How to Write the Spelman College Essay 2025-2026
Spelman College is a private, historically Black, liberal arts college for women located in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1881, Spelman is known for its strong academic programs across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEM, and for cultivating leadership, creativity, and ethical engagement in the next generation of female leaders.
For the 2025-2026 application cycle, Spelman has one required essay for applicants to respond to. This essay is your chance to distinguish yourself from other applicants, so don’t pass up the opportunity to put your best foot forward. In this post, we’ll walk you through how to do that.
Spelman College Supplemental Essay Prompt
The Spelman College tagline is “A Choice to Change the World”. If you could create meaningful change around one issue in your school, community or globally, what would it be and how would you approach making this change? (300 words)
Brainstorming Your Topic
This is a good example of the “Global Issues” essay, which has become an increasingly common supplement in recent years. This kind of essay typically asks you to do two things: talk about an issue you’re passionate about, and explain what your interest in that issue has taught you about yourself, or how it has helped you develop certain attributes.
The first thing you’ll want to do is pick an issue to write about. Note that this issue can be something close to home, in your own community, or one that affects the entire world. If you do pick a global issue, however, make sure you identify something specific within that broad issue to focus on. For example, tackling climate change as a whole might be too ambitious given the size and scale of that issue.
Instead, think about which element of climate change you are most motivated to tackle. Are you heartbroken about the loss of habitat for species that live at the poles? Are you worried about increased cases of heat exhaustion and heatstroke exacerbating the flaws in the American healthcare system? Or are you concerned that the partisanship in the United States government will prevent any bill geared towards promoting green energy from passing?
These potential topics are zoomed in on one tiny part of the huge beast that is the climate crisis. That narrower focus will provide more structure for your thoughts, which will result in a more cohesive, easier to follow essay.
If you would rather write about a local issue, think about which headlines in your local newspaper grab your attention, or recent conversations you’ve had with your family or neighbors about things going on in the area. Maybe your town, like many in the United States, doesn’t have good public transportation, and you dislike how much space is taken up by parking lots. Or maybe a nearby puppy mill was recently discovered and shut down, but now the animal shelters are overwhelmed.
Whatever issue you choose to write about should be one you feel some genuine personal connection to. Maybe your dad is a real estate agent and always complains about an illogical quirk in your town’s zoning laws. You might know a lot about this issue for someone your age, but if you don’t really care about it, your essay will come across as dry and impersonal.
So, don’t structure your brainstorming around what will make you seem smart or impressive, as the thing that will actually convey those attributes is highlighting an issue that admissions officers can see is truly near and dear to your heart.
Tips for Writing Your Essay
The #1 key to writing a strong response is describing your issue in a way that is personal, so that your readers don’t just learn what the issue is, but also how your investment in solving these issues reflects who you are. You’re not a journalist, you’re a college applicant, so ultimately the most important thing to do is teach Richmond admissions officers something substantive about the type of person you are.
To do that, you’ll want to rely on personal anecdotes related to the issue you’ve selected. By seeing you in action, so to speak, admissions officers will learn something about how you think, how you work with others, what your primary values are, and so on.
If you’ve chosen a local issue, explaining it through specific examples from your own life should hopefully be pretty straightforward. Maybe you write about how your own dog was a rescue, which motivates you to help the puppy-mill dogs find forever homes, as you know that bringing in a rescue dog may present unique challenges, but also brings an unparalleled form of companionship.
For a larger scale issue, your example might be more tangentially related, as it’s possible this issue is something you’ve become passionate about just through observation, rather than a direct link to your own life. That’s okay, so long as it’s still clear how we’re getting from point A to B. For example, maybe you’re from Seattle, and write about how the increasingly frequent heat waves, and lack of equal access to something as simple as a fan during these periods, makes you worry about what the future, with consistently extreme heat having more and more severe consequences, will look like.
Finally, note that Richmond isn’t just asking you to describe an issue you care about, but also to propose “an action or policy” to help address it. This requirement may seem intimidating at first, but don’t worry–admissions officers aren’t expecting you to enact world peace overnight. They just want to see that you’re able to think critically about an issue and be creative in identifying potential ways to make the world a little better, as that’s a huge part of what you’ll be asked to do in your classes once you arrive on campus.
In coming up with your solution, it’s not a bad idea to see if you can draw on your other interests, to both demonstrate your creativity and subtly teach Richmond admissions officers something new about you. For example, maybe you’re a big baseball fan, and propose collaborating with the local team to host a meet-and-greet with players where puppies are also available for adoption.
Or, perhaps you’re interested in learning about other cultures, so to offset the negative health effects of extreme heat, you propose a drastic change to the American work schedule–the implementation of a siesta, to allow people to relax when the heat is most intense, like they have long done in areas closer to the equator.
If you’re feeling stuck, take a step back from your actual essay, and ask yourself honestly: what would you like to do about this issue? Remember, this is a college essay, not a congressional bill, so you don’t have to worry about other people agreeing with you. You want your solution to make sense, and acknowledge the complexity of your issue–you wouldn’t want to, for example, say that to combat the health consequences of extreme heat we should simply force more people to go to medical school–but as long as you do those two things, there really aren’t any rules about what you can and can’t do.
Mistakes to Avoid
As we touched on in the “Tips” section above, the biggest pitfall with this kind of essay is focusing too much on the issue, and not enough on yourself. Particularly if you’re writing about something you’re already extremely knowledgeable about, pay attention to make sure your essay doesn’t turn into a newspaper article.
While it’s okay to include some background context about your topic, to prove that you are truly passionate about it, this is still a reflective piece of writing. So, don’t cite a million facts and figures because, while that may be educational for Richmond admissions officers, it won’t give them a clearer sense of how you’ll fit into their campus community. Instead, make sure that your discussion of your issue always connects back to something you have learned about yourself as a result of your interest in it.
You also want to be careful that you don’t accidentally offend your admissions officer with your discussion of the issue. Higher education as a whole leans much further left than society in general, but you still never know what perspectives your particular reader will have. So, avoid blaming one group or another for causing the issue or obstructing its resolution, and instead keep the focus on you and your own potential to help.
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