CollegeVine College Essay Team August 17, 2024 5 Essay Guides 2024-25

How to Write the University of Georgia Essay 2024-2025

So you have decided to apply to the University of Georgia, where the only thing hotter than your ardor for the Georgia Bulldogs will be your animus toward the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets and the Georgia summer heat. 

While the school is well-known for its back-to-back football national championships, its campus also boasts a wide array of pre-professional career tracks into any one of its specialized colleges, such as the Terry College of Business, the College of Veterinary Medicine, or the School of Social Work. Whichever field of study you end up choosing, you’ll get all the excitement that comes from going to a large research university with almost 30,000 other undergraduates.

Of course, a large student body also means the University of Georgia receives a high number of applications. One of the best ways to help yourself stand out from the crowd is by crafting a strong supplemental essay, which is why we’re going to give you detailed guidance on how to tackle this year’s UGA prompt.

Read this University of Georgia essay example to inspire your own writing.

University of Georgia Supplemental Essay Prompt

This prompt may have caused you to do a double take. What? An essay about a middle school book? Don’t worry, the admissions committee isn’t trying to trick you. You are actually allowed to write about a book that impacted your transition from your tweens to your teens.

The motivation behind asking this question is to see how you approach and handle large changes. The transition from middle school to high school is a turbulent time that in many ways mirrors the transition from high school to college—increased responsibility, new friendships, more academic challenges, finding yourself, etc. Although you are framing your development through the lens of a book, the real core of your essay is about the challenges you faced and how you handled them.

As you start brainstorming your essay, there are two routes you can take.

1. Pick a book first and tie it back to your life.
2. Pick a challenge in your life and find a book that relates to it.

Either approach is valid, it simply depends on what stands out to you more. If you had a book you were in love with that deeply resonated with you when you were 13 or 14, pick that! Think about what drew you to the book. Did the main character experience a challenge similar to you at the time? Did you find parallels to reality in the social commentary? Was there a prevalent theme that inspired you? Asking yourself these questions can help you recall what was so monumental about the book so you can draw a connection to yourself.

It’s also okay to not have any book immediately jump out at you. In that case, you can start by thinking about yourself during that time frame and ask yourself what big changes or challenges you faced. Maybe you struggled to maintain old friendships when you moved to a bigger school. Maybe you became self conscious about your looks and struggled with confidence. Maybe you found a passion for a particular extracurricular activity. Once you pick something important, you can think about books you read that relate to your experience in some way.

Before we get any further, it’s important to remind you to pick a book you actually read. The prompt isn’t asking for the most impressive book you’ve ever read, so don’t pull out War and Peace just because you think it will make you sound sophisticated. The book you pick should reflect what you read as a 13 year old (give or take a few years), so there’s no penalty for choosing Divergent or a young adult romance book.

When you have both your book and your connection to yourself, you need to ask yourself what role the book played in your development. For some students, it might be that they saw themselves in the main character and drew strength from their actions to act more courageously towards the challenges in their life. For other students, maybe there was a central theme like not belonging that resonated with them and made them feel like they weren’t alone when they read, despite feeling that way at school. Maybe some students were spurred to change their actions upon reading a negative depiction of a character.

The connection you have to the book should be extremely personal. One hundred students could pick The Outsiders, but every student could have a different explanation for why that book helped them through their transition. Describing your unique connection to the book and the impact it had on you is the most important part of this essay, so make sure you go into as much detail as possible.

If you are unsure whether or not your essay explains the impact of the book on your life well enough, you can always use an anecdote to highlight the point you are trying to make. You can also use creative writing to your advantage and write your essay as if you were in the book. Just be careful not to get so creative that you take away from the heart of your essay!

At the end of the day, this should be one of the more fun supplemental essays you get to write. You don’t have to worry about selling yourself as a talented high school student; you are allowed to be young and yourself in this essay. Your book and its impact can be as deep as you want or more on the lighthearted side. Don’t overthink it!