CollegeVine College Essay Team August 15, 2025 11 Essay Guides 2025-26

How to Write the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities Essays 2025-2026

University of Minnesota – Twin Cities requires applicants to submit two supplemental essays of 150 words or less. Applicants who intend to pursue a nursing degree must submit an additional three essays of 250 words or less. This post contains some tips for how to make your responses to UMN’s prompts as engaging as possible.

UMN is a fairly selective school, and writing strong essays is a great way to make yourself stand out throughout the application process.

Do you want to know how your profile stacks up at UMN? Calculate your chances for free right now.

University of Minnesota–Twin Cities Supplemental Essay Prompts

This supplement is a quintessential “Why This Major” prompt, which allows you to discuss academic interests, career plans, or even general subjects interests. What the University of Minnesota really wants is to see that you have spent time thinking about what you want out of your college experience, and that you’re prepared to make the most of it. It’s okay to be undecided, but you want to show that you have some direction and are looking forward to a future at U of M and beyond. 

Brainstorming Your Essay

You may already know what you’re going to study or where your career interests may lead. If not, spend some time reflecting on what excites you or interests you, inside the classroom and outside of it. Is there a topic you can’t stop talking about? Have you ever completed an assignment or participated in a project that felt more meaningful than the rest? When you think about your interests and hobbies, are there any consistent qualities, like a passion for service, a creative streak, or an individualist side?

As you consider what you might write about, you may have multiple options. Try to pick something that you’re genuinely interested in, so your authentic passion can shine through and help the admissions team get to know you. It helps to have a personal connection to your topic, but this doesn’t have to mean a story rooted in childhood. You could also talk about how you came to this interest or how you engage with it—just make it specific. Finally, it’s a good idea to at least mention how this interest might shape your future plans, whether at University of Minnesota or beyond. 

Hypothetical Student Examples

What do all these elements look like together? Let’s take a look at some hypothetical student examples.

• After building a low-cost prosthetic hand for his high school engineering club, Isaiah became fascinated by the intersection of mechanical design and human biology. He hopes to study biomedical engineering to develop affordable medical devices for underserved communities.
  

• Mariana’s passion for understanding voter behavior grew out of a project mapping turnout patterns in her city. She wants to combine political science with data science to create more equitable civic engagement strategies.
  

• Growing up near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, Surya developed a deep respect for wilderness preservation. He hopes to research sustainable forestry practices that balance ecological health with economic needs.

Each of these examples not only has a specific, personal origin story, but also shows the development and nurturing of this interest over time. That shows that your choice isn’t just a passing curiosity. The movement from the sparking of an interest, to developing it actively, to incorporating it into a future, all lends to a clear narrative story arc. Let’s look at a fleshed out example to see how these elements come together in a full-length essay. This student has chosen the Environmental Science & Policy major. 

Example Essay

As you can see, the personal interest, continued commitment, and vision for the future paint a strong picture of a student who is curious, driven, and hardworking. How can you structure your story to present the best of your academic self?

General Strategy

This question, like most questions for specialized programs, is intended to assess your commitment to pursuing a difficult, long-term path. Your primary focus here should be to convey, with concise focus and concrete examples, your commitment to and passion for nursing.

Furthermore, in such a short space, it’s crucial that you remain focused. There might be a million reasons that you want to be a nurse, and that’s great! Just don’t list them all here. Your reader won’t assume that this response is an exhaustive list of all the reasons you want to be a nurse; instead, they’ll assume that you’ve chosen one or two of the most compelling experiences you’ve had to illustrate the core motivation behind this aspiration.

This brings us to the final important thing to note: With why-driven essays, your focus should be on digging beyond basic explanation. Try to show not only the experiences that have inspired you but also what your deepest motivations and aspirations are. What drives you? What makes you tick? What do you aspire to do with your life? Use specific examples to offer insight into these important, deeply personal questions, even as you explain why you want to be a nurse.

Picking Examples

Though strong responses will be aspirational or even theoretical, your response should still be grounded in concrete examples. This means that your writing process should still begin with some brainstorming as you search for concrete examples. Think back: is there an obvious experience that made you go “Aha! I want to be a nurse”?

Strong experiences to focus on can include:

• Family or close friends in health-related fields who have inspired you.
• Your own medical experiences, as a patient.
• Experiences with close family members or friends who have been patients and who have been cared for by excellent nurses.
• An internship or shadowing experience.
• An academic or pre-professional course that exposed you to nursing.

The experiences you choose to depict should be vivid and meaningful enough that you can offer a brief, but detailed, description that shows the reader how they impacted you. As such, a brief glimpse of a nurse on a break from work or an impression you got from watching a TV show might be too superficial to develop as an experience that “shaped your decision.”

One note of caution: Note that the next prompt asks about how your “studies and activities” have prepared you for a career in nursing. This means that you’ll get a chance later to focus on specific academic or extracurricular things that have given you the skills and knowledge to dive into nursing studies. Here, your focus should be on motivations and interests, not preparation.

Digging a Little Deeper

Once you’ve chosen your example, take a moment to consider what this experience stirred in you. Was it your desire to help others? Your anger at the suffering in the world? Your fascination with biology and the mechanisms of the human body? These sorts of more abstract motivations are what, ultimately, will provide a deep, satisfying answer to this question’s “why.” However, you need to pull these sorts of deeper points out of your examples.

If your deeper motivation is a fascination with the human body and a desire to help others, you could focus on a personal medical experience. Describe a moment of reflection as you sat in your bed while a nurse drew your blood. You could watch her care and consideration intently, moved by it, but also fascinated by the procedure itself. This “moment” could be framed as helping you realize that these two passions could go together.

Structuring Your Response

A strong response will seamlessly interweave introspection/deeper reflection and concrete examples. In order to plan your essay, you should consider the relationship between your motivations/interests and the example(s) you’re giving. It’s sort of a “chicken and egg” question, but your job is to decide which came first.

Perhaps you had an interest in helping others, which motivated you to pursue an internship at a local hospital, which, in turn, cemented your desire to become a nurse. In this case, you might start by describing that initial impulse, then jump into the example of your shadowing experience, then reflect on how it shaped/specified your long-term aspirations.

Perhaps you really hadn’t realized your passion for the science of the human body until a particular medical experience you had. In this case, it might make sense to dive right into the “moment” when you found yourself in a hospital, fascinated by the procedures going on around you/happening to you. Then, you can extrapolate from this example, discussing what you realized about yourself and your long-term goals.

General Strategy

This is a fairly straightforward question. However, as with the previous question, the key here is to not go overboard. Your focus should not be to exhaustively list everything that has prepared you in any way for a career in nursing. Instead, pick two to four specific academic and/or extracurricular activities to discuss.

Again, this should not just be a list: for each example, go into detail. Explain what specific skills or information each experience you cite has given you; explain how this has prepared you to become a nurse.

Choosing Your Examples

This essay should cite specific studies and activities, so your first order of business should be to pick which studies or activities you want to discuss. However, your examples shouldn’t be chosen just because they “seem” like good nursing prep. Instead, try working backward.

First, think about what skills and knowledge you have that would make you a good nurse. Then, think about how you acquired these competencies. Whatever comes out of this last reflection will be a potential “study or activity” to include in your response. Given the framing of the prompt, however, you should try to focus on clearly defined things, like courses or extracurriculars, rather than on personal experiences.

Strong examples could include:

• Your anatomy course.
• Your internship at a local hospital.
• Your job, which has given you strong administrative skills (record-keeping is essential for nursing!).
• Your biology course.
• Your food science course, which has taught you a lot about nutrition (also key for nursing, though not always adequately covered!).
• Membership in a club like Best Buddies that lets you connect with and help those who might be differently-abled than you are.

Importantly, avoid choosing redundant examples. Each course or activity that you describe should touch on a different aspect of your preparation.

Writing Your Essay

Once you’ve chosen your examples, the key is just to weave them together. The trick, however, is to make sure that for every example you give, you do three things: (1) Explain the study experience activity in some detail; (2) describe what skills or knowledge you gained; and (3) explain how this has prepared you to become a nurse.

If several of your examples do show similar knowledge/skills, you can group them together. For example, if your overall thesis is that you have the specific knowledge of the human body and practical experience of engaging empathetically with others that you’ll need to be a nurse, you could have two main paragraphs.

• The first could focus on your knowledge of the human body, describing your anatomy course and your experience working in a physical therapist’s office. You can explain how this knowledge base will allow you to rapidly develop efficient mastery of everyday procedures that nurses must conduct.

• The second could focus on your experiences empathetically helping others: you could describe your involvement as a peer mental health counselor and your volunteer work at a local nursing home. Then, you could explain how this comfort with comforting and helping others will allow you to be an effective and compassionate nurse.

If your examples all feel quite disparate, that’s fine. Each paragraph can focus on a different skill/area of knowledge–just be sure that all three components (example, detailed description, and explanation of how this will allow you to be a good nurse) are present. Then, try to add transitions and tie all your examples together in a strong, specific, personal conclusion.

General Strategy

First, a note about what this prompt is not asking: This prompt is not asking you to explain why you want to be a nurse (you’ve already done that, hopefully, in your first response!) or why you like the University of Minnesota in a broad sense. This is a very specific question about why this particular program fits your degree and career plans.

Given this, your response should contain three elements:

1. A statement of your career and degree plans.
2. A reflection on key elements of the University of Minnesota’s Nursing Program.
3. An explanation of how these elements facilitate the achievement of your plans.

These elements can be combined in different ways, but all strong essays will contain all three in some form.

Defining Your Goals

Unlike most essays here, this one doesn’t require the incorporation of specific examples, though you might end up giving specific examples of what you aspire to do with your life.

Instead, you should begin stating your goals. What do you hope to achieve with your nursing degree? Note that you need to go beyond “I want to be a nurse” as your career plan, as that’s already self-evident. Instead, you should explain the particular kind of nursing you want to practice, or, more abstractly, the kind of impact you want to have on your patients.

Furthermore, you might also mention aspirations beyond simply working as a nurse: perhaps you would like to eventually advocate for better nursing practices on a policy level, or work in a more managerial or administrative role in a hospital. Feel free to be as specific as you like here. The more clearly you set your “targets,” the more focused, personal, and powerful your essay will be.

Familiarizing Yourself with the Program

Though you are hopefully already familiar with the program, take some time to brush up on its essential features. Identify particular requirements that really fit your goals. Go beyond what is readily accessible on their website’s front page.

Try making a list of all the unique features of the program that excite you and that you know you couldn’t find on a regular undergrad-nursing school path. Then, dig a bit deeper. Find specific mentors, courses, labs, etc., that really excite you.

Once you have this list, go back to the goals that you’ve defined. Which of these resources fit your goals? Can you draw a line from one particular offering of UMTC’s Nursing Program to achieving that aspiration?

Linking Program Features to Your Goals

This brings us to the final step: explaining exactly how the features of the Nursing Program fit your goals. Remember, the key here is to show how this program will better fit your aspirations than a normal path (undergrad, then nursing school). 

For example:  

• If you’re really interested in supporting patients suffering from cognition-altering brain conditions, you might want to talk about how the opportunity to work closely with faculty from an early point in your education will expose you to different approaches to brain trauma. Emphasize how this sort of close study and mentorship simply wouldn’t be possible in another program; you could explain how this sort of close work early in your studies will allow you to focus, as you continue to take classes, on problems and questions that arise as you start to learn more about current approaches to brain maladies and trauma.

• If your long-term goal is to work in hospital administration, trying to raise nurse’s voices in hospital decision-making, then you might focus on aspects of the program that will allow you to become more familiar with administrative dimensions of nursing. 

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