CollegeVine College Essay Team August 18, 2024 9 Essay Guides 2024-25

How to Write the Haverford College Essays 2024-2025

Haverford College has two, short supplemental essays: one about your intellectual interests, and one about Haverford’s Honor Code. As a small, academically rigorous school just a short train ride from Philadelphia, Haverford attracts a competitive pool of applicants, so you want to make sure your essays stand out. In this post, we’ll break down both prompts, and explain how to write strong responses to each one.

Haverford College Honor Code

Before we dive into the essays, we want to provide some background on the Haverford Honor code. Here’s what you need to know.

Haverford College has one of the oldest and one of the very few student-run Honor Codes in the U.S. Our Honor Code is not a set of rules, but rather a statement of shared values centered on the concepts of trust, concern, and respect.

Our Honor Code serves as an educational tool in and of itself and provides a powerful framework for our community, emphasizing and supporting qualities we see as essential to a Haverford education. Among other things, the Honor Code at Haverford shapes:

Academic Freedom: The Honor Code fosters an atmosphere emphasizing academic integrity, collaboration over competition, and the cultivation of intellectual curiosity. Differences and disagreement are respected, valued, and embraced, and open discourse is seen as fundamental to the academic endeavor.

Student Agency: The Honor Code upholds a culture in which students are deeply trusted to take substantial ownership of their education and to profoundly shape and define the Haverford community. Student ownership is reflected in self-scheduled exams, in the fact that every student completes a Senior Thesis, in shared responsibility for the residential experience, and of course in oversight of the Honor Code itself.

Community: The Honor Code establishes a supportive environment for living and learning, where the community experience plays a central role in one’s education. The inherent value of every community member is recognized, and diversity in all respects — including diversity of background, experience, and perspective — is nurtured, celebrated, and embraced.

Leadership and Engagement: The Honor Code allows every student to find and develop their own voice, to practice ways of improving community and acting on issues of importance, to learn methods of problem solving and conflict resolution, and to examine the ways they can and will impact the world beyond Haverford.

Before delving into Haverford’s supplementary essays, it is extremely important to have a solid understanding of Haverford’s Honor Code and its role in Haverford’s community. At first glance, Haverford’s Honor Code may appear to be an explicit set of rules that are designed to govern the lives of students, forcing them to comply with specific guidelines and standards. However, the goal of the Honor Code is not to restrict students, but rather to allow for more freedom.

The Honor Code fosters a community grounded in honesty, fairness, and respect. These values create an environment where students feel not only comfortable, but confident sharing their own ideas, opinions, and beliefs. Diversity in thought, belief, culture, and perspective are not only recognized, but accepted and celebrated.

The values of the Honor Code afford students an unprecedented level of control over their education and community. Since it is expected that students adhere to a high degree of honesty and integrity, students are trusted by the administration as well as their professors and peers. For instance, Haverford students don’t have RAs in their dorms, are allowed to take tests without proctors, and are able to schedule their own final exams. These freedoms and privileges can exist because of the values of the Honor Code. 

Haverford’s Honor Code also presents an opportunity for self-governance. At Plenary, an all-student “governing” session, students can debate and vote to revise the Honor Code. In this way, students have the autonomy to change and improve Haverford’s campus. 

While Haverford’s Honor Code is taken seriously, consequences for infractions are not seen as punishments, rather as opportunities to instill lifelong lessons. Consequences are decided upon by the Honor Council, composed of students, not members of the school administration. It is the hope of the Haverford community that through this process, students will take ownership for their bad decisions, learn from them, grow as community members, and realize that they have the power to control their circumstances both inside and outside the classroom.

As you write your supplemental essays, keep Haverford’s values in mind. Incorporating their values into your essays not only shows that you did your research, but also creates connections between yourself and the Haverford community. For instance, Haverford’s collaborative environment could enable you to work with your peers to understand complicated mathematical theorems. Or, Haverford’s respectful and accepting community could empower you to debate the best policies to solve climate change. Regardless of the interests you choose to express in your essays, it is always a good idea to connect your thoughts to Haverford’s Honor Code and core values. 

Haverford College Supplemental Essay Prompts

This prompt is an excellent opportunity for you to showcase your interest in a specific subject or topic. Although it is not a “Why Major?” prompt, as you have the freedom to write about any of your intellectual interests, not just your intended major, the overall structure of the essay will be similar: you want to select one of your interests, which could be as obscure as Victorian fashion or as common as math, and explain why and how your topic excites your intellectual curiosity, as well as how you’ll be able to continue learning about it at Haverford.

Starting your essay with an anecdote is a great way to show your interest in your topic to readers, rather than simply telling them about it. For example, you could begin by telling the story of how you became interested in art after your first visit to an art museum. Or, you could describe what thoughts and emotions you experience when creating art. Since you’re dealing with a low word count, your story should be pretty simple, as you don’t have the space to flesh out something complicated.

The next part of your essay should focus on the deeper reason why you are so interested in your topic or subject. In other words, what specifically about your topic makes you excited to learn more? Maybe you love science because it explains how everything in the world works, from plants growing to playing tennis. Or, maybe you’re passionate about music because it has the power to inspire and connect people.

While this essay is a short one, you ideally also want to explain, at least briefly, what you do to satisfy your curiosity about this topic. Do you read every available book on Egyptian pyramids? Do you debate the most successful political campaign strategies with your family at dinner? This extra detail will give your reader a clearer sense of how your interest in your topic manifests on a daily basis, which will make your interest feel more tangible and genuine.

Finally, you want to connect your interest in your topic to your potential future as a Haverford student. Hop onto Haverford’s website, and do some research on classes, clubs, or other opportunities at Haverford that will allow you to keep learning about it. Since you probably won’t have much room left by this point, you want to pick just one or two things, as otherwise the end of your essay will feel cramped and rushed.

For example, you could talk about how the College Year in Athens study abroad program would deepen your understanding of Greek mythology, by allowing you to see firsthand many of the sites that were most important to the Ancient Greeks. 

Alternatively, you could write about how the clubs Charcuterie Union and Food for Thought would expand upon your interest in cooking, and help you develop a more comprehensive understanding of the role food can play in different people’s lives.

Brainstorming Your Topic

This prompt tells you pretty much exactly what it wants to know: the values you’re looking for in a college community, and how those values align with Haverford’s. However, while the questions are clear, answering them thoughtfully may take some time, as you’ll need to reflect on what your values truly are.

With a question as open-ended as “What do you value in your communities?” sometimes asking yourself related, slightly more focused questions can help you brainstorm more efficiently. Here are some examples of those kinds of questions:

• What are some of your favorite communities you’re a part of? What makes you love them so much?
• When you think about your friends, what qualities do many of them share?
• Look at your complete college list—why are you applying to this particular set of schools, out of all the colleges in the United States and across the world?

The actual values you choose are much less important than those values being genuinely important to you. One applicant might write an excellent essay about trust, while someone else might write an equally strong one about open-mindedness. But if you try to force a connection to something that isn’t really one of your primary values, your reader will be able to tell you aren’t being fully authentic.

Finally, as you’re brainstorming you’ll likely come up with a list of several different values. But because this essay is so short, you’ll want to focus on just one, or two at the most, once you start writing. Otherwise, you won’t be able to give each value the attention it needs, and your essay will end up feeling all over the place.

Tips for Writing Your Essay

In your actual essay, the most important thing to do is connect the value or two you’re focusing on to Haverford’s values, specifically those laid out in the Honor Code. If you’re having a hard time doing that, you may want to go back to the drawing board. For example, valuing a good sense of humor is a wonderful thing, but doesn’t connect super well to anything in the Honor Code.

A better thing to focus on would be, say, speaking up about what’s important to you. You could easily connect that value to the following two lines of the Honor Code:

• “The Honor Code allows every student to find and develop their own voice, to practice ways of improving community and acting on issues of importance.”

• “The Honor Code upholds a culture in which students are deeply trusted to take substantial ownership of their education and to profoundly shape and define the Haverford community.”

Once you feel confident that you’ve linked your own values to Haverford’s, you want to think about how to clearly explain that link to admissions officers. Here, Haverford is once again being considerate, and telling you pretty much exactly how they want you to do that, in the second paragraph of the prompt.

To summarize, that paragraph is telling you to use concrete examples and anecdotes to explain how you came to have this particular value. In other words, show, don’t tell, because otherwise, your reader won’t really understand what you having this value says about your personality as a whole. Plenty of people value outspokenness, but the point of the college essay is to distinguish yourself from other applicants. So, you want to show what the value you have chosen means in the context of your life specifically, and why that value’s importance in your life has inspired you to apply to Haverford. 

For example, you could talk about how you hated attention as a kid, and preferred to just spend time with your family’s pets. But during the pandemic, seeing people adopt pets for company without knowing how to take care of them frustrated you to the point that you started your own YouTube channel, to explain how to avoid making common first-time pet owner mistakes. To your surprise, the channel became extremely popular, and many people wrote comments thanking you for your help. Speaking up is still hard for you, though, and being on Haverford’s campus, where outspokenness is encouraged, will help you continue to get better at it.

Mistakes to Avoid

Because this prompt is so explicit about what it wants, it’s pretty hard to get totally off-track. The only thing you really want to be wary of is using your space in an inefficient way. 200 words will disappear quickly, so you want to make sure you’re being thoughtful about how long you spend addressing each part of the prompt.

Otherwise, you may end up accidentally using 160 words explaining how you came to have the value you’re focusing on, and then have to cram in the connection to Haverford at the very end. There’s no one correct breakdown of how long you should spend on each point of your essay, as ideally one thing flows naturally into the next. Just make sure the connection to Haverford gets enough room to breathe, as, since that part is likely going to come at the end, it’s at the most risk of getting cut short.