CollegeVine College Essay Team September 20, 2023 19 Essay Guides 2023-24

How to Write the University of Oregon Essays 2023-2024

The University of Oregon offers all applicants two optional prompts—one with two options to choose from, and one that’s more open-ended than a usual prompt. There’s also a required prompt for Honors College applicants and two required prompts for prospective Architecture majors.

Since UO receives thousands of applications from academically strong students, your essays are your chance to stand out. In this post, we’ll discuss how to craft an engaging response to each of these prompts and their options.

Read these University of Oregon essay examples to inspire your writing.

The University of Oregon Supplemental Essays

How to Write the University of Oregon General Supplemental Essays

Discrimination is a very personal topic. After reading the prompt, you’ll probably have an idea whether or not you have enough experience to select it as your essay. Your essay doesn’t necessarily have to be about an experience where you were the one being discriminated against, and it also doesn’t have to be about a time when you did the right thing and actively stood up to discrimination.

In fact, the prompt suggests discussing an experience where you contributed to discrimination or failed to prevent it. If you decide to answer this prompt, you need to be prepared to share personal experiences and stories that might be uncomfortable for you to address. If you don’t feel comfortable writing a detailed, personal essay on this topic, it’s probably wiser for you to choose the other prompt option.

If you decide to write this prompt, you’re going to first need to find an experience to write about. You might have something off the top of your head, or it might take a little longer to figure out what you want to write about. Some possible experiences you could consider include:

• Being a racial minority in a predominantly homogenous school
• Being told you can’t do something because of your gender
• Bullying someone or not preventing bullying
• Participating in racial justice or gender equality marches
• Being treated differently because of your sexuality
• Witnessing discrimination and not standing up

A note about race/ethnicity: 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. If you wish to discuss a time during which you were discriminated against because of your racial/ethnic background, this is the place to discuss that.

Whichever experience you decide to write about as your experience with discrimination, positive or negative, you should start the essay with an anecdote to help the admissions officers understand what your experience was.

Let’s say your example is a time when you were walking down the hall on your way to your calculus class and you heard your friends calling a girl racist names. Did you keep your head down and ignore the situation because you didn’t want a late pass to class? Or did you join your friends and make fun of the girl in some way? Or, did you go over to your friends to call them out for their actions and to ask the girl if there was anything you could do to help her?

By setting up your experience in a very personal, anecdotal fashion, you can quickly establish what your experience was and ground your essay so it feels individual and unique.

The most important part of this essay is not your story about discrimination—though that is still the subject of the essay—but rather how you overcame the discrimination and grew from the experience. Or maybe you weren’t able to overcome it, but you still learned about yourself and society from that experience. That’s a perfectly valid thing to write about as well.

After you’ve established what your experience was, you should focus the remainder of your essay on how that experience changed you as a person or opened your eyes to something that had a deep impact on you. If you carefully choose an experience with personal significance, you’ll be able to figure out why it was important to you fairly easily. You want to show the admissions officers that this experience taught you something you still carry with you every day and will continue to carry with you on campus.

Maybe you learned to never judge anyone for a physical trait or disability again after you were belittled and profiled yourself. Perhaps you saw the need for more social justice lawyers in the country after you read stories about innocent people on death row who never got the fair representation they deserved. Or, maybe you decided to stop letting society define what is “appropriate” and started encouraging other students to embrace their own personalities rather than societal conventions.

The final part of your essay should describe how you’ll bring those lessons to the University of Oregon. You could choose to talk about how you vow to be accepting of everyone you meet with your new perspective on life, how you want to speak with students who’ve confronted discrimination in similar ways, or your plan to study a field related to some level of societal inequity to continue learning about how to combat injustice.

If you end up choosing this essay option, the key is to be as introspective and personal as possible. The admissions committee does want to hear if you have suffered any hardships or even if there are moments you yourself aren’t proud of in life, but they are most interested in your personal growth from these events. As long as you’re willing to open up about your experiences and reflect on what you have learned, this is a great option to choose!

Some helpful tips for this essay:

• Avoid using a privileged tone. This type of prompt may lead you to accidentally frame yourself as a champion for the marginalized, and that is something you need to make sure to avoid.

• Use “I” statements. It’s very difficult and complicated to speak on behalf of an entire subset of people, but you can speak for yourself and speak from your own experience.

• Show what you learned. If you choose to write about an event where you did not speak up, it would behoove you to show some personal growth and/or a time that you did. If you are writing about a time when you were discriminated against, do not forget to include what you learned and how you will rely on that experience at The University of Oregon.

While the previous option focuses on a student’s experiences with discrimination, this essay focuses on a student’s background. Every student on campus contributes to making a diverse community, so in this prompt, you’ll want to share with the admissions committee ways in which you will add to the University of Oregon’s vibrant community.

We recommend writing this essay if you come from a background or identity that has given you a unique experience and perspective. Even if you feel like the community you come from is “boring” or “generic,” there’s probably still a lot you could find to write about! Take a look at our guide to writing the diversity essay for some tips that will help you tackle this prompt.

Brainstorming your topic:

No matter where you come from, the person you are now has been influenced by your background and many converging factors. That said, there is a wide variety of experiences, values, or interests that you might pick from for this essay. Here are a few ideas:

• Family traditions
• Religious holidays
• Music tastes
• Unique hobbies
• Cultural values
• Moral values you live by

As opposed to the previous option, where you’re asked to describe an experience, this prompt is more focused on how you plan to share your unique background with your fellow students on campus, thus contributing to and expanding the diverse community. Don’t spend too much time describing your background without discussing how you plan on sharing it at the University.

This also means you don’t just have to pick one thing to discuss for the entire essay. A Chinese-American student could talk about his tradition of making dumplings with his dad’s side of the family and the filial piety that is a core aspect of their culture, while also mentioning his deep-rooted love for the Yankees that he got from his mother.

Tips for writing your essay:

The admissions officers reading this essay are really looking to hear about how you plan to share your unique personal culture with other students on campus. As you write, make sure you both describe what is important to you and why you want to share it with others. Including stories or anecdotes is a great way to establish the personal connection to these experiences that you value. They provide the admissions committee with a deeper understanding of your personality.

This prompt also asks how you plan to offer support to others on campus, and a great way to answer this question would be to tie it back to whatever you plan to share with the campus community. This support can take many forms. Consider the following examples:

• A student might write about how he will pack extra curry powder so he can cook chicken curry for his friends when they’re upset, because his mom makes that at home to cheer him up.
• A student could write about some memories from Hanukkahs spent with her family, and how she’ll share these experiences with new friends who don’t know anything about Judaism.
• A student who lost a parent at a young age knows how hard it is to struggle with loss, so they will be there to comfort and console peers who might experience similar loss.

Mistakes to avoid:

If you choose this option as the topic of your essay, you want to make sure your voice and personality come across. Be careful that you don’t write things that are too generic or clichéd in your essay—you don’t want to write about a life lesson that could be on a Hallmark card. If you are writing about your heritage or cultural ethnicity, you don’t want to accidentally stereotype yourself or make monolithic statements about an entire group of people.

The best way to avoid the above mistakes is to write about things from your personal experience. This essay should be about something so unique and specific to you: only you could have written it!

After reading this prompt, perhaps you experienced a great sigh of relief. There may have been a time where you feel as though your academic performance didn’t match your ability, or, more simply, that an academic record is not indicative of you as an entire person.

This prompt gives you the opportunity to explain a blemish on your academic record. It’s important, however, to keep in mind when choosing to write something in the additional information section that you should not simply be making excuses for a bad GPA or trying to downplay getting suspended for cheating—whatever you choose to include should substantially improve upon and develop your application, as well as offer a perspective on your record and on yourself as a person that is not otherwise reflected in your essays.

See CollegeVine’s guide to writing the “exceptional personal circumstances” essay to gain a deeper understanding of what you should and shouldn’t include.

Essentially, this essay should provide explanations, not excuses.

When writing this essay, you should highlight personal responsibility and growth, in place of justifications or apologies.

For example, if you were caught in an academic integrity scandal, it is much more compelling and refreshing to hear you explain how you are a different student and grew from that experience than it would be to read a laundry list of excuses about the pressure you were under.

This is also the place to discuss any personal hardships you experienced during your high school experience. It’s important to remember the gravity of this question—the school cites “death or illness of a parent, caring for a family member, homelessness, frequent moves, or due to learning disabilities/differences or study habits” as possible reasons.

Also note that while the year 2020 may have been difficult for you, it affected most students in similar ways, at least with regard to the disruption to normal studies. It would probably be best to avoid writing about this time, but if you do choose to write about this disruption to learning in 2020, make sure to make it as personal as possible.

For example, perhaps you didn’t have a reliable computer or internet at home, or maybe you were splitting your time taking care of your siblings while trying to study. The more specific you are, the more the admissions panel is able to see you as a holistic candidate.

Finally, remember that this prompt is optional. If you truly don’t have any substantial reason to respond to this prompt, that’s completely fine. Don’t try to make up an academic struggle or place undue importance on a trivial matter just to write this essay.

This prompt is meant to gauge who you are as a person, beyond just your abilities as a student. That said, an open-ended prompt like this one is both a blessing and a challenge. On the one hand, the endless number of interests to share about yourself can serve as a strength, as there aren’t really any limitations to the essay you can write. On the other hand, because it’s so open-ended, it can be daunting to figure out which is the perfect passion to choose.

The passion you write about doesn’t necessarily have to be a traditional extracurricular activity, but you might still want to take a peek at our guide to writing the extracurricular activities essay for some tips!

First and foremost, it’s important to follow the prompt—i.e., to select only one passion. Perhaps one passion is so essential to your identity that you already know what you’re going to share. More likely than not, though, you might be struggling to identify a singular topic that encapsulates your essence.

Brainstorming your topic:

Before you begin writing, it’s important that you select a strong topic. When choosing a passion, you need to be sincere. Don’t write about a topic you aren’t really passionate about just because you think the admissions committee wants to read about it. An authentic topic will always make for a better essay than some random extravagant one.

To begin, you might draft a list of formative interests, things that have come to define who you are. This could be anything from chemistry to horseback riding. The passion you choose should ideally reveal a greater truth about yourself—something that the reader wouldn’t know about you from the rest of your application. If you’re still struggling, you might think about what passion or interests your friends or family might share to describe what you’re about.

You might also draft a list of experiences that fall into certain emotional categories (i.e. pride, fear, excitement, jealousy). By breaking down these experiences into subcategories, it might be an easier way to access your best memories with certain activities or subjects.

Tips for writing your essay:

Good essays often begin in the middle of a story—this technique is called beginning in medias res. Starting right in the midst of the action makes for an engaging hook. Try using an anecdote and beginning with a feeling or a setting. The word count is large enough to put this technique to good use, and you’ll want to capture your reader’s attention as quickly as possible.

For example, a student who loves playing classical guitar might begin her essay like this:

“My fingers pluck each string deliberately but delicately. My foot taps quietly along, keeping rhythm like a metronome. I am at peace, once again practicing classical guitar like I have every day for the past ten years. That seems long already, but there is still so much to learn.

As each mellifluous note wafts through the air, I am filled with the joy of knowing there is another technique to master, another piece to play, another obstacle to conquer. Playing classical pieces is more than a hobby; it is a challenge, an opportunity to honor something that transcends time.”

This is a strong start to a response for a number of reasons:

• First, it uses very evocative language to great effect, painting a vivid picture of the passion.
• Second, it describes in detail the emotions the passion evokes and the reason it elicits joy in the student.
• Finally, it showcases the student’s perspective in a way that cannot be misconstrued. This student is clearly intellectually stimulated by this passion, dedicated to it, and industrious when it comes to practicing—all excellent qualities to bring to the University of Oregon.

Best of all, all of those reasons have been established in under 100 words! As you can see, there is an immense amount of freedom to exercise your creative writing skills.

There are techniques besides in medias res anecdotes. For example, you might begin with a bold claim:

“My mother begged me not to do it.”

or:

“To be completely honest, I’ve never been much of an athlete.”

Or, you might start with a question, a statistic, or an interesting fact:

“When a dive is being adjudicated, there are four essential criteria: your approach and starting position; your take-off from the platform or springboard; your flight through the air; and your entry into the water.”

The main idea is to have a strong hook that will make your reader want to keep reading. Once you accomplish that, you can move on to the body of the essay. This is where you should detail the passion, when and how it developed, what it means to you, how you feel when you partake in it, etc.

It’s also important that you write positively about yourself. While that doesn’t mean the essay has to be an uplifting piece about how amazing and fantastic you are, you should make sure not to tell a story that might be misinterpreted or misunderstood by the admissions panel. If the passion you write about involves directly ignoring a reasonable rule set by your high school’s administration—or worse, the law—for example, that will signal to the admissions community that you are constantly “defying authority.”

Besides illegal activities, you’ll want to avoid writing about the following things, some of which we’ve discussed already:

• Something you aren’t actually involved/interested in.
• Something you already wrote about elsewhere (or intend to include elsewhere later).
• Something you think sounds impressive that you aren’t too invested in.
• And just because it bears repeating, don’t write about defying authority/breaking the law!

The end of your essay should have some reflection. What did you learn from this experience? In what ways are you different from how you were when you first discovered the passion? How do you plan to apply any lessons the passion taught you in the future?

Whatever passion you choose, both you and the admissions officers reading your essay should be able to answer this question—Why share this passion? If you feel like you can answer this question with a response like “it showcases your grit,” “it demonstrates that you’re an intellectually curious person,” “it exemplifies your love for your family,” etc., then you’re off to a great start.

This extracurricular essay prompt is asking you to write about a specific experience, activity, or project that has inspired your interest in Oregon’s architecture program. When thinking about what experience you might write about, make a list of some top contenders then ask yourself these questions about each of them:

1) Is this the activity/project in which you have shown the most commitment to the field? Has it been the most influential experience in your development?

2) What is the strongest emotion you feel about this experience?

• Why do you feel that emotion?
• How has that emotion evolved over time?
• What is/was your emotional state during the experience?

3) What goes through your mind at the moment that you participate in this activity/project?

4) Have you developed or strengthened any personality traits as a result of participating in this activity/project? If so, what are they and how have they changed over time?

5) Are there any specific skills that you have developed as a result of participating in this activity?

6) How does this activity affect the rest of your life? This can include other activities, your social life, academics, etc.

Your approach to answering this prompt will be different based on whether you choose to discuss an activity or a creative project.

If you choose to discuss an activity you’ve partaken in, then you’ll want to select an one that has truly and profoundly influenced your interest in design. Outline specifically what this experience was and what your role in it was.

For example, say a hypothetical student was an Instructional Design Intern at a plastic manufacturing company. They would want to focus on explaining what their role in the organization was and how they made an impact. They could write the following:

“As a design intern, I conducted material science research and provided administrative support to a team to develop a new type of packaging—one that is made from more sustainable materials than plastic and paper. My work helped create more environmentally friendly packaging that is biodegradable, and it will reduce the microplastic waste that ends up in the world’s soils and oceans.”

If you chose to discuss a specific project, you will want to outline the creative process. For example, a hypothetical applicant could talk about how they always start a creative project by taking a walk through a local park listening to calming music. Here is an example of a paragraph they might write:

“Before every creative project, I always go on a calming walk through the trails of my local park. This helps clear my mind of everything that isn’t related to the project and gives me creative ideas while I am immersed in the nature around me. Once I finish my walk, I go back to my house and begin jotting down the different ideas for 15 minutes straight. I write down anything and everything that comes to mind without worrying about whether or not it will make for a good project—I just want the creative ideas to flow.”

This could serve as a plausible way to explain how your creativity serves your projects, and it shows how these projects influence your curiosity in the domain of design.

After choosing either an activity or a project, make sure to discuss what you learned from that experience. Do not just simply state that you learned how to draw an elephant, for example. Instead, if you created a colorful painting of a forest or garden, write that you learned how to blend certain colors to achieve a desired effect and form a complete picture.

This prompt is sort of a cross between the common “Why This College” prompt and “Why This Major” prompt. Be sure to look at both articles to get a good idea of how to tackle this prompt. It’s different from either one in that it asks about a specific program as opposed to the University as a whole or one particular major. The first step when writing your essay is to do your research.

Go through the University web pages about the program and the department as a whole, noting the specific features and offerings that pique your interest. You’ll want to demonstrate that you are truly committed to this program and uniquely suited for it by mentioning specific appealing resources by name.

Here are strategies to consider for this prompt:

1. Zero in on your academics.

Discuss in depth how Oregon’s program matches your goals. While you discuss this idea broadly, be sure to also mention specifics about the program that serve your goals better than any other school or program could.

For example, a hypothetical student might be interested in obtaining a Bachelor of Interior Architecture. The student could write an essay about how the major program interests them because it would uniquely allow them to explore their passion for connecting virtual reality to the architecture of the real world.

They could then mention specific resources that the program offers to help them achieve their learning goal, including: a class called “Introduction to Architectural Computer Graphics,” Professor Siobhan Rockcastle’s virtual reality research into building skylights, and virtual reality architectural design exhibitions on campus.

Highlighting these specific resources and reasons for choosing the major program will make the student stand out, and will show that they are passionate enough about UO’s offerings to do research into its offerings that set it apart from other schools.

2. Link opportunities to your skills and experiences.

Be sure to connect your extracurriculars, high school classes, and general life stories to your academic interests. Show that you’re a good fit for the program by highlighting relevant prior experiences with topics that are central to the program.

For example, if a hypothetical student worked in construction in the past, they might talk about how they gained a deeper understanding of how houses are built. They could then explain how gaining this knowledge inspired them to pursue an architecture major with a focus on townhome design.

Maybe they also visited a lot of museums, churches, and other buildings with rich histories, and they were fascinated by the methods each architect took in the design and construction processes. This would explain their interest in studying architecture and their desire to one day recreate historical styles for a new era.

3. Discuss unique features of the program.

For instance, one key aspect that a hypothetical student could highlight in their essay is that Oregon’s design program heavily emphasizes a hands-on approach throughout their curriculum. Their essay would talk about their appreciation for the fact that students are given their own work area in studios and are granted a high degree of independence.

Another specific detail that their essay might include is that Oregon’s faculty members focus on having discussions about students’ work rather than giving letter grades, so that students can gain constructive feedback and learn from their mistakes.

No matter which approach you take, mentioning specifics about the program will help the admissions officers envision you as a student in it. Just be sure that you do good enough research to discuss these resources, people, and opportunities with some depth. If your research was lackluster and you just name-drop things without elaboration, your essay will seem insincere and unfocused.

Where to Get Your University of Oregon Essays Edited

Do you want feedback on your Oregon essays? 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!