CollegeVine College Essay Team September 25, 2023 17 Essay Guides 2023-24

How to Write the Lehigh University Essays 2023-2024

Lehigh University has 2 required supplemental essays, and then 3 optional essays for those students who may be looking to apply to some of Lehigh’s specialized programs.

As a small liberal arts university, Lehigh puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of writing, and so it’s important to write strong essays. In this post, we will be detailing how to answer all these questions, both those prompts for all applicants and those for any applicants wishing to apply to any of Lehigh’s specialized programs! 

Lehigh University Supplemental Essay Prompts

Overview

We know you’ve been writing what feels like thousands of essays, so you’ll probably be happy to hear that these essays are all 300 words or less. While that may be a relief, it should also raise a bit of a red flag – short word counts can actually be a bit more demanding since they require you to condense a lot of important information (like how great and qualified you are) into a very small space. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you don’t need to spend a lot of time on these essays just because they’re short. But don’t worry. We know – easier said than done. But rest assured that we’re here to help you write some brilliant essays!

This prompt probably doesn’t need much interpreting—it’s a straightforward “why this college” essay. This essay wants to know what prompted you to apply to Lehigh and how you first learned about their institution. You’ll notice that the word count here is pretty short, at a measly 150 words. That’s not a lot of space at all, so make sure to be concise and get straight to the point.

The most common mistake that people make with “why this college” essays is that they’re too general. They write an essay that any applicant could write because they list the aspects of Lehigh that anybody and everybody is excited about. This sends the message that the applicant didn’t do much research beyond a quick Google search. For this reason, admissions officers end up reading hundreds of practically identical essays. Instead of rattling off generalities, you want to make your essay unique and interesting!

So how do you find a unique aspect of Lehigh to talk about? Research! You can find a full list of ways to research for the “why this college” essay, but we’ll give you a quick breakdown now as well. 

• Start by making a list of all the reasons that you want to go to Lehigh. You might realize looking at this list that it’s full of generic answers such as “great location,” “good price,” and “my test scores are in the competitive range.” It’s okay! Use those answers to guide your research. 

• Look for more specific information about what Lehigh has to offer — like unique courses, an internship program, a club you’re interested in, or research projects. Now is a great time to head over to the university or department website or visit student social media groups. Or, even better, ask your guidance counselor to connect you to a current student to talk to! The more specific the information you include as your “why Lehigh,” the more you’ll stand out.

You may think that admissions officers are looking for a specific answer, but the truth is that they really just want to get to know you better! There are no wrong answers, and trying to give a “correct” answer is boring and overdone! Find something you’re genuinely passionate about and run with it.

You may find yourself getting so caught up in the “why Lehigh” part of the question that you totally forget to answer the part about how you first heard about Lehigh. Don’t fall into that trap! No matter how good your essay is, skipping part of the prompt will make you appear careless and you certainly do not want that. Think back to the first time Lehigh was on your radar. Did a friend mention it to you? Do you live nearby? Maybe a character in your favorite TV show went there or you read about it in a book.

A mistake a lot of students make with essays like this—especially with such low word counts—is that they spend too much time writing about all the amazing things about the college. I know what you’re thinking: But isn’t the prompt asking me to talk about what I like about Lehigh? Well, yes and no. Admissions officers want to know what you like about Lehigh, but frankly, they already know that it’s an incredible institution and they don’t need you to remind them. They’re much more interested in what parts of you match up with their values.

Sound confusing? Think of it this way. Let’s say you’re interested in Lehigh because of Professor Christopher Burke’s social psychology research on dealing with stress through partner support. Prof. Burke isn’t applying to Lehigh and the admissions committee already knows all about him, so spending 100 words talking about how great he is wastes time and words. Instead, introduce your interest in his research, and then frame it around your own research experience on the effect of marital status on hypertension. Also, discuss how this resource is related to your professional goals; maybe this student wants to become a marriage counselor and this research will help him better understand the science behind the therapies, and even come up with new ones. 

If you’re still stuck, try checking out these “why this college” essay examples. Just remember to make it your own and stay true to yourself!

Prompt 2 (General Tips)

This question is an example of a diversity prompt, which asks you to think deeply about how you experience, think about, value, and support diversity in your life. Lehigh University wants to know what unique identities, experiences, or attitudes you’re going to bring to their campus. You can check out College Vine’s guide to writing the diversity essay for more general tips on how to think about this topic. 

We also want to note that while the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in June 2023 (you can learn more about how the end of affirmative action impacts college admissions in this College Vine post), many schools are now using diversity prompts to consider race on an individual basis in their admissions process. If your racial or ethnic background has impacted you significantly, this is your chance to tell Lehigh University.

As you develop your answer to one of these prompts, remember to think expansively about diversity. Diversity doesn’t just mean race, gender, sexuality, or socioeconomic status. You might also consider writing about your national or ethnic origin, disability, family structure, or even unique communities that you might be part of based on interests or hobbies. Remember, you want to highlight something that makes you stand out, so spend some time reflecting on how diversity shows up in your life, and what it means to you. 

This prompt asks you to consider the communities that you’re a part of, and how you envision the best versions of those communities. If you are passionate about activism and enacting positive change in the communities you’re a part of, this is the prompt for you! Since the prompt talks in hypotheticals, you don’t need to have examples of a major change you’ve created. Of course, if you do have experience with advocacy in your communities, you should highlight that. 

First, you’ll want to pick the community you plan to write about. This could be one of the ideas listed in the prompt itself, but it could also refer to a club or hobby that allows you to showcase passions you haven’t gotten a chance to talk about yet. The prompt allows you to go as broad as you’d like to, even as far as the global community, but keep in mind that choosing a smaller, specific setting allows you to discuss more personal and specific ideas. 

Maybe you’re a button collector, a founder of the foraging society in your town, or an online participant in forums discussing queer representation in the media. Whatever you choose, you should establish the community you’re going to talk about and what it means to you in the first quarter of the essay, leaving plenty of room to talk about how you envision diversity improving in this space.

The real meat of this question is in the change it asks you to envision in your chosen community, so you should spend most of your essay discussing what that looks like. Here, you have the opportunity to think creatively about how to make your space a more equitable one. Rather than saying something generic, like wishing your group had more members of color, try to come up with specific ways that increased accessibility and equity could make this community stronger.

For example, you might write about how your baking club usually brings in treats that members make at home, and how you’ve noticed that this might limit students from participating if they don’t have the time or money to bring something in. Maybe you have a vision of raising money and securing a space where the club could meet to bake together, so that everyone can participate equally. 

It’s important to remember that this question focuses on growth, so while lack of equity may be a point of deep frustration, you want to avoid focusing on any negative qualities that may impede progress toward equality. It’s great to be realistic and acknowledge these barriers where they exist, but the focal point of this essay needs to be your ideas for progress. 

Though you could write about factors that have shaped you and your beliefs directly, it’s hard to make this compelling and avoid writing a list of personality features. Choosing an obstacle or experience to illustrate your character and values is a stronger choice, making this an example of an Overcoming Challenges essay. You can check out College Vine’s guide for writing Overcoming Challenges essays for a good overview of this prompt. 

Since the overall prompt focuses on diversity, you may want to pick an obstacle, challenge, or experience that explores a diverse aspect of your identity or shows your engagement with and value for diversity. In choosing your challenge, try to pick something specific, unique, and meaningful to help distinguish you from other applicants. There are many ways to approach thinking about this. 

• Has your identity changed over time? What prompted this change, and what did you learn about yourself through this process?
• When is a time that you had to stand up for something you believed in?
• Have you ever had a long-held belief that was challenged or changed? What was that like?
• Have you ever had an experience that taught you something about who you are and what’s important to you?
• Describe a time when you encountered a new situation that you had to figure out how to navigate. What did you do? How did you decide what to do? 

As you write, make sure to pick an anecdote that demonstrates the qualities you want to emphasize. The most exciting or dramatic challenge may not be the best fit if it doesn’t actually show the values that you want to display. That might look many different ways. Here are some examples of things a student might write about:

• A Muslim student who had to work with her drama teacher to participate in a play while still being able to take a break to pray
• A wrestler who noticed homophobic jokes being made in the locker room and sought to change the culture of his team
• A student who participated in Debate Club and found ways to understand diverse perspectives in a case about reproductive rights 

With only 300 words to answer this prompt, you should define the obstacle or experience quickly, in the first quarter of your response. Make sure you describe why this experience was meaningful to you, and any relevant background details. The rest of your essay should focus on how you responded to the problem and what you learned from it, both about the world, and about yourself. Remember, the focus is on you and showing the Lehigh University admissions team the attributes and qualities that you possess, so the majority of your writing should be spent demonstrating a deep understanding of how this challenge and your response helped shape you into the person you are today.

This prompt is extremely broad and basically allows you to write about anything you want.

As you answer this prompt, beware of choosing a cliche or widely shared anecdote, like a sports injury, moving, or immigrating from one place to another. While this can be a very personal and deeply affecting story, there are many other prospective students that might choose to write about it. Make sure that your essay is particular to you and makes you stand out in the crowd of applicants.

This is another prompt that you might choose if you want to discuss a diverse identity feature, but one that can be equally effective with a non-identity focus. This is also a good opportunity to explore an attribute or interest that you haven’t yet had the chance to dive into in your application.

This should not be a list of everything that makes you unique, but should instead be a deep exploration of one thing you feel is important. Another mistake to avoid is only providing information about the interest or background you’ve chosen without explaining its connection to you. Lehigh University is interested in you, so what you write should focus on your engagement with the subject, its effect on you, and why you feel it is important in your life. 

Like the prompt discussed above, this is another prompt where an anecdote would be particularly compelling. Make sure your anecdotes are unique, richly detailed, and give insight into you and why your chosen subject is important to you. Consider this example excerpt of a student who chose to write about their engagement with the Deaf community:

Before the movie came out two years ago, most people had no idea what a “CODA” was, or why there would be a specific word for the child of Deaf adults. I grew up with people apologizing to me for living in a household that they thought lacked life and music, or explaining to my teachers why I had to interpret for parents who are white and look like they speak English. What these limited understandings of Deafness lacked was an appreciation of the warm, vibrant, and often very loud Deaf culture that has been my home for all my life. Whether it’s still being able to sign jokes to my dad with my mouth full, or being so attuned to facial expressions and body language that I can tell when people are lying, my parents’ Deafness has enriched my life in large and small ways that I wouldn’t trade for anything. 

Just like this student, you want to use detail to enrich your narrative, and rather than explaining the intricacies of the culture, group, or background you’ve chosen, let this be a way for Lehigh University to get to know you.

This prompt is for students looking to enter the Integrated Business & Engineering Honors Program only. It’s a fairly straightforward question that wants to know your rationale for being in the program and hear about your professional goals and how you believe the program can help you advance them. This is not a typical honors program for all liberal arts majors, but rather only specifically for those interested in integrating a STEM-based engineering education with a business mindset. 

The first thing you’ll need to do is write a list of reasons why you feel like you are interested in this program. Think about your career aspirations and how they fit within this program. Generally, there are two kinds of students who will be applying to this program:

The Business Major: The IBE program stands out to business students who are looking to understand how products are designed and manufactured in order to have a better sense of the development process from start to finish. Additionally, business students will learn the qualitative and problem-solving skills of engineering that can only help them in their business endeavors. Perhaps you’re someone who is interested in finance, the IBE program would help teach you analytic skills in regards to specific products and show you how to make judgment calls based on the development process as a whole.

The Engineering Major: For those students who are looking to go into some area of engineering, learning business skills through IBE will help them understand the decision-making process behind products. In doing so, engineering students can learn how to make their products more effective and fill the needs of the consumer or client. Having a business-oriented mindset will also aid them in the workplace and allow them to not only design products, but make decisions regarding the product in terms of development, distribution, and marketing. For example, perhaps you’re interested in mechanical engineering and want to work in the construction industry, learning business skills through IBE would help you understand how mechanical engineering is an essential part of the daily business of our lives and how construction can be idealized to benefit the public.

Knowing this, match the list of reasons you have for IBE to the kind of student you want to be. While you can end up getting a dual degree through IBE in engineering and business, you will need to select a concentration when you start off. Do you feel like you want to be a business student with an engineering integration or an engineering student with a business integration? If you’re still unsure, you can read more about the IBE program on their website, attached here. The website includes information about curriculums, courses, and other main staples of the IBE program, which brings us to our next step: figuring out how the IBE program can help your professional goals.

You obviously don’t have to know what career you’d like to have when you graduate college – that’s what college is there to help you figure out. However, it can be helpful to set goals for yourself that will guide your path throughout the program. 

Perhaps you want to launch a business that can solve a problem in your community – maybe you live in a coastal town and want to design a home appliance to protect your house from floods. While you may not know how to engineer that, you can discuss how the IBE program would help you with both facets of the endeavor – the business and the engineering behind the product. 

The IBE program offers a two-semester Senior Project course in which teams work with a corporate sponsor to actually go through a product development process. You could write about how you would hope to pair with an environmental engineering start-up that could work with your team to design a sustainable product for these coastal communities. You can even go further and mention how participating in both the Sophomore and Junior Laboratory programs, which primarily focus on educating students on the business and engineering sides of project development, would prepare you to take on a task of this stature.

Regardless of how sure you are of your goal, be as specific as you can and showcase your ambition.

This prompt is for students looking to enter the Integrated Business & Engineering Honors Program only. It’s a fairly straightforward question that wants to know your rationale for being in the program and hear about your professional goals and how you believe the program can help you advance them. This is a four-year program that will award you a degree from both Lehigh’s College of Business and their College of Engineering and Applied Science and thus is a highly rigorous and specialized program. It requires full commitment and dedication, which is what admissions representatives will be looking for in your response.

The first thing you’ll need to do is figure out what makes you interested in this specific program. Do you have an interest in computer science but want to know more about how you can apply it in business? Are you more interested in business but already know more about computer science? Do you want to combine both of them to eventually work at a tech start-up of the future? Whatever your goal may be, remember it’s not just about the finish line, but what about integrating computer science and business appeals to you? And that includes what you hope to do in the program at Lehigh.

For example, one of the most important offerings of the CSB program is the senior Capstone project, in which students will conduct a highly intensive design project often with the backing of corporate sponsors. Students will work with these corporate sponsors to attend to the company’s needs, often programming or designing internal systems for the company such as websites, applications, modules, and more. Discussing a specific offering like Lehigh’s capstone project will showcase how you wish to apply your skills in the business world. 

Perhaps you hope to work with a sustainability company to help design ways to connect people with more environmentally friendly ways to live. Maybe something as simple as connecting people with the nearest public recycling bin. You could write about how a project of that size with the guidance of a corporate sponsor would give you the hands-on experience of client-based work to help you succeed in the business world.

Whatever your reason for wanting to be a part of the CSB program may be, remember to showcase your driven and determined nature. Even if you’re not sure of what specifics you wish to get out of the program, there’s bound to be something on the CSB website that sticks with you. Do research, brainstorm, and write what most encapsulates your interest.

IDEAS, or the Integrated Degree in Engineering, Arts, & Sciences, is an honors program at Lehigh University that is aimed at students who are interested in obtaining an education in both liberal arts and STEM. The IDEAS honors program will require students to take courses in mathematics and sciences, and then gives students the ability to select whether they’d rather pursue an Engineering concentration or an Arts & Science concentration. 

All in all, IDEAS is for students looking for a cross-disciplinary education that can give them a really strong sampling platter of various fields of study. It is a rigorous four-year program, but one that provides a rewarding all-around experience. While IDEAS may offer a comprehensive education in several disciplines, it is not for students who are just simply undecided in their major, rather the contrary – it’s for students who know they desire a holistic education that engages a variety of interests and allows them to forge their own path from those interests. 

One of the key distinctions between high school and college is that whereas in high school you’re splitting your time evenly between math, science, English, and other subjects, in college you will generally have control over how much time, if any, you spend with each. For example, if you are an English major, it doesn’t make much sense for you to take Organic Chemistry – that is, of course, unless you want to be an IDEAS student.

Think about how you’ve enjoyed your high school experience. Maybe you’re someone who has an astute interest in philosophy as well as computer science. The IDEAS program would not only give you the ability to take courses across Lehigh’s various colleges and give you access to all the philosophy and computer science courses but also allow you the ability to define your own major and eventual career path. 

Using this example, perhaps you’re interested in how computer science and ethics intersect. You can write about specific examples of this such as how self-driving cars may need to make snap decisions based on how they’re programmed with the principles of human ethics. You can write about how the IDEAS program would give you the ability to learn about the intersection between ethics and engineering, thus giving you a highly-specialized profile to obtain your eventual career goals.

If you’re unsure of what your career goals or specific interests may be exactly, write down various subjects that interest you and then try to find the intersection between them. Chances are you can establish a connection between most two subjects, and your ability to do so will display creativity and determination. Admissions representatives for the IDEAS program are looking for students who are hoping to carve out their own path at Lehigh, so the more specific you can get the better.

Where to Get Your Lehigh University Essays Edited

Do you want feedback on your Lehigh 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. 

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!