How to Write the Swarthmore College Essays 2024-2025
Swarthmore College has two required supplemental essay prompts. The first prompt is about identity and background, and the second is about a topic that has fascinated you recently.
Since Swarthmore receives thousands of applications from academically strong students, your essays are one of your best opportunities to stand out. In this post, we’ll discuss how to craft an engaging response to each of these prompts.
Read this Swarthmore essay example to inspire your writing.
Swarthmore College Supplemental Essay Prompts
Prompt 1: Swarthmore College maintains an ongoing commitment of building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive residential community dedicated to rigorous intellectual inquiry.
All who engage in our community are empowered through the open exchange of ideas guided by equity and social responsibility to thrive and contribute as bridge builders within global communities.
Our identities and perspectives are supported and developed by our immediate contexts and lived experiences – in our neighborhoods, families, classrooms, communities of faith, and more.
What aspects of your self-identity or personal background are most significant to you? Reflecting on the elements of your home, school, or other communities that have shaped your life, explain how you have grown in your ability to navigate differences when engaging with others, or demonstrated your ability to collaborate in communities other than your own. (150-250 words)
Prompt 2: Swarthmore’s community of learners inspire one another through their collaborative and flexible approach to learning. Swarthmore students are comfortable with intellectual experimentation and connection of ideas across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and interdisciplinary studies through a liberal arts education.
Tell us about a topic that has fascinated you recently – either inside or outside of the classroom. What made you curious about this? Has this topic connected across other areas of your interests? How has this experience shaped you and what encourages you to keep exploring? (150-250 words)
Prompt 1
Swarthmore College maintains an ongoing commitment of building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive residential community dedicated to rigorous intellectual inquiry.
All who engage in our community are empowered through the open exchange of ideas guided by equity and social responsibility to thrive and contribute as bridge builders within global communities.
Our identities and perspectives are supported and developed by our immediate contexts and lived experiences – in our neighborhoods, families, classrooms, communities of faith, and more.
What aspects of your self-identity or personal background are most significant to you? Reflecting on the elements of your home, school, or other communities that have shaped your life, explain how you have grown in your ability to navigate differences when engaging with others, or demonstrated your ability to collaborate in communities other than your own. (150-250 words)
This prompt is a prime example of the common diversity prompt. Colleges that provide diversity prompts are interested in learning about your background and the influence it has had on your perspectives and personal growth.
In June 2023, the United States Supreme Court struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions. The ruling, however, still allows colleges to consider race on an individual basis, which is one reason many schools are now including diversity prompts as one of their supplemental essay prompts. If you feel that your racial background has impacted you significantly, this is the place to discuss that.
When approaching a prompt like this, there are some things to take into consideration. The most important of these things is what aspects of your background you choose to write about. Your background or communities you are part of can include ethnicity/race, country of origin, language, gender, hometown, income class/socioeconomic status, illness/disability, and even interests or activities.
In reality, a person’s self-identity is made up of a combination of all these things and more, but you have 250 words maximum to write your response, so it’s best not to get into every aspect. Do note, however, that the prompt specifies “aspects” as a plural, meaning you should write about more than one. Ideally, your response will pick two or three facets of your identity that complement each other in some cohesive way.
For example, consider the following hypothetical students:
- A Mexican-American student did a high school project on immigration to the United States. Her ability to interview immigrants in Spanish and her firsthand experience as the child of Mexican immigrants gave her a more nuanced view than someone who doesn’t have the same attributes, and allowed her to navigate the topic in a way that taught her classmates a lot.
- A student whose mother has an illness had to pick up a job to help his family financially. His life experiences—both with his mother at the hospital and as a forward-facing retail employee—dramatically increased his capacity for understanding and profoundly changed the way that he interacts with people. He has developed a high degree of empathy because of this.
- A student has had yearslong fascination with film direction and editing. Years of watching YouTube videos and documentaries about the filmmaking process have taught her a great deal about what things work and why. When she took an acting class in high school, her knowledge of direction allowed her to give insightful advice to her peers. This experience made everyone involved a stronger storyteller, and instilled in the student a deep appreciation of the usefulness of having different backgrounds in a group when tackling a singular issue.
In the first example, the student’s ethnic background and language helped her understand an important topic and convey it to others more thoroughly. In the second, the student’s role as the child of someone with a severe illness and his family’s socioeconomic status (as is implied by his getting a job) contribute to his increased empathy when interacting with others in general. And finally, the third student’s particular interest and growing expertise in a field allowed her to help improve her peers’ performances in a different, albeit related, field.
The above examples work because there is a direct throughline that connects each student’s aspects of identity to their individual growth. Note that even though the third student’s essay would only be about one aspect of identity, it’s a much less common aspect than the admissions committee is used to seeing, so its uniqueness is likely to compensate for the lack of other aspects. Additionally, if she found a way to make it relevant to her anecdote, that student could discuss her gender identity and the traditional level of underrepresentation that her identity has in her industry.
One thing you want to avoid is being generic. The examples above aren’t fully fleshed out because they are hypothetical topics—not example responses. In your essay, go beyond just saying something like “This environment taught me to value relationships with others.” Anyone could write that kind of sentence, and it really doesn’t offer the admissions officers much about what makes your background important or special to you.
There’s a golden rule of writing that you may have heard before—”Show, don’t tell.” Instead of offering a generic statement, consider using an anecdote in which your background plays a central role. Use the events of your anecdote to illustrate the lessons you’ve learned rather than just trying to explain the lessons in a nonspecific clichéd way.
No matter which aspects of your identity you choose to highlight, be sure that you can clearly convey the ways in which those aspects have helped you grow in your ability to navigate differences when you engage with other people or communities. Make sure your reader can see the direct links that tie your background, your anecdote, and your growth together.
Prompt 2
Swarthmore’s community of learners inspire one another through their collaborative and flexible approach to learning. Swarthmore students are comfortable with intellectual experimentation and connection of ideas across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and interdisciplinary studies through a liberal arts education.
Tell us about a topic that has fascinated you recently – either inside or outside of the classroom. What made you curious about this? Has this topic connected across other areas of your interests? How has this experience shaped you and what encourages you to keep exploring? (150-250 words)
This prompt is a bit like the common “Why This Major?” prompt, but is more broad. Instead of asking you about the major you’ve chosen, this prompt invites you to talk about any topic that has fascinated you recently. Prompts like this one are meant to gauge your curiosity, interests, and capacity for exploring new subject matter.
Before you begin writing, you’ll need to decide on a topic. Unlike a typical “Why This Major?” prompt, this prompt doesn’t restrict you to an academic subject. There’s nothing wrong with writing about an academic subject here, but if there’s something more extracurricular in nature that you’re really passionate about, that would be a great topic to write about. Remember, supplemental essays are there for you to give the admissions committee a more thorough look into who you are.
The best topic to write about in this essay will ideally be one you have been enthralled by recently. Think about the subjects you’ve spent a lot of time on lately. Perhaps you fell down a rabbit hole online and watched a dozen YouTube documentaries about the geopolitics of a country, or maybe you’ve been putting a lot of practice into learning the guitar.
Whatever your chosen subject is, make sure it’s something you’ve really enjoyed and cared about. Don’t write about some deeply cerebral scientific study you don’t know much about just because you think that’s what the admissions committee wants to hear. If you choose a subject that has truly fascinated you, your sincerity will shine through in your response.
That being said, specificity is important. While it’s good to be interested in a field broadly, an essay like this really benefits from particulars. For example, it’s easy to ramble generally for 250 words talking about how much you like filmmaking, but it would be even better to home in on your interest in the use of camera angles to convey subtle emotional connotations in a scene. The more specific you can get about your chosen topic, the more your genuine interest in it will come across in your essay.
Once you have narrowed your ideas down into something you want to write about, brainstorm answers to all the parts of the prompt:
- What made you curious about the topic?
- Has the topic connected across other areas of your interests?
- How has this experience shaped you?
- What encourages you to keep exploring?
You consider these questions carefully and honestly. If you got into a topic because your friend told you to look it up, that’s fine, but be sure to discuss what exactly about that subject piqued your interest and made you curious. Address each point the prompt is asking so you can have a complete answer.
Try to draw clear connections between other areas of your interests, and even your desired major if you can. Using the above filmmaking example again, a prospective psychology major who is interested in filmmaking and music as well might draw links between these disparate elements by mentioning her fascination with how film composers utilize music theory principles to evoke specific emotional responses.
Also talk about what the topic means to you. The prompt asks how your experience has shaped you and what encourages you to keep exploring. These questions are both great ways to gauge your personal growth and intellectual curiosity, so don’t miss this great opportunity to showcase those attributes.
Where to Get Your Swarthmore Essay Edited
Do you want feedback on your Swarthmore essay? 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!
