Writing Supplement

Writing supplement prompts included in Dartmouth's application for admission to the Class of 2027

Updated July 7, 2022

Dartmouth's writing supplement requires that applicants write brief responses to three supplemental essay prompts as follows:

1. Required of all applicants. Please respond in 100 words or fewer:

Dartmouth celebrates the ways in which its profound sense of place informs its profound sense of purpose. As you seek admission to Dartmouth's Class of 2027, what aspects of the College's academic program, community, or campus environment attract your interest? In short, Why Dartmouth? Please respond in 100 words or fewer.

2. Required of all applicants. Please respond in 200-250 words:

"Be yourself," Oscar Wilde advised. "Everyone else is taken." Introduce yourself in 200-250 words.

3. Required of all applicants. Please choose one of the following prompts and respond in 200-250 words:

A. Labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta recommended a life of purpose. "We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things," she said. "That is what we are put on the earth for." In what ways do you hope to make—or are you making—an impact?

B. What excites you?

C. In The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, William Kamkwamba '14 reflects on constructing a windmill from recycled materials to power electrical appliances in his family's Malawian house: "If you want to make it, all you have to do is try." What drives you to create and what do you hope to make or have you made?

D. Dr. Seuss, aka Theodor Geisel of Dartmouth's Class of 1925, wrote, "Think and wonder. Wonder and think." What do you wonder and think about?

E. "Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced," wrote James Baldwin. How does this quote apply to your life experiences?