How to Write the Lewis & Clark College Essays 2025-2026
Lewis & Clark College, located in Portland, Oregon, is a private liberal arts institution known for its strong commitment to global awareness, sustainability, and interdisciplinary learning. This year, Lewis & Clark has one required essay, however students can choose from two different prompt options.
In this post, we’ll share our advice for writing the Lewis & Clark supplemental essay.
Lewis & Clark College Supplemental Essay Prompts
Prompt: To help us get to know you better, please provide a short response to one of the following questions (300-400 words).
Option A: Most colleges have mottos – a word or phrase that expresses the ideals that guide their actions. Lewis & Clark’s motto is Explorare, Discere, Sociare – to explore, to learn, to work together. Tell us about your personal motto and how it guides you (Latin not required).
Option B: At Lewis & Clark, we strive to be an inclusive community in which students benefit from exchanging ideas with people whose perspectives may differ from their own. Reflect on a time when you engaged with someone whose background or life experiences are different from yours and share with us what you learned from that experience.
Option A
Most colleges have mottos – a word or phrase that expresses the ideals that guide their actions. Lewis & Clark’s motto is Explorare, Discere, Sociare – to explore, to learn, to work together. Tell us about your personal motto and how it guides you (Latin not required). (300-400 words)
This prompt could be a good choice if you want to talk more broadly about your life story. Through the motto you choose, you can reveal your values to the admissions committee and share examples of how those values influence your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
The first step for approaching this essay is to develop a motto for yourself. Don’t be discouraged if this takes some time—it’s better to brainstorm for a few days and come up with something unique and authentic than to go with the first thing that pops into your brain. As the prompt says, you don’t have to use Latin in your motto like most colleges do—but that also doesn’t mean you can’t if you want!
In fact, maybe your first language is Spanish so your motto is in Spanish to reflect that aspect of your identity. That would be a great way to incorporate an important part of yourself in this essay. Just be sure that if your motto is in another language, you also include the English translation.
Mottos tend to be short phrases. They can be full sentences or just words strung together like Lewis & Clark’s motto. Here are a few mottos to inspire your brainstorming:
- Live every day like it’s your last.
- E pluribus unum (out of many, one).
- Eat healthy, sleep well, breathe deeply, enjoy life.
- Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered)
- Knowledge is power.
- When in doubt, dance it out.
- Cur non (why not).
Once you have a motto that you feel encapsulates your personality, you want to think of practical examples that you can use as anecdotes in your essay to demonstrate how this motto guides you. For example, if a student picked “When in doubt, dance it out” as their motto, they might have some stories related to dance competitions they’ve participated in, but maybe also a story about how before a big test, they studied by associating facts with dance moves and during the test they recalled answers by picturing the move. A detailed example like this would make for a great demonstration of how this motto permeates into all aspects of this student’s life—not just their hobbies.
The key is to make it clear how your motto reflects/influences your life. Whether you use your motto as a guiding principle for the actions you take, or it is a summary of who you are and what is important to you, the examples you highlight in your essay should naturally support the idea behind your motto.
Here are a few examples of how students can do that:
- Kyle: Do it scared – Kyle has always struggled with overthinking—whether it was auditioning for the school play or emailing a teacher with a question. Over time, he learned that waiting to feel “ready” often meant never acting at all. His motto, “Do it scared,” reminds him that courage doesn’t mean fear disappears; it means choosing to act anyway. It pushed him to apply for a summer research program in a new city and to start a podcast about student anxiety. At Lewis & Clark, he hopes to keep “doing it scared”—asking hard questions, trying new subjects, and exploring unfamiliar perspectives with honesty and grit.
- Lila: Alis volat propriis (she flies with her own wings) – Lila has always carved her own path, even when it meant standing apart from the crowd. When her friends joined established clubs, she started her own sustainability initiative, collecting leftover cafeteria food to donate to shelters. When people told her art and science didn’t mix, she designed an installation that visualized carbon emissions through light and sound. Her motto, Alis volat propriis — “She flies with her own wings” — reminds her that independence isn’t about isolation, but about trusting her instincts enough to take flight in new directions. At Lewis & Clark, she hopes to keep flying on her own wings — blending creativity and research to explore climate solutions that inspire both the mind and the heart.
Option B
At Lewis & Clark, we strive to be an inclusive community in which students benefit from exchanging ideas with people whose perspectives may differ from their own. Reflect on a time when you engaged with someone whose background or life experiences are different from yours and share with us what you learned from that experience. (300-400 words)
In today’s polarized world, it’s important to have the skills to engage in healthy debate with others. Lewis & Clark wants to know that you’re open to learning and changing your perspective, or that you’re able to respectfully share your viewpoint and convince others to change their beliefs.
Write down a list of possible experiences you had, and don’t worry about whether the topic/issue you were debating was “important” enough or not. What matters is the context around this discussion.
Your essay doesn’t necessarily need to be about traditional political debate topics, such as abortion or gun control. In fact, we encourage you to write about issues that will be a little less common, if you can think of some relevant experiences (local issues can be especially promising). Topics such as cultural appropriation, the ethics of thrifting and reselling, or whether your school district should get rid of its gifted program are all fair game.
After creating your list, reflect on which experience was the most transformative, intellectually stimulating, emotional, and unique. Which do you remember the most clearly and why? Once you’ve narrowed down your options into a few viable ones, pick the one that you feel will make it easiest to craft a compelling story.
When starting this essay, include just enough to set the scene. Don’t dwell on exposition, irrelevant details of the conversation, or negative emotions surrounding the event for too long. Who was there? How did you disagree, and why?
Make sure to provide just enough context before focusing on the second part of the essay: the change that occurred for you or the other person. A common mistake in this essay would be to spend too much time talking about the disagreement and not enough about your growth.
Really dive into how your thinking was shifted, or what you did to shift another’s thinking. What did you do during or after the discussion? Did you research it more deeply? Talk with others?
Finally, explain how this experience changed the way you engaged with others in the future. Do you now take a step back and consult more people before launching an initiative? Do you make sure to acknowledge the merit of the other side in discussions?
Here’s an example:
You’re the leader of your environmental club and launched a campaign for your school to ban plastic straws because of their negative impact on ocean life. Then, several disabled students messaged you to explain how they were against the measure since plastic straws can be necessary for accessibility. You organized a town hall with your club and everyone who messaged you. After hearing stories of students with mobility issues who couldn’t drink without straws, and their bad experiences with paper and metal straws (which pose injury risks), you realized that this initiative wasn’t inclusive, and the whole group brainstormed ways to make it so. In the end, it was this open and patient forum that led to you changing your mind, and the willingness of the opposed students to contribute to another solution. The final solution was an offering of both plastic straws for those who needed them, as well as reusable straws for others. Now, the environmental club regularly holds town halls to ensure that diverse voices can weigh in on future initiatives.
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