How to Write the Trinity College Essay 2025-2026
Trinity College is a prestigious liberal arts institution located in Hartford, Connecticut. It only has one optional supplemental essay this year, however, we strongly urge applicants to respond to this prompt as the supplemental essay is your best opportunity to distinguish yourself from your fellow applicants. Writing a strong essay that is engaging and informative just could be the deciding factor between admitting you and an applicant with a similar profile. Keep reading for our advice on writing Trinity College’s supplement.
Trinity College Supplemental Essay Prompt
Optional: The identities you claim, the challenges you face, and the successes you enjoy shape the background for your college experience to come. What is an aspect of your background that you are excited to share and/or explore as a member of the Trinity community and why? (300 words)
Brainstorming Your Topic
This is a classic example of the common “Diversity” essay, which you’ll likely come across more than once as you knock out your supplements. Or maybe you’ve already responded to this kind of prompt for another school, and are thinking of repurposing that essay here. If this is your first time tackling this kind of essay, don’t worry—we’re here to help you figure out exactly what you want to write about!
The first thing to note is that the way colleges evaluate race in the admissions process has changed since the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in 2023. Schools are now only allowed to consider a student’s race in the context of their overall story and background, and the essay is the perfect place to show how your race fits into the broader context of who you are.
What this means is that, if your race is an important part of your identity, we’d encourage you to think hard about focusing this response on it, as otherwise Trinity admissions officers will be incredibly limited in their ability to factor your race into their admissions decision.
Of course, if you don’t think your race is quite the right topic for you, that’s completely fine. There are many things that comprise our identities. You could write a strong essay about a different aspect of your identity that people typically associate with “diversity,” like your gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on. But you could also write about something more unconventional, like a hobby you’re unusually passionate about, or a particularly formative experience. Topics in this vein could include:
- The countless hours you’ve spent researching how analytics has changed how baseball teams evaluate their players
- Your experience driving the Pacific Coast Highway on your own last summer
- Your encyclopedic knowledge of where different cacti species grow, and how large they can become
So long as the thing you choose is genuinely important to understanding who you are overall, you’ll be able to write a strong response about it.
Tips for Writing Your Essay
The first step to writing a strong response is explaining why this feature of your identity is fundamental to who you are. You should do that using specific anecdotes that show, rather than merely tell, Trinity admissions officers why this quality of yours matters. If you just say “Coming to terms with my sexuality was hard, but ultimately worth it,” they may feel sympathy or pride towards you, but they won’t understand anything about how this process inspired your growth or development.
Instead, describe the anxiety you felt at any family gathering when your relatives would ask you if you had a girlfriend yet, and how you felt like a failure when your older brother got engaged to his long-term girlfriend. Then, you can transition into talking about how, during a backpacking trip with him and his fiancée, being away from the world for a few days made you feel comfortable enough to come out for the first time, and their immediate acceptance and love helped start to wash away your feelings of inferiority.
Don’t just give an overview of what happened. Instead, use strong descriptive language to fully flesh out your thoughts and feelings. Depending on what you’re writing about, some of those thoughts and feelings may still be quite raw, so keep in mind that, while showing vulnerability speaks well of your self-awareness and overall emotional maturity, you don’t need to bare your soul to a bunch of strangers. Only go as deep as you’re comfortable with.
You also want to make sure you’re addressing both pieces of the prompt. You don’t want to just describe this one feature of your identity, but also explain how it will help you contribute to Trinity’s campus community. That means admissions officers need to understand not just that your identity encompasses this one feature, but also what this one feature says about who you are as a whole.
Because you have a lot of space to work with, ideally you should also connect what you’ve learned from having this particular quality to a specific club, program, or even academic offering at Trinity. Your goal in this essay is to describe how one particular aspect of your identity has been especially important in shaping who you are, and who you will become at Trinity, and the best way to do that is by making a concrete connection between this feature of yourself and the school.
For example, the hypothetical student described above may talk about how his experience coming out to his brother taught him how empowering it is to have even one person on your side. And because he also knows how risky it feels to take that first step, at Trinity he hopes to become a Peer Mentor at the Queer Resource Center, so that he can be a source of comfort to students like him who are in need of a safe space to be themselves.
If he were to instead just say something general, like “I will draw on this experience whenever I interact with my peers, to ensure they feel supported even if I don’t know what they’re going through,” most of the work of envisioning him as a Trinity student is being left up to the admissions officers, as what he described is something he could do at any college. By citing a school-specific resource that will help him achieve this goal of supporting his peers, he paints a clear picture of himself as an empathetic, engaged member of the Trinity community.
Mistakes to Avoid
The main thing that can sometimes happen in this kind of essay is your response only focuses on the one aspect of your identity you’re highlighting, and doesn’t take that next step of zooming out to how this one feature impacts who you are as a whole. Once you have a strong working draft, take a second to double check you’ve addressed the broader significance, as otherwise your response won’t be as informative for admissions officers as it should be.
Additionally, it’s important to pick specific ways your identity will shape your college experience. Make sure you are addressing this prompt in the way you might address a “Why This College” essay by highlighting unique resources and opportunities at Trinity that you will engage with. Students who don’t do this will have essays that could apply to a multitude of schools, but the admissions officers want to read about how you will interact with their school specifically.
Where to Get Your Trinity College Essay Edited for Free
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