cutter essay that says something like “Hamilton will teach me to be more open-minded toward new ideas…”, the focus of your essay should be on what your unique perspective is and how it came to be.
You might be asking yourself, what is my perspective? It can be anything—from values to beliefs to or from identity to traditions. Below are a few examples to get you thinking about the range of potential answers:
- Working at your family’s restaurant makes you value hard work and accountability
- Being a racial minority and facing discrimination has taught you to approach everyone with kindness
- Growing up with multiple siblings made you highly competitive in a way that motivates you to reach your full potential
- As an avid surfer, you strongly believe in trying to reduce climate change to help ocean life
- Your passion for photography makes you appreciate the beauty found in the little details
The key thing to notice is that in each of those examples there is a perspective, but also a description of what influenced or brought about that perspective (e.g, a passion for photography led to the perspective that mundane little things can contain beauty). In order to get “full points,” so to speak, with the admissions officers, you need to show where your perspective came from. This is the deeper elaboration that turns a decent response into a really good one.
In order to fully elaborate on your perspective and show what influenced it, you should include an anecdote. Storytelling is the most engaging and effective way to convey such a point to your reader, and it makes the essay flow more smoothly.
Once you have a strong anecdote that shows your unique perspective, you can apply it to Hamilton. When talking about how Hamilton will shape your perspective, consider how your perspective might be challenged or supported. Will you be taking classes that question your perspective? Will you join a group of like-minded students who share your perspective?
Go beyond a basic answer like “At Hamilton I will experience new ideas from a range of diverse perspectives.” Include predictions on how your perspective will be shaped with specific examples:
“In the course Digital Technology and Social Transformations, I will not only find support for my belief that social media can bring about societal change, but I will also learn how to effectively harness the power that social media holds.”
You aren’t quite done yet. Along with discussing how Hamilton will shape you, you need to explain how your perspective can shape Hamilton. Now, you might not be influencing the campus as a whole, but you will have an impact on your classmates, the people in your dorm, and members of any organizations you join. Explain how you will share your perspective with any group you’ll interact with and how you anticipate that perspective affecting them.
For example, to continue with the example above, you might say something like “I’ve already started to do so at my high school, by setting up the inaugural school-wide March Madness tournament and running Twitter and Tik Tok accounts with updates on how each game could affect the standings. I look forward to bringing this tradition to my freshman floor as well, to give us one last bonding experience before we go our separate ways on campus at the end of the year.”
Where to Get Your Hamilton Essays Edited For Free
Do you want feedback on your Hamilton 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!
