The Journal of the History of Ideas Blog

  • Write for Us
  • Contributing Editors
  • Style Guide

Think Piece

  • Women’s International Thought
  • Black Intellectual History
  • Media of History
  • Academy and Democracy
  • Hans Blumenberg and Political Myth
  • What Is Global History?
  • Pathways in Intellectual History
  • Collective Memory
  • Intellectual Histories of Ethiopia
  • Broadly Speaking: A Companion Interview
  • Companion Piece
  • What We’re Reading
  • Announcement
  • Virtual Issues
  • Reading Lists
  • Lesson Plans

The Essayist as Public Intellectual

the essays are intellectually

By Stephanie Redekop

The mid-twentieth century United States was, American poet Randall Jarrell wrote in 1953 , an “age of criticism”: a period in which criticism became the “representative or Archetypal act” of the humanistic intellectual (p. 66). For many of these intellectuals and critics , the essay was the preferred medium of expression.  Phillip Lopate recently identified the period from 1945-1970 as “ the Golden Age of the American Essay .” In the decades since, essays have also become “ the lingua franca of the American academy ,” which developed an increasingly tight affiliation with public intellectual work in the United States after World War II. In other words, intellectual historians of the post-1945 period in the United States often have no choice but to contend with essays in our research. But what does it mean to read essays as evidence?

Because essays are a genre of literary nonfiction, we risk missing important aspects of their cultural work if we only read them for their informational or ideological content without attending to matters of genre, form, and style. For this reason, scholars of the essay offer several insights pertinent to reading essays for the purposes of intellectual history or intellectual biography.

What is an essay? A notoriously fraught and “open” form , Graham Good provides us with a useful working definition : essays are typically short nonfictional prose texts that are “provisional and exploratory, rather than systematic and definitive”; they derive authority from the essayist’s “personality” rather than their formal credentials or technical vocabulary; and their concerns are typically “personal and particular.” Though the essay may appear similar to other nonfictional prose genres, like the article, Robert Atwan argues that the designation of essay is most appropriate  “when the writer’s reflections on a topic become as compelling as the topic itself,” when the piece’s style and methods demonstrate its subject’s complexity or resonance with broader themes. As a result, the essay is itself a complex form that requires literary interpretation ; it is not “a straightforward and transparent form of exposition,” but rather an “an enactment of thought and a projection of personality that use[s] language dramatically” (p. xxxvi).

It is these two qualities that may be of particular interest when reading essays for the purposes of intellectual history: essays derive authority from the personality of the essayist, and they present their ideas through a dramatization of thought.

First, understanding the essay as a literary genre means acknowledging that, even though essays are “ grounded in the illusion of their artlessness ” and offer an impression of candor or transparency, this impression is itself a literary effect. In fact, most essay theorists emphasize that essays derive their authority from the projected personality of the author. Nicole Wallack identifies the “single most important quality of the essay as a literary form” to be the essayist’s “presence” (p. 15). Writers can create this “presence” by including personal experience as evidence, creating a distinctive voice, and establishing a clear point of view (p. 2-6). In other words, an essayist’s presence does not necessarily arise from the use of the first-person; it is also shaped by the their distinctive style, posture, and perspective.

Reading essays with an attention to the writer’s presence can have important interpretive implications. For instance, we might ask: what is the basis of this essayist’s authority? What kinds of knowledge do they represent themselves to have, and what does it mean for them to know? Reading “A Stranger in the Village” by James Baldwin, for example, Wallack asks us to carefully consider Baldwin’s decision to supply personal experience as evidence and to write from a first-person point of view, rather than take these decisions for granted (p. 66). What is at stake in Baldwin’s decision to present potentially abstract concepts in these personal terms? Though Wallack poses this question as a scholar of writing and rhetoric, it bears historical implications as well. Baldwin’s essays frequently establish a collective first-person point of view (“we”), using what Cheryl Wall has called “ strategic American exceptionalism ” to interrogate the construction of American identity (p. 120). Likewise, in using the form of the personal essay to bring his identity and experience as a Black American to the fore, Baldwin emphasizes the personal impacts of social systems and demonstrates the twentieth-century alignment between freedom and personal identity (p. 16, 21).

Stephen Schryer examines the ways in which mid-twentieth-century essayists writing for William F. Buckley’s National Review construct a rhetorical posture of “anti-intellectual intellectual[ism].” In so doing, Schryer encourages us to consider what strategies a given essayist uses to identify and position themself as a knowledge authority. His attention to stylistic patterns in the self-positioning of National Review essayists such as Hugh Kenner and Joan Didion — including, notably, their maverick sensibility — allows Schryer to untangle the “contradictory strains of elitism and populism” competing within 1960s conservatism. As these scholars demonstrate, the intellectual work of an essay extends beyond the ideas that it describes, and those ideas themselves are shaped by the self-representation of the essayist.

Second, an essay is a dramatization of thought. Essays tend to communicate their core ideas dramatically, drawing attention to those ideas’ development or genealogy and presenting them as arising out of concrete particulars. An essay does not only transmit ideas as information; rather, it conveys the story of how those ideas have been formed or experienced by the writer (p. x). Unlike articles, essays do not necessarily present those ideas systematically or lead with a straightforward thesis. Therefore, instead of working to extract a thesis, we should contend with the essayist’s decision to present ideas otherwise. Theodor Adorno , for example, argues that essayists’ refusal to privilege abstract concepts above individual particulars actively resists “equating knowledge with organized science”. In the same way, he writes, an essay “shakes off the illusion of a simple and fundamentally logical world, an illusion well suited to the defense of the status quo”.

Essays function as works of intellectual storytelling, which in turn affects the ways in which they represent what information is and what information does. In the book Tough Enough , which examines the “unsentimental” styles and related ethical frameworks presented by a range of women essayists in the mid-twentieth century, Deborah Nelson suggests that “facing the facts” in these essays requires that we not only identify “what is happening,” but also confront what it means “to be changed by that knowledge” (p. 14). As Nelson demonstrates, reading essays requires engaging with both facts and aesthetic experience.

With these essential literary dimensions of essays’ work in mind, intellectual historians also have much to offer the field of essay studies. The field’s emphasis on advancing stylistic or rhetorical analyses of individual essays has sometimes come at the expense of examining those essays’ historicity. Making a case for essays’ literary value has often been expressed in the language of their timelessness: in Cynthia Ozick’s often-cited formulation , essays differ from articles because they transcend the moment of their composition. Today, essays often find their way to readers in the form of sweeping anthologies . But from this vantage, it can be more difficult to identify an essay’s timeliness, the way that it has arisen out of specific moments, contributed to specific discourses, and been addressed to specific audiences. Therefore, as scholars like Wallack and John J. Pauly have argued, essay studies will strongly benefit from deeper institutional and intellectual histories that situate essays within the broader discourses that they have engaged and helped to shape.

The essay genre is explicitly invested in exploring the interrelation between concrete particulars and the broader ideas with which they resonate. As such, essays are often sources well suited to the aims of intellectual history. The scholars of post-1945 American essays whom I have cited above demonstrate how essays’ literary dimensions also reveal important aspects of their ideological content. Nelson models the strengths of this approach particularly well in Tough Enough . Although she acknowledges that the artists and intellectuals whom she studies do not constitute a recognizable intellectual group, she makes a persuasive case for grouping them based upon the commonalities in their essays’ “style and outlook”— namely, their unsentimentality. Likewise, by understanding this un-sentimentality to be an aesthetic and ethical “choice rather than character trait,” Nelson moves beyond isolated readings of individual essayists to instead complicate historical narratives about “our relationship to suffering” after 1945 (p. 1-3). As I have argued, essayists’ formal and stylistic decisions are deeply shaped by underlying ideas about knowledge, authority, and the public sphere. Therefore, intellectual historians should consider what ideas animate and take shape from an essay’s formal and stylistic elements, in addition to the historical and intellectual discourses with which the essayist is directly engaged.

Stephanie Redekop is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and a Junior Fellow at Massey College. Her research charts a literary history of the role of facts in American public discourse of the 1960s and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Featured Image : Cover of Partisan Review Vol. 21 No.4 (July-August 1954)

September 20, 2021

Comments are closed.

Creative Commons License

Latest posts

  • The Making of an Anticolonial Culture: An Interview with Ismay Milford
  • Broadly Speaking: An Interview with Felix Schlichter
  • Future’s Past of Museums: Between “Brick-and-Mortar” and Virtuality
  • East European Intellectual History–Russian Nationalism: Virtual Issue 2.3
  • The Scottish Enlightenment Presents: A Lesson in Moderate Radicalism

the essays are intellectually

Read the latest issue of the journal on Project Muse.

Learn more about the journal on our Penn Press site.

© 2024 JHI Blog — Powered by WordPress

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑

Subscribe By Email

Your Email Leave this field blank

This form is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

  • Search Menu
  • Browse content in Arts and Humanities
  • Browse content in Art
  • History of Art
  • Theory of Art
  • Browse content in Classical Studies
  • Classical Literature
  • Browse content in History
  • Colonialism and Imperialism
  • Environmental History
  • Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
  • History by Period
  • History of Education
  • History of Gender and Sexuality
  • Intellectual History
  • Legal and Constitutional History
  • Local and Family History
  • Maritime History
  • Military History
  • Political History
  • Regional and National History
  • Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
  • Social and Cultural History
  • Theory, Methods, and Historiography
  • Urban History
  • Linguistics
  • Browse content in Literature
  • Literary Studies (Romanticism)
  • Literary Studies (American)
  • Literary Studies (European)
  • Literary Studies - World
  • Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
  • Literary Studies (19th Century)
  • Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
  • Literary Studies (African American Literature)
  • Literary Studies (British and Irish)
  • Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
  • Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
  • Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
  • Literary Studies (History of the Book)
  • Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
  • Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
  • Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
  • Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
  • Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
  • Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
  • Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
  • Mythology and Folklore
  • Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
  • Browse content in Media Studies
  • Browse content in Music
  • Music Theory and Analysis
  • Browse content in Philosophy
  • Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
  • Epistemology
  • Feminist Philosophy
  • History of Western Philosophy
  • Metaphysics
  • Moral Philosophy
  • Non-Western Philosophy
  • Philosophy of Language
  • Philosophy of Mind
  • Philosophy of Science
  • Philosophy of Religion
  • Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
  • Practical Ethics
  • Social and Political Philosophy
  • Browse content in Religion
  • Biblical Studies
  • Christianity
  • East Asian Religions
  • History of Religion
  • Judaism and Jewish Studies
  • Religion and Education
  • Religion and Health
  • Religion and Politics
  • Religion and Science
  • Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
  • Religious Studies
  • Browse content in Society and Culture
  • Cultural Studies
  • Browse content in Law
  • Browse content in International Law
  • Public International Law
  • Browse content in Science and Mathematics
  • Browse content in Neuroscience
  • History of Neuroscience
  • Browse content in Psychology
  • Music Psychology
  • Social Psychology
  • Browse content in Social Sciences
  • Browse content in Anthropology
  • Anthropology of Religion
  • Regional Anthropology
  • Social and Cultural Anthropology
  • Browse content in Economics
  • Economic History
  • Browse content in Education
  • Higher and Further Education
  • Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
  • Communication Studies
  • Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
  • Browse content in Politics
  • Comparative Politics
  • Political Economy
  • Political Theory
  • US Politics
  • Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
  • Asian Studies
  • Latin American Studies
  • Browse content in Sociology
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • Health, Illness, and Medicine
  • Race and Ethnicity
  • Sociology of Religion
  • Sociology of Education
  • Urban and Rural Studies
  • Reviews and Awards
  • Journals on Oxford Academic
  • Books on Oxford Academic

How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University

How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University

How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University

Professor of English and of Literary and Cultural Studies

  • Cite Icon Cite

How to Be an Intellectual makes the case for a renewed critical writing. It tells the story of contemporary criticism and theory from several unique perspectives, notably its institutional and historical circumstances. For instance, it recounts the rise of "the theory journal," under the aegis of the drive for research beginning in the 1970s, which supplanted the little magazine, and it deciphers the evolution of academic keywords from "sound" to "rigor" to "smart." It also draws on a wealth of interviews with leading critics and philosophers, from M. H. Abrams and Donna Haraway to Andrew Ross and Judith Halberstam, presenting profiles of their work and their careers. Throughout, it considers how its academic location has influenced contemporary intellectual work, and one section deals explicitly with the current problems facing American higher education. It offers original analyses of the draconian expansion of student debt (including an account of how it parallels colonial indenture), and the situation of professors, increasingly casualized and subject to unprecedented stratification. Lastly, the book presents a number of personal essays about experiences related to working with books, inside and outside the university. Throughout, How to Be an Intellectual argues for the public obligation of criticism-both to educate its public about otherwise specialized academic matters, and to consider the politics of our culture.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

  • GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]
  • Google Scholar Indexing

Personal account

  • Sign in with email/username & password
  • Get email alerts
  • Save searches
  • Purchase content
  • Activate your purchase/trial code

Institutional access

  • Sign in with a library card Sign in with username/password Recommend to your librarian
  • Institutional account management
  • Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

  • Click Sign in through your institution.
  • Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
  • When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
  • Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Sign in with a library card

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

  • Click Sign in through society site.
  • When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

  • View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
  • View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

  • About Oxford Academic
  • Publish journals with us
  • University press partners
  • What we publish
  • New features  
  • Open access
  • Rights and permissions
  • Accessibility
  • Advertising
  • Media enquiries
  • Oxford University Press
  • Oxford Languages
  • University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

  • Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
  • Cookie settings
  • Cookie policy
  • Privacy policy
  • Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Yale College Undergraduate Admissions

  • A Liberal Arts Education
  • Majors & Academic Programs
  • Teaching & Advising
  • Undergraduate Research
  • International Experiences
  • Science & Engineering Faculty Features
  • Residential Colleges
  • Extracurriculars
  • Identity, Culture, Faith
  • Multicultural Open House
  • Virtual Tour
  • Bulldogs' Blogs
  • First-Year Applicants
  • International First-Year Applicants
  • QuestBridge First-Year Applicants
  • Military Veteran Applicants
  • Transfer Applicants
  • Eli Whitney: Nontraditional Applicants
  • Non-Degree & Alumni Auditing Applicants
  • What Yale Looks For
  • Putting Together Your Application
  • Selecting High School Courses
  • Application FAQs
  • First-Generation College Students
  • Rural and Small Town Students
  • Choosing Where to Apply
  • Inside the Yale Admissions Office Podcast
  • Visit Campus
  • Virtual Events
  • Connect With Yale Admissions
  • The Details
  • Estimate Your Cost
  • QuestBridge

Search form

What is “intellectual curiosity” and 3 places you’ll find it.

the essays are intellectually

Intellectual curiosity is one of those Yale™ phrases—it’s one of our core values, plastered all over the admissions website, reiterated every year during speeches and welcomes… In fact, for the class of 2023, president Peter Salovey dedicated his entire opening address to celebrating Yale’s “culture of curiousity.” He encouraged students to embrace their humility and admit that they have a lot left to discover. But what is intellectual curiosity,  really?  Are Yale students just natural intellectual curiosity monsters, dedicated to always searching for more information, more reading, more debate? 

The answer is no. We are normal college students (mostly), but there is something about loving the process of learning that binds us together. And it isn’t that we love readings, problem sets, or writing essays! Intellectual curiosity is a big phrase for something that’s actually very simple—the passion for hearing each other out, learning from each other, and wanting to know more. We are all curious. At Yale, you are allowed to be. So, where can you find this coveted “intellectual curiosity” on campus?

1. In the dining hall

Dining hall conversations can go in pretty much any direction. When I sit down at Saybrook’s long table—a row of tables pushed together in Saybrook’s dining hall—I never know where our “intellectual curiosity” will land us. One day we might be talking about the hidden messages in Taylor Swift’s Instagram posts and whether she is going to surprise drop another album (my money is on December 26th, 2021, but let’s check back in about it). The next the conversation might be about prison abolition and what alternatives to incarceration are most likely to be implemented first. 

2. On the walk home 

Whether you’re walking from class to the Schwarzman center, from the LGBT co-op to your residential college, or from the shops around the New Haven green to your section in the Humanities Quadrangle, you will probably pass through Cross Campus. Cross Campus is the area of campus located right in front of Sterling Memorial Library. It is a big courtyard with lots of paths that intersect with each other. Functionally, this means that Cross Campus is the perfect spot for student groups to set up their information tables. On the walk home, you can stop and learn about the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project (YUPP), Sustainability at Yale, or Dwight Hall’s Volunteering efforts. Be curious and don’t shy away from the pamphlets!

3. In the classroom

This one’s a no-brainer. The seminar table is like an intellectual curiosity rap-battle. 

More Posts by Alex

the essays are intellectually

My Journey to American Studies

the essays are intellectually

My Cultural Connections Family Tree

the essays are intellectually

Being Human(ities) in STEM

the essays are intellectually

DOWN at Yale We Write About Us

the essays are intellectually

Breathing Through the Winter Blues

A picture from the archive, MEChA 1991.

MEChA in Generations

the essays are intellectually

PrepScholar

Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 3 key tips for writing successful tufts supplemental essays.

author image

College Essays

feature_tufts

Tufts University has a selective acceptance rate— less than 10% in 2022 . You'll need a strong application to stand out from other applicants, including stellar essays. Luckily, this guide is here to help you out!

In this blog post, we'll cover everything you need to know about the writing portion of Tufts University's application, including what prompts are available and how to answer them.

Feature Image: Jellymuffin40 /Wikimedia Commons

body_library-7

If you want to study at Tufts' Ginn Library, you'll need strong essays. Nurcamp /Wikimedia Commons.

What Should You Know About the Tufts University Essays?

Tufts University uses either the Common or Coalition Application, so choose the one that works best for you . Each one has unique essays, so be sure you follow the correct prompt for whichever application you're using.

Both applications have their own writing sections that you'll need to respond to. These essays are more general than the Tufts essays, but it's still important to follow guidelines and aim to impress with them . They're part of your application, and deserve your best effort! The Common Application has one set of prompts to choose from and the Coalition Application has another , so do some reading ahead of time to plan for which one you'll answer if you need to fill out both applications for different schools.

What Prompts Does the Tufts University Application Have?

Tufts University requires you to apply to a specific school within the university during your application. This shouldn't be a problem if you already know what major you'll be applying to, and Tufts recommends not applying as undecided .

The application should give you the correct set of prompts for whichever school you apply to, but you can also check on Tuft's website .

If you're applying to the School of Arts and Sciences, School of Engineering, or 5-year Tufts/NEC combined degree, you'll have two essays. One is a classic "Why Tufts?" essay with a Tufts-specific twist, and the second prompt allows you to make your choice of two options.

For applicants to the BFA or 5-year BFA+BA/BS combined degree program, you'll also have two prompts. The first is, again, a classic "Why Tufts?" essay question, while the other asks you to to respond to one of three questions. 

body_writing-8

What Are the Tufts University Prompts?

Because the prompts vary between different schools, there's a lot of information to cover for how to write the ideal Tufts essay. But Tufts does provide some helpful advice —"Think outside the box as you answer the following questions. Take a risk and go somewhere unexpected. Be serious if the moment calls for it, but feel comfortable being playful if that suits you, too."

In short, be yourself . Tufts doesn't just want to hear your academic qualifications, nor do they want to hear their qualifications as a good school recited to them—they already know!

For School of Arts and Sciences, School of Engineering, and Tufts/NEC Degree Applicants:

You have two essays to write for this section. Both are required, but the second prompt offers you three potential choices.

Prompt #1: The "Why Tufts?" Essay

The first prompt, which you have 100 to 150 words to answer, reads:

Which aspects of the Tufts undergraduate experience prompt your application? In short, "Why Tufts?"

This is a pretty straightforward question—it's a version of the popular "Why This College?" essay . You wouldn't be applying to Tufts if you didn't already know that you wanted to go there, right? But always be aware that every other student applying to Tufts also knows that it's a good school. You can't just list qualifications back them; you have to dive a little deeper than that.

Tufts wants to know here is not just what attracts you to the college, but also what you'll bring to it . Let your enthusiasm and fresh ideas shine!

Having said that, a great essay is going to show admissions counselors that you've done your research. Be sure you point to specific parts of the "Tufts undergraduate experience" in your writing! For example, maybe there's a specific professor you want to work with, or a unique program that only Tufts offers that's a great fit for you. The more specific you are, the more you'll show admissions counselors that you're serious about becoming a student at Tufts.

Prompt #2: The Free Choice Essay

The second prompt is a little more complex. It also has a word count of 200 to 250, but includes three options you must choose from:

Now we'd like to know a little more about you. Please respond to one of the following three questions.

A) It's cool to love learning. What excites your intellectual curiosity?

B) How have the environments or experiences of your upbringing – your family, home, neighborhood, or community – shaped the person you are today?

C) Where are you on your journey of engaging with or fighting for social justice?

These three prompts are a great way to tell the admissions office more about yourself, particularly if you have extracurricular interests that you haven't had the opportunity to discuss yet.

Any of these prompts is a great choice, but you can only choose one. Here's a breakdown of who each prompt is a good fit for:

  • Prompt A: If you're an intellectually curious person, this is a great fit for you. People that fit this mold will engage in learning opportunities outside the classroom and constantly be on the hunt for knowledge. If you're the type that reads news before school or watches documentaries for fun, this is a good prompt for you!
  • Prompt B: This is a good all-around prompt! Generally speaking, most people will have some experience that helps them answer this prompt well. Having said that, this prompt requires you to be thoughtful and introspective. You'll need to understand how your experiences and background have shaped the person you are today.
  • Prompt C: Social justice is an important topic in 2021, and Tufts admissions officers are interested in students who fit with the university's mission of an "inclusive and collaborative" environment. If you have been part of the social justice movement, this would be a great prompt for you.

Keep in mind these are just suggestions. If one of these prompts jumps out to you as a perfect fit, run with it.

body_create

If you can't find this key on your keyboard, you'll have to invent it!

How to Answer Prompt A

In this prompt, Tufts wants to hear about your curiosity and interests. There are two ways you can approach this essay, each of which has its benefits and drawbacks.

First, you can choose an intellectual interest you have that relates to your future major. For example, say you're majoring in biology because you want to be in drug development. If that's the case, you can talk about a specific aspect of drug development that gets you excited. Maybe it's developing new vaccine production methods that use plants instead of animals, or maybe you want to develop new drugs to treat chronic illnesses like multiple sclerosis.

The trick here is being specific and letting your passion shine through, then tying all of that back to your future studies at Tufts. Don't be afraid to talk about a class you can't wait to take, or a project you hope to explore while you're in school. Just make sure that you're balancing talking about why you're curious with your academic plans. You don't want this to sound exactly like your "Why Tufts?" essay!

The second way you can approach this topic is by choosing something you're curious about that's a passion of yours, even if it isn't related to your major. This has the benefit of showing you're curious about more than just your major field, which is something admissions counselors are looking for.

For example, maybe you want to major in kinesiology, but you love social media and you're curious about how it impacts the ways we behave. You don't have to be majoring in psychology or computer science to write about this topic if you're passionate about it! The trick — and drawback — to going this route is making sure you're still connecting this passion back to your plans as a potential Tufts student. Maybe this curiosity has made you want to join the Tufts Psychology Society so you can learn more about how you can use human behavior and social media to help motivate people in your future career as a physical therapist.

How to Answer Prompt B

This prompt is asking you to write about how your background has shaped your character. Admissions counselors are looking for essays that showcase your thoughtfulness, especially in terms of how your experiences impact you as a person. This is a chance for you to highlight parts of your personality and identity that might not otherwise come across in your admissions materials.

If you choose this essay prompt, you'll want to spend some time figuring out which aspect of your background you want to focus on. Luckily, the prompt gives you a few ideas (family, home, neighborhood, and community) to start with, but you're not limited to those! Maybe you want to talk about an after school program you were a part of, or a sports team you played on for your entire childhood. As long as this experience or environment played a substantial part in your upbringing, it's fair game.

Whatever you choose, make sure you're choosing one thing . Don't talk about your family and your neighborhood and your community. This essay isn't long enough to cover all of that material! Instead, pick one thing and get specific. Explain why was this experience or environment important to you, and go into detail about how it impacted you as a person.

The best answers to this prompt are going to tell a story about your experience that helps readers connect with who you are. Perhaps one of the things that most shaped your character was growing up with five siblings. Tell a story about a specific moment that will help admissions counselors understand what that was like!

And finally, don't forget to connect this back to being a Tufts student by explaining how your character is a good fit for the university. For instance, let's go back to having lots of siblings. Maybe that's taught you to value everyone for their unique personalities because no matter how different you are, everyone brings something special to the table. Because of that, you're excited about making new friends and bringing people together as part of the Tufts community.

How to Answer Prompt C

This prompt is all about social justice. If you're not sure what social justice is, the National Association of Social Workers defines it as "the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities." Put another way, social justice is the fight for equality for everyone regardless of their race, class, or economic status.

To answer this prompt, you'll need to explain how you're learning about, involved in, or fighting for social justice. What steps are you taking to help further this cause in your own life? Note that the prompt uses the term "journey," here. That means admissions counselors aren't expecting you to have this whole "social justice" thing figured out! So don't worry if you haven't arranged a march in your community or taken up donations to help with the Black Lives Matter movement. Admissions counselors are more interested in how you're learning about the social justice movement and making changes in your life to support that cause.

Here's the thing: if you're not part of the social justice movement or aren't comfortable with the idea, do not write this Tufts essay. You're given essay options for a reason! Admissions counselors are trained to sniff out falsehoods, so the worst thing you could do is fib about your social justice work. It's okay if this isn't a good topic for you!

If you do choose this prompt, make sure you start with a story. Did you participate in a march? Have you volunteered with a social justice oriented organization? Telling a specific story about your experience will help readers connect with you as a person. It's also okay if your experience with social justice was talking with a friend about it and realizing that you can do more to support the cause. Like the old saying goes: it's not about the destination — it's about what you're learning in the process.

Also, be honest about what your journey so far. It's okay to say you're still learning, or that the journey has been tough. Admissions counselors value authenticity, and the truth is that fighting for social justice can be hard. Just make sure you're keeping your discussion as positive as you can! Focus on what you've learned and how hard you're trying to make a difference.

And of course, be sure you tie this all back to Tufts. Explain how your understanding of social justice will affect how you participate in your classes and on-campus events. Make it clear that you're going to bring a spirit of equity with you to campus since that's what admissions counselors want to see in future Tufts students.

body_sfma

For BFA, 5-Year BFA+BA/BS at SMFA Applicants:

This section has two required essays. You don't have any choice over which prompts you'll be answering, which eliminates some of the struggle to choose the best option for you.

Prompt #1: The "Why SMFA at Tufts?" Essay

The first prompt, which must be answered in 100 to 150 words, reads:

Which aspects of the Tufts undergraduate experience prompt your application? Why SMFA at Tufts?

This prompt is similar to the "Why Tufts?" essay prompt, but with a slightly different focus. SMFA at Tufts is the School of the Museum of Fine arts program at Tufts , so it's definitely for those interested in the arts.

The admissions office wants to see you demonstrate what exactly draws you to this school over others, and what specifically drives you to seek an art degree . What will you get out of Tufts that you couldn't get elsewhere? How will an art degree enrich your life, and how will you use that degree in the future?

Colleges want to foster intellectual growth in their communities, which is why they ask for more than a standard "this is a good school" answer. They want to know why you want to attend, but they also want to know what you're bringing to the community .

Browsing Tufts and SMFA at Tufts galleries are a great way to get some inspiration. Can you see your artwork fitting in there? What will you offer that isn't already represented?

Think about art that you've created or art that you want to create . How will Tufts help you get there? What makes you want to pursue an art degree, rather than art as a supplement to another field? Clearly articulating your interest and commitment will demonstrate that you're a good fit for Tufts to the admissions office.

Prompt #2: The Art Prompt

The second prompt, also with a 200 to 250 word count, reads:

Art has the power to disrupt our preconceptions, shape public discourse, and imagine new ways of being in the world. What are the ideas you'd like to explore in your work?

This question dives a little bit deeper into your artistic mind. It's not enough to create art that is beautiful on a surface level—Tufts wants to know that you're thinking about your art meaningfully, too .

This prompt is essentially an artist's statement , though it's focused more on your artistic intent on a large scale rather than on an individual piece. Look through some of your favorite art you've created and think about common themes and recurring ideas, even if you didn't intend for them to be there . What concepts are you trying to explore, even subconsciously?

Consider not just what your art looks or sounds like, but also what it's made of and why you chose to make it that way. Think beyond availability or ease of use—always keep the question of "why" in your mind.

Themes are good, but try not to go too general or invent something that isn't there. Much of art is about capturing beauty, so try to think deeper than that. And if you're going to claim that your art critiques or represents something, you need to be able to demonstrate that— analyze what you've created to show how it connects to your themes, don't simply project something over the top and hope that admissions officers don't notice it wasn't really there .

body_fistbump

What Do Tufts Essays That Worked Look Like?

Thankfully, Tufts University isn't shy about putting accepted essays online for applicants to browse. While some of these essays apply to older topics, they'll still help you get a sense of what admissions counselors are looking for in excellent students (and their essays).

"Why Tufts?" Essay That Worked

I vividly remember stepping onto the roof of Tisch Library and seeing a group of kids sitting in hammocks, overlooking the Boston skyline. I briefly tuned out my tour guide's presentation and began to eavesdrop. The students covered everything from physics to what they had for lunch that day. When they spoke about physics, they did not speak with pretension; instead they spoke with passion. Likewise, when they spoke about something as simple as lunch, they did so with witty intrigue. Tufts students are as interesting as they are interested. This description not only resonates with me, it defines me.

This essay does an excellent job of answering the questions at the core of the "Why Tufts?" essay. The writer channels an experience they had while at Tufts, detailing how listening in on other students solidified their desire to attend. They use words like "passion" to describe Tufts students, showing traits they also want to channel.

The ending really hits on something important: this student wanted to be part of the student body because the students they overheard were not only interesting people, but also interested . Remember the prompts mention of being "intellectually playful?" This is the perfect way to demonstrate curiosity, interest, and love of learning int he specific context of Tufts .

"What Have You Created?" Essay That Worked

This essay applies to an older prompt that asked students to talk about one of their creations. Here's what this student had to say:

When people talk about building something, creating it, they most often mean something physical. Engineers, architects, and laborers, these are the professions that I think of as making things. I've never been much of a builder, I lack that particular understanding of the world that is required to envision what you will build, and have never been coordinated enough to make much of anything with my hands, but I can create. What I have made is not something you can hold or touch, it spans no gaps and holds no weight, and I can't even claim to have laid a single finger on its construction. My creation is a poem, or rather, poems. Series of letters symbolic of sounds strung together to make words, which are in turn collected into lines and stanzas, pieces of a whole. My poems cannot be touched, but they can touch you; though they won't form a bridge, they can cross a divide; and while you'll never be able to weigh them on a scale, the weight of the ideas they hold can be felt the moment you read them. So I may not be an engineer or an architect or a laborer, but I am a creator. I craft words into meaning, forge lines into rhymes, and sculpt imaginations. So even if I can't hold what I make, I can watch it take shape and see its impact on the world.

This essay does an excellent job of answering the question not just by stating the answer, but by embodying it . It's clear that the student is a writer; their language is vivid, immediate, and playful, demonstrating how strong their grasp is on word meanings and sentence structure.

Importantly, this essay doesn't disparage other disciplines—it interprets poetry using language physical creators might use, such as "spans," "bridge," and "weight.

There's a great deal of creativity and intellectual play in this essay, which serve to set the writer apart from students who might have focused more on the existence of the thing they'd built (a souped-up car engine, for example) than the function of the thing they'd built (a souped-up car engine that reduces carbon emissions, for example).

When tackling this prompt, think about how you, too, can exemplify your creation in your essay .

body_dolphin2

Think like a dolphin: smart and playful!

Key Points for Your Tufts Essays

Best practices for Tufts essays are similar to other schools, but there are some special considerations to keep in mind.

Pay Attention to Tufts' Intellectual Bent

Tufts makes a point of using words like "playful" and "intellectual." These suggest a curiosity about the world that goes beyond wanting to attend a good school because it's a good school. Keep them in mind as you're writing— how can you demonstrate your own curiosity and interest in the world?

Remember That Tufts Is a Research University

You'll be interacting more with graduate students than you would in other settings . Not only will this give you a leg up in applying to grad school, but it will also grant you the opportunity to think more deeply than if you were only exposed to other undergrads.

Demonstrating an interest in learning from other students and participating in a learning community is a great way to show that you're interested in the unique experience of attending a research university.

Choose the Prompts That Are Right for You

Because Tufts has two different sets of prompts depending which school you'll be attending, be sure you select the right ones. Further, be sure you really maximize each prompt's potential— the rest of your application covers academics, so use your essay to showcase what really makes you stand out .

What's Next?

Before you get started on writing your essays, you'll want to know what kind of admission requirements Tufts has . Great essays are important, but you should also demonstrate academic success!

Plan to get the best scores possible on your standardized tests, too. Reading about ACT and GPA requirements ahead of time can help you plan your academic strategy, as can reading about SAT requirements . Use these guides to get a head start!

the essays are intellectually

Want to write the perfect college application essay? Get professional help from PrepScholar.

Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay that you'll proudly submit to your top choice colleges.

Don't leave your college application to chance. Find out more about PrepScholar Admissions now :

Craft Your Perfect College Essay

Melissa Brinks graduated from the University of Washington in 2014 with a Bachelor's in English with a creative writing emphasis. She has spent several years tutoring K-12 students in many subjects, including in SAT prep, to help them prepare for their college education.

Student and Parent Forum

Our new student and parent forum, at ExpertHub.PrepScholar.com , allow you to interact with your peers and the PrepScholar staff. See how other students and parents are navigating high school, college, and the college admissions process. Ask questions; get answers.

Join the Conversation

Ask a Question Below

Have any questions about this article or other topics? Ask below and we'll reply!

Improve With Our Famous Guides

  • For All Students

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 160+ SAT Points

How to Get a Perfect 1600, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 800 on Each SAT Section:

Score 800 on SAT Math

Score 800 on SAT Reading

Score 800 on SAT Writing

Series: How to Get to 600 on Each SAT Section:

Score 600 on SAT Math

Score 600 on SAT Reading

Score 600 on SAT Writing

Free Complete Official SAT Practice Tests

What SAT Target Score Should You Be Aiming For?

15 Strategies to Improve Your SAT Essay

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 4+ ACT Points

How to Get a Perfect 36 ACT, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 36 on Each ACT Section:

36 on ACT English

36 on ACT Math

36 on ACT Reading

36 on ACT Science

Series: How to Get to 24 on Each ACT Section:

24 on ACT English

24 on ACT Math

24 on ACT Reading

24 on ACT Science

What ACT target score should you be aiming for?

ACT Vocabulary You Must Know

ACT Writing: 15 Tips to Raise Your Essay Score

How to Get Into Harvard and the Ivy League

How to Get a Perfect 4.0 GPA

How to Write an Amazing College Essay

What Exactly Are Colleges Looking For?

Is the ACT easier than the SAT? A Comprehensive Guide

Should you retake your SAT or ACT?

When should you take the SAT or ACT?

Stay Informed

the essays are intellectually

Get the latest articles and test prep tips!

Looking for Graduate School Test Prep?

Check out our top-rated graduate blogs here:

GRE Online Prep Blog

GMAT Online Prep Blog

TOEFL Online Prep Blog

Holly R. "I am absolutely overjoyed and cannot thank you enough for helping me!”

MIT Press

On the site

Essays on the intellectual powers of man.

Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

by Thomas Reid

Introduction by Baruch A. Brody

  • 9780262680127
  • Published: August 15, 1969
  • Publisher: The MIT Press
  • 9780262180405

Out of print

Other Retailers:

  • MIT Press Bookstore
  • Penguin Random House
  • Barnes and Noble
  • Bookshop.org
  • Books a Million
  • Amazon.co.uk
  • Waterstones
  • Request permissions
  • Description

Thomas Reid was the seventeenth century Scottish philosopher who, during his professorship at King's College in Aberdeen, led the attack upon Humean skepticism, then both wide-based and historically deep-rooted in Scottish thought. The responsibility for the success of this attack belongs not only to Reid himself but to them extremely promising minds—whom he affected so profoundly, among them Dugald Stewart, James Beattie, James Gregory, George Campbell, and Alexander Gerard. The school lost favor under the weighty dominance of John Stuart Mill and the British idealists, and Reid's writings, as a result, have suffered from long neglect.

As is the case with the Reidian ethic, the Reidian epistemology takes its direction largely from the conflict with Humean thought. Disturbed by the prevalence of analogical hypotheses drawn from the physical world, Reid based his own epistemological theory upon his introspective analysis of the operations of the mind, outlining three possible elements in any mental act: the act itself; the act's object; an intuitive belief in the existence of the object, distinct from the mental act. On the basis of this analysis, he differentiates perception, sensation, memory, conception, and abstraction. Reid's Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man also takes particular issue with the Cartesian and Lockean philosophy which held that the direct objects of mental acts were ideas in the mind, a point of view which necessitated the consequent attempts to provide philosophical proof to justify one's belief in physical objects, the past, other minds, etc. Reid saw in this position the roots of Humean skepticism and resisted it wholeheartedly, insisting that we have a justified common-sense belief that mental acts do have as their objects distinct physical objects, and he challenged, one by one, the skeptics' arguments to the contrary.

Related Books

The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress

Fordham Logo 400 X78

the essays are intellectually

  • Campus Culture
  • High School
  • Top Schools

the essays are intellectually

5 Stanford Intellectual Vitality Supplemental Essay Examples

  • essay topic
  • college application essays

College applications look at more than just your test scores and your personal statement.  

the essays are intellectually

Colleges give you other opportunities to demonstrate your personality or passion. Stanford, for example, asks for 3 additional supplemental essays. One of them questions an applicant’s intellectual vitality. Here’s the prompt:

Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development. (250 word limit)

   

StanfordAndrew

Stanford university ‘21  .

What’s more probable: dying from a shark attack, or dying from falling airplane parts? Surprisingly, the answer is falling airplane parts. But why does our intuition point us towards shark attacks? Read full essay.  

    

Stanford University ‘18

My sophomore year, I fell in love with math.

See, I’ve always been a strong student in mathematics, but until Precalculus with Mrs. Forbes, it was always my least favorite class. In second grade, I remember scribbling down numbers from the Fibonacci sequence while the teacher explained negative numbers for the hundredth time, which illustrates a trend: teachers saw an empty bucket, while I wanted an intellectual adventure. Keep reading.  

the essays are intellectually

Outside my kitchen, towers of iron-crusted bicycle frames obscure a copse of overgrown plum trees. Alongside the house, wheels rest in stacks sorted according to diameter-width, and the front brick patio is strewn with odd mechanical pieces. My house is a way station for lost bikes, and my dad, a life-long thrifter, is their guardian. His mission to repair and sell them in his spare time results in a view more like a junkyard than a backyard. Continue reading.

When my biology teacher announced that our next project would be a poster on the cell cycle, I immediately thought, “This is going to be easy.”

I soon realized that I was wrong. Very, very wrong. My previous knowledge of mitosis barely scraped the surface. We were now expected to study all the molecular mechanisms that drive the cell cycle—a tangled network of checkpoints, proteins, and pathways. Worse, our teacher refused to give us any information, abandoning us to find everything for ourselves. Read on.

the essays are intellectually

Stanford University ‘19

If literature is the expression of opinions, and if opinions are subjective, then literature as a whole is subjective. Consequently, what are we supposed to gain from works of literature if not absolute truths? I, personally, look to literature to challenge my beliefs by presenting me with new ideas and opinions. Continue reading .

———-

Interested in reading these students full personal statements, and the Intellectual Vitality supplemental essay? Unlock all of them in one go with  our curated package ! 

the essays are intellectually

Our  premium plans  offer different level of profile access and data insights that can help you get into your dream school. Unlock any of our  packages  or search our  undergraduate profile database  to find specific profiles that can help you make an informed choice about where to apply! 

About The Author

Frances Wong

Frances was born in Hong Kong and received her bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University. She loves super sad drama television, cooking, and reading. Her favorite person on Earth isn’t actually a member of the AdmitSee team - it’s her dog Cooper.

Browse Successful Application Files

the essays are intellectually

Last week, Prompt's CEO shared what mistakes to avoid in your college essay. In Part 2 of this two-part blog series, learn how to pick an essay topic. The key: focus on an admissions officer’s...

How to Write College Essays to Boost your Chances Part 1: Biggest Essay Mistakes

With an otherwise great college application, how important can college essays really be? When only 1 in 5 students applying to selective colleges have compelling essays, make sure you avoid this essay mistake....

College Application Lessons from 2020-2021: Strategizing through Covid Changes (Part 2)

In this second part of his two-part series, college admissions coach Justin Taylor explains key admissions lessons from 2020, an unprecedented year of firsts, that can help you strategize as we enter into this next application...

College Admissions Lessons from 2020-2021: Strategizing through Covid Changes (Part 1)

In Part one of this two-part series, college admissions coach Justin Taylor explains key lessons about 2020, “a year like no other,” that could seriously boost your chances in 2021, including smarter list building and transcript GPA...

Winners of the AdmitSee 2020 College Scholarship

We are so excited to announce that for this year’s scholarship, we selected five scholarship winners to maximize the impact of our $5,000 college scholarship prize money....

the essays are intellectually

  • 1. Webinar Series: College Application Prep for High School Juniors
  • 2. College Application Lessons from 2020-2021: Strategizing through Covid Changes (Part 2)
  • 3. College Admissions Lessons from 2020-2021: Strategizing through Covid Changes (Part 1)

Download our FREE 4-Year College Application Guide & Checklist

  • 5. COVID-19 and Your College Essay: Should You Write About It?
  • 6. College Search: How to Find Your Best College Fit
  • 7. College Tours 101: Everything You Need to Know
  • 8. Waitlisted? 5 Ways to Move from the College Waitlist to Acceptance
  • 9. When (and why) should you send additional materials to colleges you’re interested in?
  • 10. How to Make Your College Essay Stand Out
  • 1. How to Write College Essays to Boost your Chances Part 2: Focusing the Priority
  • 2. How to Write College Essays to Boost your Chances Part 1: Biggest Essay Mistakes
  • 3. College Application Lessons from 2020-2021: Strategizing through Covid Changes (Part 2)
  • 5. Winners of the AdmitSee 2020 College Scholarship
  • 6. COVID-19 and Your College Essay: Should You Write About It?
  • 7. Education, Access and Systemic Racism
  • 8. Applying to BS/MD Direct Medical Programs: Why Early Med School Admission Might be Right for You
  • 9. How to Get Off the College Waitlist (5 Go-To Strategies)
  • 10. College admissions prep during the Coronavirus

the essays are intellectually

logo

  • SAT BootCamp
  • SAT MasterClass
  • SAT Private Tutoring
  • SAT Proctored Practice Test
  • ACT Private Tutoring
  • Academic Subjects
  • College Essay Workshop
  • Academic Writing Workshop
  • AP English FRQ BootCamp
  • 1:1 College Essay Help
  • Online Instruction
  • Free Resources

How to Answer the Harvard Supplemental Essay Prompts (2023-2024)

How to write the harvard supplemental essays (2023-2024).

Bonus Material: PrepMaven’s 50+ Real Supplemental Essays for Ivy+ Schools

Last year, Harvard admitted just 3.2% of applicants, meaning that if you want a shot at an admission for the 2023-2024 cycle, your application has to be just about perfect. 

One element of the Harvard application that many students struggle with is the Harvard writing supplement. It’s tricky to know exactly how to approach these supplemental essays: what can you write to stand out from the thousands of other applicants? What exactly are Harvard admissions officers looking for?

Fortunately, at PrepMaven, we’ve helped thousands of students craft compelling college application essays. It doesn’t hurt that many of our expert tutors have been admitted to Harvard themselves, and so they know exactly what works. 

In this guide, we’ll break down the 2023-2024 Harvard writing supplement, explaining exactly what you need to do to maximize your chances at a Harvard acceptance. To check out our overall guide that covers everything you need to do to get into Harvard in 2024, click here.

As you read on, check out our free resource linked below: it contains real, successful examples of supplemental essays written for Harvard and other top schools. 

Download 50+ Real Supplemental Essays for Ivy+ Schools

Jump to section:

  • Harvard 2023-2024 supplemental essay prompts 
  • How to write Harvard’s first essay
  • How to write Harvard’s second essay
  • How to write Harvard’s third essay
  • How to write Harvard’s fourth essay
  • How to write Harvard’s fifth essay

Harvard’s 2023-2024 supplemental essays 

This year, Harvard has a fairly intense set of supplemental essays: you’ll have to write 5 essays, each with a maximum word count of 200 words.

The supplemental essays prompts are below: 

the essays are intellectually

Prompt 1 Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?  Prompt 2 Briefly describe an intellectual experience that was important to you.  Prompt 3 Briefly describe any of your extracurricular activities, employment experience, travel, or family responsibilities that have shaped who you are.  Prompt 4 How do you hope to use your Harvard education in the future?  Prompt 5 Top 3 things your roommates might like to know about you.

The first thing to notice is that several of these essays fall into well-known categories of the college essay. 

How to write Harvard’s first essay: Diversity/Community

If you haven’t already, you’ll soon come to recognize this essay prompt. At heart, this kind of prompt is asking you to discuss how–based on specific elements of your life–you view your role as a potential member of Harvard’s diverse community. 

We call this the Diversity/community essay, because those are really always two sides of the same coin. 

With the Harvard Diversity/community essay, there are 2 basic options for structuring your response:

  • Discuss community through the lens of your identity. 
  • Discuss community through the lens of other events/activities/pursuits in your life. 

Which path you take will actually be easy to decide: 

the essays are intellectually

If your identity (racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, religious, etc.) has significantly influenced your worldview or experiences, go with option 1. 

In other words, if you know you have something meaningful to say about how your identity has shaped you, that should structure your response. This might mean writing an essay about how discrimination or systemic biases have affected you or your family; it could just as well, however, mean writing about specific experiences you’ve cherished as a member of a particular culture. 

A few great examples from recent essays we’ve worked on: 

  • An essay that focuses on a student’s biracial background and how she learned to use others’ ignorant/racist comments as opportunities for starting difficult conversations. 
  • An essay exploring how a first-generation immigrant served as a translator for his parents. 
  • An essay from a young woman exploring how she navigated the contradictions between her feminist views and the emphasis on tradition within her religion. 

If your identity has not significantly experienced how you view the world, go with option 2. 

If you don’t feel particularly connected to a specific identity, or if you can’t think of specific ways that your identity has affected you, you should instead focus on other elements of your life that have shaped your view of community. 

Think about what you want out of a community: then, think about what aspect of your life (an extracurricular, a hobby, a social circle) has shaped that desire. Tell that story. It may sound a bit tough to thread that needle, but it really isn’t so bad: here are a few really successful topics from recent students in response to this kind of prompt:

the essays are intellectually

  • An essay about how a student’s participation in yearly music recitals with strangers shaped how he views community as a place for everyone to share their gifts/talents. 
  • An essay from an avid hiker about how his experiences maintaining hiking trails taught him to think of community as a shared, daily effort in the service of others. 
  • An essay from a student who moved countries multiple times reflecting on what in each place contributed to creating a cohesive community. 

All the examples are different, but share one thing in common: using your personal experiences to reflect on your role in a diverse community. 

For successful examples of Diversity/community essays, check out the first Princeton essay and the first three UMich essays in the free collection below!

How to write Harvard’s second essay: Intellectual Experience

Here’s the second supplemental prompt:

Briefly describe an intellectual experience that was important to you. 

You can really think of this question as being a simpler version of the “Why Major?” question that colleges often ask (and on which we’ve written a guide here ). 

With a simple “Intellectual experience” prompt, you don’t have to go into the nitty-gritty of how Harvard’s programs will help you pursue your interests. Instead, you’ll just tell the Harvard admissions committee how a particular experience you’ve had sharpened your curiosity, raised new questions, or affected your academic goals. 

Think of the “Intellectual Experience” essay as having two parts:

  • Describe the experience itself
  • Show how it affected you or what you learned

What kinds of things count as intellectual experiences? Well, it really is a very broad category, and you’re likely the best judge. Particularly good ideas include things like:

the essays are intellectually

  • Independent research
  • Internships with professors or universities
  • Advanced summer programs at universities
  • Academically-focused extracurriculars 

If you don’t have any of the above to talk about, you can also make this essay about:

  • A provocative book, article, etc. that you’ve engaged with
  • A particularly memorable moment in class (a specific lab, assignment, or lecture)
  • Any other learning experience, formal or not, that had a profound effect on you

The key is that, regardless of what the topic of your essay is, you do the following:

  • Describe it in vivid, specific detail
  • Convey your passion for whatever you’re describing
  • Explore its effect on you

Never underestimate the power of simply showing Harvard admissions officers that you’re the kind of person who spends time thinking about your interests. That’s really all they want here, and that’s why it’s so important that you’re specific and passionate. 

At the same time, Harvard admissions committees want to see that this intellectual experience has shaped you in some way, that you’ve meaningfully engaged with it. That’s why it’s crucial that you spend some time discussing what new ideas or questions arose out of this experience. 

And that’s it! Do all of the above, and you’ll have the second of Harvard’s supplemental essays locked down tight–plus, you’ll have a great template for any other schools that ask the same question. 

Ready to get started? A great resource to begin with is our collection of real, successful supplemental essays, many of which answer similar prompts. For stellar examples of essays that discuss intellectual experiences, check out the last supplemental essay for Princeton, as well as the first sample essay for UPenn. 

How to write Harvard’s third essay: Extracurricular

Harvard’s third supplemental essay is a classic one: the Extracurricular essay. You’re pretty much guaranteed to see a version of this prompt for a few of your schools. For reference, the exact wording of Harvard’s is below:

Briefly describe any of your extracurricular activities, employment experience, travel, or family responsibilities that have shaped who you are. 

These essays usually come quite naturally to students, since the Extracurricular prompt lets you get into more detail about something on your resume/activities sheet. 

Although you may be tempted to simply write about the most “impressive” thing on your resume, we’d encourage you to think a little bit differently: the question here, as with every essay, is about what the best story you can tell is. 

You should especially think about how much more your essay can add on to what the activities list already shows. For example, if your team won first place at a national Quizbowl competition, that’s definitely impressive. But is there a story there? More to the point: is the story you tell going to add something meaningful beyond the fact that you took home the first place trophy?

If not, then Quizbowl can stay on your activities list: the Harvard admissions committee will still know you got first place, and you’ll be able to use this supplemental essay to instead provide added detail and color to an activity that might otherwise seem less impressive. 

We’ve included a sample below from an essay in response to one of Princeton’s previous prompts. 

the essays are intellectually

Over the pandemic, I tutored two middle school boys. Now, I love kids, but middle schoolers are not my number one favorites. They are often dismissive of authority and it’s very hard to hold their attention for longer than two minutes. So working with them on Zoom for an hour became my new challenge. I tried many tactics. When fun warm-ups, writing prompts, and Zoom games all failed, I was officially stumped. I couldn’t understand why they found me so uninteresting. I decided to pay closer attention to the passions they mentioned. Instead of imposing my own ideas, I listened to what they had to say. It turned out Lucian loved running. Getting him to read was like pulling teeth, but I found a Jason Reynolds book called Ghost, part of a series about a track team. We would spend ten or fifteen minutes at the beginning of each session reading it aloud to each other, and while he seemed to be engaged, I couldn’t tell exactly how much he was enjoying it. But when we finally finished, he asked me shyly, “What did you say the next one was called?” Sajiah proved to be tougher to please. He wasn’t swayed by any books I suggested to him, no matter the topic. He often hummed or rapped while working, which I found to be endlessly annoying, until I started listening to the actual words. I Googled the lyrics and noticed that he particularly enjoyed Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa. So we began a project investigating the origins of hip hop, and created a website as the final product. He loved finding out more about the music he listened to every day, and I loved seeing him so happy with his work. I don’t pretend I saved the world by helping these boys, but I am proud of the creative way I found projects and topics they genuinely enjoyed investigating. I hope to continue working with children as a form of civic engagement throughout college and beyond; if I can help students like Sajiah and Lucian, it’ll be well worth it.

Notice that the extracurricular itself (tutoring two young students) isn’t inherently impressive, but the story is. If the author just left this on their activities sheet, it probably wouldn’t have caught admissions officers’ attention. 

But, because this applicant was able to tell a meaningful, reflective story about this extracurricular activity, it added a new depth and perspective to their application as a whole. 

The third Harvard supplemental essay doesn’t have to be difficult: stay honest, stay direct, and tell your story. 

To read other responses to this very prompt (and many other sample supplemental essays), download our collection below. And if you’d like the guidance of one of our expert tutors (some of whom wrote the very essays in that packet), just contact us . 

How to write Harvard’s fourth essay: Putting your education to use

Although this question may feel oddly specific, it’s really just another version of a commonly asked question: what are you going to do with what you learn? Most frequently, this is a question asked by religious universities, or universities with a particular focus on service. 

While the answer doesn’t have to present you as somebody who will spend their whole life volunteering, it’s a good idea to reflect a bit on what the purpose of education is for you, and how you might be able to present that in a socially-minded, positive way.

Below, check out the prompt and some advice on what Harvard admissions officers are looking for. 

How do you hope to use your Harvard education in the future? 

the essays are intellectually

There are probably some obvious answers you could give here that (even if they’re true) should probably stay off the page. Saying you want to use your Harvard education to make a ton of money on Wall Street or make elite political connections isn’t likely to win you any admiration from the admissions officers. 

That being said, don’t try too hard to pass yourself off as someone you’re not. If you really do have a passion for service or politics and plan to pursue a major related to those ideas, then this essay will be quite straightforward for you. Describe what drives you and how the tools Harvard provides will help you achieve those socially-minded goals. 

For example, if you’re motivated to address systemic inequities in education and plan to study something like sociology, you could simply discuss where this motivation comes from and how a Harvard sociology degree would help you in your goals. The strongest essays will always come from these kinds of stories. 

If, on the other hand, you don’t have those kinds of motivations or background, you’ll likely want to focus this essay more broadly on how you plan to pursue your post-grad life. Ideally, you’ll find some way to thread in ideas about community, giving back, and service into this essay. 

This can be a big-picture, or not. You might talk about how a Harvard education will help you support your family, or how it can help you give back to the local community you come from. As long as you keep your essay specific and honest without trying to overdo your charitable intentions, you’ll be fine. 

How to write Harvard’s fifth essay: Roommates 

Ah, a classic roommate essay! Although this might seem like an offbeat or wacky question, you’ll find there’s a few colleges that ask you to share something with your future roommates. Why?

Well, basically because they want to make sure you’re a fairly sociable person who’ll get along with people. 

Top 3 things your roommates might like to know about you.

You can and should have fun with these essays, and can even frame them as letters to your roommate. It’s an opportunity for you to share fun facts or quirks about yourself, sure, but more than anything these essays are a chance for you to show that you’re mindful of others. 

Whatever specific facts you include here, be sure to make some of them about you as a community member. For example, if you’re an engineering whiz, you can definitely talk about how you like to tinker and take stuff apart. But, to really make this land with Harvard’s admissions committee, you could also mention how that means you’ll always be ready to help your roommate fix a broken laptop. 

The key idea is to show that your quirks, whatever they are, will have some positive impact on the people around you. 

the essays are intellectually

Be humble, be playful, but don’t forget what this is all about: you’re trying to convince Harvard you’d be a good person to have around for four years. First and foremost that means showing them that you’d be a conscientious roommate who’s mindful of others’ needs. 

If you’re applying to Harvard, the place to start is our comprehensive guide to the Harvard application for the 2023-2024 cycle, which you can find here. That guide doesn’t just cover what Harvard’s application requires of you: it uses the latest statistics and insights from our own Harvard undergraduate tutors to walk you through exactly what you’ll need to do to have a shot at Harvard.

Once you’re ready to start writing supplemental essays for Harvard and your other schools, we have two main pieces of advice. 

First: read real, successful sample supplemental essays that helped get students into Harvard and other hyper-selective schools. Most people don’t really know what schools like Harvard actually want from the supplemental essays, and the best solution is to spend lots of time reviewing sample essays. We’ve collected dozens of these essays in the free resource below. 

Second: get expert help. Whether you’re a brilliant writer or just an okay one, you’ll benefit tremendously from the advice of someone who’s already successfully navigated the college application process. Our college essay coaches aren’t just writing experts who can make your essay shine: they’re trained to know exactly what schools like Harvard expect to see . 

Check out the free sample essays below, and, when you’re ready to start writing, contact us to get paired with a college essay expert. 

Related College Essay Posts

  • 14 Best College Essay Services for 2023 (40 Services Reviewed)
  • How to Get into Harvard 2023-2024
  • Hot to Get into Princeton 2023-2024
  • How to Get into Yale 2023-2024
  • How to Answer the UC Personal Insight Questions
  • 11 College Essays That Worked
  • How to Start a College Essay
  • The Diamond Strategy: How We Help Students Write College Essays that Get Them Into Princeton (And Other Ivy League Schools)
  • What is the College Essay? Your Complete Guide for 2023
  • College Essay Brainstorming: Where to Start
  • How to Write a ‘Why This College’ Essay + Examples that Worked for the Ivy League
  • 9 Ways to (Quickly) Improve Your College Essay

Mike

Mike is a PhD candidate studying English literature at Duke University. Mike is an expert test prep tutor (SAT/ACT/LSAT) and college essay consultant. Nearly all of Mike’s SAT/ACT students score in the top 5% of test takers; many even score above 1500 on the SAT. His college essay students routinely earn admission into their top-choice schools, including Harvard, Brown, and Dartmouth. And his LSAT students have been accepted In into the top law schools in the country, including Harvard, Yale, and Columbia Law.

Privacy Preference Center

Privacy preferences.

College Advisor logo

Harvard Supplemental Essays 2023-24

' src=

Harvard Supplemental Essays 2023-2024

If you’re applying to Harvard , you might be wondering how to approach the Harvard supplemental essays. Harvard is one of the most prestigious schools in the United States and the world, and as such is ultra-competitive. As an applicant, you’ll want to take every opportunity to distinguish yourself, starting with the Harvard essay prompts. This may feel daunting, but writing stellar Harvard application essays is guaranteed to make your application shine.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about writing your Harvard supplemental essays. This includes understanding the Harvard essay requirements and showing you where to find Harvard essay examples. We’ll also go over general Harvard application requirements that you should know, including the Harvard acceptance rate and application deadline.

Want some advice on how to get into Harvard? You’ve come to the right place. Now, let’s go over some quick facts about the Harvard supplemental essays. 

Harvard Supplemental Essays: Quick Facts

Harvard university essay quick facts.

  • Harvard acceptance rate: 4% – U.S. News rates Harvard a highly competitive school.
  • 5 short-answer questions (200-word limit)
  • Restrictive Early Action: November 1st 
  • Regular Decision: January 1st 
  • Harvard application note: The Harvard supplemental essays for the 2023-2024 cycle have changed from past years. All five Harvard supplemental essays are required for all applicants.
  • #1 Harvard Essay Tip: Your essays are your opportunity to show Harvard how you’ve interacted with the world. This includes how your experiences have shaped you into who you are and the kind of impact you hope to make.

Please note that essay requirements are subject to change each admissions cycle, and portions of this article may have been written before the final publication of the most recent guidelines. For the most up-to-date information on essay requirements, check the university’s admissions website.

Now that you know the basics about the Harvard application, let’s dive into more information about the Harvard supplemental essays. 

What are the Harvard Essay Prompts?

Harvard Supplemental Essays

The Harvard essay prompts for the 2023-2024 have changed dramatically from past years. Previously , Harvard only required a short extracurricular essay. Students then had the opportunity to write an additional essay, choosing between a few Harvard application essay questions. These included topics such as how you hope to use your college education and unusual circumstances in your life.

Now the Harvard supplemental essays are different. According to the latest information for first-year applicants, Harvard requires 5 short-answer essays of 200 words or less. 

Here are the Harvard essay prompts for this year :

Harvard University Essay Prompts

1. harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. how will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to harvard, 2. briefly describe an intellectual experience that was important to you. , 3. briefly describe any of your extracurricular activities, employment experience, travel, or family responsibilities that have shaped who you are., 4. how do you hope to use your harvard education in the future, 5. top 3 things your roommates might like to know about you. .

If you’ve read the Harvard supplemental essay prompts for their optional essay in years past, these questions may look familiar. Before, students might write one long Harvard application essay that only touched on one of these questions. Now, Harvard is requiring their applicants to succinctly respond to multiple prompts. 

You might find writing multiple Harvard application essays is more intimidating than writing just one. And that’s okay! Even though this is the first year the Harvard supplemental essays are structured this way, these prompts are nothing new. We’ve still got all the information you need to successfully tackle the Harvard supplemental essays..

But before we dive into the Harvard supplemental essay prompts, let’s first talk about your Harvard personal statement. 

Harvard Personal Statement

When you apply to Harvard, your Harvard application must include a personal statement. Both the Common App and Coalition App require you to write a personal statement, choosing from a selection of prompts. This essay is also what the Harvard admissions committee considers your Harvard personal statement. Unlike your Harvard supplemental essays, your personal statement is not school-specific. That means it can be submitted to any school you are applying to.

The 2023-24 Common App prompts are broad, and intentionally so! The prompts are meant to give students the space and opportunity to write about something they care about.

You can write about:

  • Your background
  • A lesson you have learned
  • A time that you challenged a belief
  • Something you’re grateful for
  • An accomplishment, a topic that fascinates you
  • Any topic of your choosing!

Harvard encourages students to write about something they’re passionate about, not something they think would impress the Harvard admissions committee. According to this list of tips about the Harvard personal statement, “The point of the personal statement is for you to have the chance to share whatever you would like with us. Remember, your topic does not have to be exotic to be compelling.”

Whatever you write your personal statement about, it should stand apart from your Harvard supplemental essays. Each one of your Harvard application essays should tell the Harvard admissions committee something new about you. Or, it should elaborate and build upon something that you haven’t had enough time to discuss elsewhere in your application. 

What should I write my Harvard essay about?

Harvard Supplemental Essays

There is no one perfect essay topic that will automatically earn you admission to Harvard. The best Harvard supplemental essays will communicate something unique about you, giving the admissions committee a window into who you are. 

One way to come up with ideas for your Harvard supplemental essays is to read successful application essays! In this list of Ivy League essays that worked, you’ll see essays about everything. From AP Biology to Adventure Time to a family member’s hospitalization for schizophrenia. The quality of your writing, and whether the topic is important to you, is more important than the topic itself. 

Harvard personal statement examples

In this guide to past Harvard personal statement examples, you can read essays from previous years. These essays answered many of the same questions Harvard asks today—except using far more words. Not all of these Harvard personal statement examples align with the current Harvard prompts, but they’re still examples of great writing.

Additionally, these Harvard personal statement examples still show the diversity of topics, as well as styles, that Harvard looks for. Though the Harvard essay requirements are different this year, there are many overlapping topics covered in the Harvard personal statement examples. 

Choosing a topic

If you’re still stuck coming up with a topic for your Harvard application essay questions, try a brainstorm! Brainstorming or free writing about the different short answer questions is a great way to generate potential essay ideas.

Strong essays often focus around moments of change or personal growth. Think about an experience you grew from, or maybe one that demonstrates your values and what matters to you. You can also look to your application for inspiration. What aspects of who you are do you feel like your extracurriculars, grades, or potentially test scores leave out? 

Harvard Short Answer Questions

In the next sections, we’ll go over each of the Harvard supplemental essays individually. For each of the Harvard essay prompts, we’ll discuss what the prompt is asking for and how you might approach it. And we’ll give you tips on what to include in your Harvard supplemental essays to make them stand out. 

This year, the Harvard supplemental essays consist of 5 separate short-answer questions. The Harvard supplemental essays are called “short-answer” because of the word limit. You only have 200 words to provide a strong, detailed, and specific answer to the Harvard essay prompts. Limiting your Harvard supplemental essays to only 200 words can be tricky. So, it’s important you choose your topic wisely, consider the important details, and make every word count.

You can look up the Harvard supplemental essays with the Common App’s search tool . By searching for Harvard, or any other college, you can go over their school-specific writing requirements for that college. On Harvard’s website you can find guidelines for your Harvard application, including requirements for the Harvard supplemental essays. 

Now, let’s go over each of the Harvard essay prompts in more detail.

Harvard Essay #1 – Contributing to Harvard

Harvard Supplemental Essays

The first of the Harvard supplemental essays is about contributing to Harvard.

Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?

This question is a bit misleading. Although it’s phrased as a single sentence, there are really two parts to this prompt. What in your life has shaped you into the person you are today? Then, how does that affect what you’ll contribute to Harvard’s community? 

For the first of your Harvard supplemental essays, think about what “diversity” means to you. Maybe it’s where you grew up, your race, your gender or sexuality. Or maybe you’ve had a unique upbringing that falls outside of those identity categories. Once you have identified the piece of your upbringing you would like to share, think about how it’s shaped you. What value has that brought into your life, and how can that part of you enrich Harvard’s community? 

For example, maybe you went to school in a really homogeneous suburb. Think of a place where everyone was the same race and from the same socioeconomic class. Once you recognized that, you tried to do everything you could to learn about different perspectives. Maybe you volunteered outside your community to try and understand the experiences of people outside of that bubble. This intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness is a product of your upbringing that impacts how you’d interact with others at Harvard.

Harvard Short Essay #2 – Intellectual Experience

Harvard Supplemental Essays

For the second of your Harvard supplemental essays, you’re asked to focus on the intellectual.

Briefly describe an intellectual experience that was important to you. 

This Harvard application essay should speak to your academic interests and your intended concentration— Harvard’s version of a major . Even if you don’t know what you want to concentrate in, that’s okay! You don’t have to worry about your Harvard supplemental essays defining what you will eventually go on to study. All you need to do is focus on a moment in your education, or in your life, that stimulated you intellectually.

Each of the Harvard supplemental essays are trying to learn something specific about you. In this one, Harvard is trying to see if you are intellectually curious and passionate about learning. As a prestigious university, Harvard puts a huge value on its students having a desire to learn. If you are applying to Harvard, this should be a pretty easy question to answer! 

If something doesn’t immediately come to mind, try asking yourself these questions. What moment made you love English, or Math, or Science? Was it inside or outside of the classroom? Was it a political debate, or a conversation with a family member? An essay topic you didn’t expect to enjoy but ended up adoring? As long as you explain an intellectual passion, there’s no wrong answer.

Harvard Essay Prompt #3 – Extracurricular Activities Essay

Harvard Supplemental Essays

If the first two Harvard supplemental essays focused on identity and curiosity, you can think of the third as focusing on action. The next of our Harvard supplemental essays centers around the things you do outside of the classroom. 

Briefly describe any of your extracurricular activities, employment experience, travel, or family responsibilities that have shaped who you are.

You may have already gone into detail about one of your extracurricular activities or other experiences in your Common App. If so, you should consider selecting a different one to speak about here. Having all of these individual Harvard supplemental essays allows you to share so many facets of who you are. Don’t limit yourself by describing the same thing multiple times!

This question is very open-ended. Since you only have 200 words, focus on answering this question succinctly and honestly. Don’t overthink it — simply pick one of these experiences and describe how it has shaped who you are. 

You could talk about grocery shopping with your mom, working at a summer camp, or being the captain of the swim team. What matters most is that you pick an experience that really impacted you. This could be something that inspired a change in your perspective, or helped you develop a new skill. The most important part of question 3 of your Harvard supplemental essays is not which activity you pick. It’s in showing how it has shaped you. 

Harvard Essay #4 – Education and the future

Harvard Supplemental Essays

For #4 of your Harvard supplemental essays, Harvard tasks you with envisioning your future. 

How do you hope to use your Harvard education in the future?

A Harvard education can get you a lot of places. Harvard knows that it’s a renowned institution—there’s a reason that the Harvard acceptance rate is so low. However, you don’t need to inflate its ego by discussing Harvard’s prestige. Instead, think about how a Harvard education will prepare you to make a positive impact in the world.

Also be wary of writing your Harvard supplemental essays in a way that inflates your own ego. Don’t just say you think you’ll be the next Elon Musk or the President of the U.S. Focus less on who you’ll be and more on what you’ll do. Think about what technology you could create to make peoples’ lives easier or policies you could enact to reduce poverty. Many Harvard students go on to achieve amazing things. However, make sure you’re focused on why those things are important and not the achievement itself.

You can also use the 4th of your Harvard supplemental essays to sneak in some “why Harvard” details. Consider mentioning a specific Harvard class or professor that you wish to study under. Maybe five years after graduating, you want to be writing a book with Professor X. And five years after that, you want to be teaching at Harvard on the same topic. 

Harvard Essay #5 – Roommate Essay

Harvard Supplemental Essays

This final question for the Harvard supplemental essays gives you an opportunity to chat with an imaginary future roommate. 

Top 3 things your roommates might like to know about you.

In the last of your Harvard supplemental essays, you can get a little creative. Since this question gives you complete freedom over what you include, it can be helpful to save it for last. Then you can look back at your other Harvard supplemental essays and brainstorm what the admissions committee hasn’t heard yet. If you could only describe three things about yourself, in 200 words, what would you say?

Since you’re hypothetically talking to a roommate, don’t be afraid to be more joking or casual—let your personality shine through! But, keep in mind that an admissions officer will still be reading your essay. So long as you’re being appropriate and true to yourself, you get to decide what to share and how to share it!

That being said, don’t mention only things that are superficial. Remember, this is still part of your application, and your reader is deciding whether you belong at Harvard. “I leave my clothes all over my bedroom floor, but I promise to never leave them in the common room,” may be the truth. However, opt for the personal over the mundane! What do you geek out about? How do you like to spend your free time? What Harvard experiences are you most looking forward to?

How to write the Harvard supplemental essays

Harvard Supplemental Essays

So, we’ve gone over the individual Harvard application essays. Now let’s talk about some general tips that you could use to answer any of the Harvard essays.

Be specific

Whether you’re writing about your extracurriculars, your upbringing, or Harvard itself, be specific. Generalizations can feel like they let you say more in fewer words. But, they don’t say as much about who you are or your experiences.

Instead of saying “I’ve always been passionate about history,” get specific! There are lots of people who like history—what exactly about history interests you? A specific time period? A social movement? Is it something about the discipline itself? Did you always feel this way about this subject? The more specific you are, the more the Harvard Admissions team can learn from your Harvard supplemental essays. 

This tip also applies to when you’re talking about Harvard. At some point in your Harvard application essays, you’ll want to mention something about why you want to attend Harvard. There are a whopping five Harvard essay prompts, after all! Avoid the obvious, like that Harvard has good academics and is prestigious. Be specific — you can list clubs, professors, majors like Sociology or Economics , or anything else that’s specific to the school. This shows that you’ve done your research and you want to come for a reason, not just the Harvard degree. 

Be yourself

At the end of the day, your Harvard application essays are for Admissions to get to know you better. The more introspective you can be before writing them, the more you can use the essays to demonstrate your values. Since the Harvard acceptance rate is so low, you’re competing against many incredibly qualified applicants. Sure, you might have stellar grades—but so does the average Harvard applicant. Your answers to the Harvard essay prompts are a way to set yourself apart. And the best way to do that is by being yourself. 

When you’re writing your Harvard application essays, it can feel intimidating to try and be “unique.” It can feel like you’ve never had a truly unique experience. But no one is exactly like you, so the more true to yourself you can be, the better! In your Harvard application essays, you don’t need to perform anything that you think Harvard wants to hear. Just be honest and speak about yourself and your experiences.

Show, don’t tell

This tip on perfecting your Harvard application essays is a classic: show, don’t tell. Instead of simply stating the facts or your feelings, you put the reader into the experience using dialogue, imagery, and storytelling. 

For example, you might start your Harvard application essay by saying, “I was the most excited I had ever been.” Instead, could you describe how that excitement felt? Were your palms sweaty? Was your heart racing? Paint the reader a picture so they can imagine what it must have felt like to be there with you.

We know you do only have 200 words for these Harvard essay prompts. However, that leaves more than enough room for an evocative anecdote. Many students place this type of anecdote at the beginning of their Harvard application essays as a “hook.” A hook is something that grabs the reader’s attention, and pulls them into the essay. It makes them want to keep reading. Since the admissions committee will be reading so many essays, using a hook like this can make your essay stand out.

Grammar and spelling

It’s not super exciting, but it is non-negotiable: your Harvard application essays must have perfect grammar and spelling. The Harvard acceptance rate is 4%. You don’t want to let a typo or a run-on sentence be the distinguishing factor between you and another applicant. 

Use spell check, use an online grammar checker, or give your Harvard application essay to a parent or friend. Reading the essay out loud is also a great way to catch typos and grammatical errors. If something sounds wrong when it’s read out loud, you know that you have to go in and fix it. Reading out loud also forces you to look at each word. So, it’s less likely that a copy-paste error like having two “and’s” in a row would slip by. 

Get creative

Don’t be afraid to have fun with your Harvard application essays! The Harvard essay prompts might seem pretty straightforward. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t take them in a more fun direction. 

One way to stand out is to get a little creative. Sure, there’s probably such a thing as being too creative. You don’t want to be so quirky that you forget to answer the question, or come off smug. But adding a little natural humor or excitement into your essays is a totally acceptable way to get the admissions committee’s attention. 

If after reading these tips you’re still in doubt, consider reading some Harvard personal statement examples. Keep in mind our Harvard personal statement examples are from before changes were made to the Harvard essay requirements. However, they cover many similar topics as the current Harvard essays. Even though the Harvard essay prompts aren’t exactly the same, and the word count is certainly different, they’re still valuable. Our Harvard personal statement examples can show you how many different ways there are to answer the same questions. And how to write an essay that stands out. 

Does Harvard like risky essays?

Harvard Supplemental Essays

Judging from personal experience, yes! When I wrote my Harvard application essay in 2015, they were still asking for the optional extended personal essay. I chose to answer the prompt that asks what your roommate should know about you—similar to the current prompt. 

Instead of writing an essay, I wrote a play/screenplay where I meet my roommate for the first time. It was formatted like a play, with dialogue and stage directions, and set in the Harvard dorms. I researched specific things about Harvard and Harvard Square, and incorporated different places in the dialogue to make it feel more specific. I also shared a lot about myself: my values, quirks, extracurriculars, and more. And I guess they liked it, since I was admitted in the class of 2020!

In general, Harvard is looking for students who aren’t afraid to stand out. This includes students who are intellectually curious and passionate about what they believe in. It might feel harder to get creative in only 200 words. But, since you have five questions, you can always pick one of them and take a risk! Write a poem, use a quote or song lyrics, write with a specific audience in mind. As long as you’re using correct spelling and grammar, and you’re answering the question, the world is your oyster!

What does Harvard look for in applicants?

So what does Harvard look for in applicants? If you want to know how to get into Harvard, you’ll need some idea of what Harvard is looking for. 

First and foremost, you need to make sure you’re answering all of the Harvard essay prompts. And, be sure you’ve fulfilled all of the Harvard application requirements. That means:

  • Including your Harvard personal statement
  • Answering the Harvard application essay questions
  • Meeting all of the Harvard essay requirements
  • Submitting all of the required materials.

You also need to carefully observe the Harvard application deadlines, and pick which deadline works best for you. 

Outside of these Harvard application requirements, what else do you need to think about to know how to get into Harvard? Start by thinking about why you want to go to Harvard. It can seem like a simple question, but why Harvard specifically? Why are you a good fit? Why would you excel there? And why do you need to be there, specifically, to reach your highest potential?

Looking for more concrete answers to how to get into Harvard? On Harvard’s website, they provide admissions criteria . Stellar academics are understandably important, but Harvard also considers factors like leadership, character, and community involvement. One way to show Harvard that you embody these factors is through your answers to the Harvard application essay questions. 

When is my Harvard application due?

Harvard Supplemental Essays

There are two Harvard application deadlines. Regardless of which deadline you choose to submit by, you’ll need to submit a complete application. This includes:

  • Your answers to the Harvard application essay questions
  • Your (optional) SAT scores
  • Letters of recommendation
  • Extracurricular list
  • Any other Harvard essay requirements or supplements

One Harvard application deadline is Restrictive Early Action, and the other Harvard application deadline is Regular Decision.

Harvard Restrictive Early Action

The Harvard application deadline for Restrictive Early Action is November 1 . Restrive Early Action means that you can only submit your application early to one institution. Unlike Early Decision, it’s not a binding acceptance. So if you get into Harvard early, you can still apply to other schools Regular Decision. 

You should only apply to Harvard early if you’re confident that you’ve satisfied the Harvard essay requirements. You’ll also want to make sure you’ve answered all of the Harvard application essay questions to the best of your ability. When writing your answers to the Harvard supplemental essays, give yourself enough time to draft and brainstorm. Don’t write your answers the night before the deadline. If you haven’t filled the Harvard essay requirements or answered the Harvard application essay questions, don’t rush! Rather than hurry to submit Early Action, give yourself until the Regular Decision deadline.

Harvard Regular Decision

The Regular Decision deadline is January 1 . This gives you plenty of time to fulfill the Harvard essay requirements, including answers to all five Harvard essay prompts.  This might make for a busy Winter Break, but it’s worth it to make sure that you’ve confidently satisfied all of the Harvard application requirements. 

Additional Harvard Resources from CollegeAdvisor

Hopefully by this point you’re feeling more confident about answering the Harvard essay prompts. Although the Harvard application essay questions are different this cycle, you’ve still got plenty of resources to depend on. 

If you’re still looking for advice on how to get into Harvard, check out our guide that covers every step of the Harvard admissions process. We also have webinars like this one where you can hear from Harvard students about their college journeys. 

Don’t forget that if you’re still struggling with answering the Harvard essay questions, you can read these Harvard essay examples: Harvard personal statement examples from years past. Even though these Harvard essay examples are a little out of date, Harvard personal statement examples can give you a feeling for what kind of essay Harvard is looking for—regardless of the Harvard application essay questions. 

Harvard Essays – Takeaways

Now that you’ve reached the end of our guide to the Harvard supplemental essays, you’re ready to write your own. Here are some key takeaways to keep in mind: 

Harvard University Essay Key Takeaways

  • The Harvard application essay questions are different this year. Be sure to check Harvard’s website for the most up to date Harvard application requirements. 
  • This year, there are 5 Harvard supplemental essays. Each essay has a word limit of 200 words. 
  • When writing your essays: Be specific. Be true to yourself. Show and not tell. Always check your spelling and grammar. Don’t be afraid to get creative!
  • Be mindful of the two Harvard deadlines: November 1st (Restrictive Early Action) and January 1st (Regular Decision).
  • Wherever you are in your college journey, CollegeAdvisor is here to support you. From guides to Harvard’s extracurriculars , to Harvard personal statement examples and what to expect after you apply, we’ve got you covered. Even though the Harvard personal statement examples aren’t answering the same prompts as this year, they can still be educational. Give them a read and see for yourself! 

Thanks for reading our guide to Harvard’s supplemental essays—now go forth and write!

Harvard Supplemental Essays

This essay guide was written by advisor, Rachel Kahn . Looking for more admissions support? Click here to schedule a free meeting with one of our Admissions Specialists. During your meeting, our team will discuss your profile and help you find targeted ways to increase your admissions odds at top schools. We’ll also answer any questions and discuss how CollegeAdvisor.com can support you in the college application process.

Personalized and effective college advising for high school students.

  • Advisor Application
  • Popular Colleges
  • Privacy Policy and Cookie Notice
  • Student Login
  • California Privacy Notice
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Your Privacy Choices

By using the College Advisor site and/or working with College Advisor, you agree to our updated Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy , including an arbitration clause that covers any disputes relating to our policies and your use of our products and services.

Logo

Essay on Intellectual Revolution

Students are often asked to write an essay on Intellectual Revolution in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Intellectual Revolution

What is an intellectual revolution.

An intellectual revolution is when people start thinking in new ways. It’s like a big change in how we understand the world. Imagine people long ago believing the Earth was flat, and then learning it’s round. That’s a huge shift in thinking!

Causes of Intellectual Revolutions

These revolutions often start when someone asks questions or has new ideas. Sometimes, when we learn more through science or meet other cultures, our old ideas change. It’s like updating a game to make it better.

Effects of Intellectual Revolutions

After an intellectual revolution, many things can change, like how we live or what we believe. Schools might teach different things, and new inventions can appear. It’s as if everyone’s minds get a fresh update.

250 Words Essay on Intellectual Revolution

What is an intellectual revolution.

An intellectual revolution is a big change in the way people think. It’s like when everyone starts to see the world in a new light. This can happen because of new ideas, inventions, or discoveries that make people question what they believed before.

Examples in History

History has seen many of these revolutions. A famous one is the Enlightenment in Europe, where thinkers like Newton and Voltaire helped people understand science and human rights better. Another is the Renaissance, when art and knowledge from the past inspired new creativity.

Why They Matter

These revolutions are important because they change societies. For instance, they can lead to new laws or ways of living. They encourage people to learn, be curious, and solve problems.

Today’s World

Today, we’re living through a digital revolution. Computers and the internet have transformed how we get information, talk to each other, and work. It’s making us rethink how we live and learn.

In short, an intellectual revolution is a big shift in thinking that can change the world. It’s like a new chapter in a book, offering fresh stories and possibilities. These revolutions make us smarter and help us build a better future.

500 Words Essay on Intellectual Revolution

What is intellectual revolution.

An intellectual revolution is when people start thinking in new and different ways. It’s like a big change in how everyone’s brains work. Imagine if one day, everyone decided that instead of walking, we would hop like kangaroos. That would be a big change, right? Well, an intellectual revolution is a bit like that, but with thoughts and ideas instead of hopping.

The Start of New Ideas

Long ago, people used to believe whatever they were told by their leaders or by old stories. But then, some brave thinkers started to question these beliefs. They began to use their own minds to understand the world. This was the beginning of an intellectual revolution. They looked at nature, did experiments, and used reason to find answers. This was a huge shift because it led to many discoveries and inventions that changed the world.

Changes in Society

When people begin to think differently, it changes how they live. In history, there have been times when lots of new ideas popped up, like during the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment. These ideas helped people see that they had rights and could make their own choices. They learned that they could ask questions about their leaders and demand fair treatment. This led to better laws and governments that cared about the people’s needs.

Science and Technology

An intellectual revolution can lead to big steps in science and technology. For example, when scientists started to understand germs, doctors could treat sicknesses better. Or when inventors learned about electricity, they could make light bulbs and power machines. These changes made life easier and helped people live longer and healthier lives.

Education and Knowledge

Education is a big part of any intellectual revolution. When new ideas are shared, people need to learn about them. Schools and books become more important because they spread knowledge. The more people learn, the more they can think of even newer ideas. It’s like a cycle that keeps going, making things better and better.

Challenges of Change

Not everyone likes new ideas. Sometimes, people who are used to the old ways feel scared or threatened by change. They might try to stop the new thinking or say it’s wrong. But usually, the new ideas are so strong that they keep spreading, and after a while, most people start to accept them.

Today’s Intellectual Revolution

Today, we are living in our own intellectual revolution with the internet and technology. We have so much information at our fingertips, and we can share our thoughts with the whole world in seconds. Kids like you can learn about anything you want, and you might even come up with the next big idea that starts a new intellectual revolution!

In conclusion, an intellectual revolution is all about changing the way we think. It’s exciting because it brings new discoveries and helps us build a better world. Just remember, every big change starts with a simple new thought, so keep thinking and who knows, you might be part of the next big revolution in thinking!

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

  • Essay on Intellectual Property
  • Essay on Intellectual Powers Of Man
  • Essay on Integrated Marketing Communication

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence

The use of artificial intelligence in the EU will be regulated by the AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI law. Find out how it will protect you.

A man faces a computer generated figure with programming language in the background

As part of its digital strategy , the EU wants to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure better conditions for the development and use of this innovative technology. AI can create many benefits , such as better healthcare; safer and cleaner transport; more efficient manufacturing; and cheaper and more sustainable energy.

In April 2021, the European Commission proposed the first EU regulatory framework for AI. It says that AI systems that can be used in different applications are analysed and classified according to the risk they pose to users. The different risk levels will mean more or less regulation. Once approved, these will be the world’s first rules on AI.

Learn more about what artificial intelligence is and how it is used

What Parliament wants in AI legislation

Parliament’s priority is to make sure that AI systems used in the EU are safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory and environmentally friendly. AI systems should be overseen by people, rather than by automation, to prevent harmful outcomes.

Parliament also wants to establish a technology-neutral, uniform definition for AI that could be applied to future AI systems.

Learn more about Parliament’s work on AI and its vision for AI’s future

AI Act: different rules for different risk levels

The new rules establish obligations for providers and users depending on the level of risk from artificial intelligence. While many AI systems pose minimal risk, they need to be assessed.

Unacceptable risk

Unacceptable risk AI systems are systems considered a threat to people and will be banned. They include:

  • Cognitive behavioural manipulation of people or specific vulnerable groups: for example voice-activated toys that encourage dangerous behaviour in children
  • Social scoring: classifying people based on behaviour, socio-economic status or personal characteristics
  • Biometric identification and categorisation of people
  • Real-time and remote biometric identification systems, such as facial recognition

Some exceptions may be allowed for law enforcement purposes. “Real-time” remote biometric identification systems will be allowed in a limited number of serious cases, while “post” remote biometric identification systems, where identification occurs after a significant delay, will be allowed to prosecute serious crimes and only after court approval.

AI systems that negatively affect safety or fundamental rights will be considered high risk and will be divided into two categories:

1) AI systems that are used in products falling under the EU’s product safety legislation . This includes toys, aviation, cars, medical devices and lifts.

2) AI systems falling into specific areas that will have to be registered in an EU database:

  • Management and operation of critical infrastructure
  • Education and vocational training
  • Employment, worker management and access to self-employment
  • Access to and enjoyment of essential private services and public services and benefits
  • Law enforcement
  • Migration, asylum and border control management
  • Assistance in legal interpretation and application of the law.

All high-risk AI systems will be assessed before being put on the market and also throughout their lifecycle.

General purpose and generative AI

Generative AI, like ChatGPT, would have to comply with transparency requirements:

  • Disclosing that the content was generated by AI
  • Designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content
  • Publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training

High-impact general-purpose AI models that might pose systemic risk, such as the more advanced AI model GPT-4, would have to undergo thorough evaluations and any serious incidents would have to be reported to the European Commission.

Limited risk

Limited risk AI systems should comply with minimal transparency requirements that would allow users to make informed decisions. After interacting with the applications, the user can then decide whether they want to continue using it. Users should be made aware when they are interacting with AI. This includes AI systems that generate or manipulate image, audio or video content, for example deepfakes.

On December 9 2023, Parliament reached a provisional agreement with the Council on the AI act . The agreed text will now have to be formally adopted by both Parliament and Council to become EU law. Before all MEPs have their say on the agreement, Parliament’s internal market and civil liberties committees will vote on it.

More on the EU’s digital measures

  • Cryptocurrency dangers and the benefits of EU legislation
  • Fighting cybercrime: new EU cybersecurity laws explained
  • Boosting data sharing in the EU: what are the benefits?
  • EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act
  • Five ways the European Parliament wants to protect online gamers
  • Artificial Intelligence Act

Related articles

Benefitting people, the economy and the environment, share this article on:.

  • Sign up for mail updates
  • PDF version

What are your chances of acceptance?

Calculate for all schools, your chance of acceptance.

Swarthmore College

Your chancing factors

Extracurriculars.

the essays are intellectually

How to Write the ‘Intellectual Risk’ Swarthmore Essay

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Daniel Sheeran i n a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info.

What’s Covered:

Approaching the prompt.

  • Writing About Your Experience

Different Topics To Write About

Relating your experience to swarthmore.

Swarthmore College asks its applicants to reply to one of three options for its supplemental essay. The prompt for option 2 asks:

“We are inspired by students who are flexible in their approach to learning, who are comfortable with experimentation, and who are willing to take intellectual risks that move them out of their comfort zone. Reflect on a time that you were intellectually challenged, inspired, or took an intellectual risk—inside or outside of the classroom. How has that experience shaped you, and what questions still linger? (250 words)”

In this article, we will discuss how to approach the prompt as well as some tips for writing your essay and relating your experience to Swarthmore.

This essay is all about your academic and intellectual interests. Students who have participated in a research project or were involved in a unique internship will find this essay topic particularly useful for highlighting their experience. 

Swarthmore says it is inspired by students who are flexible in their approach to learning and comfortable with experimentation. When you approach this prompt, make sure to spend some time brainstorming about a time you were challenged intellectually or inspired outside of the classroom.

Writing About Your Experience 

When writing about a time you took an intellectual risk, focus on how that experience shaped you and led you to have more questions. Learning is a never-ending process and, sometimes, the answer to one question leads you to others. 

Swarthmore includes this prompt as one of their options because they want to know how this process works for you. As they say, Swarthmore students are inspired by intellectual risk, so the admissions officers are interested in hearing about your experience. 

You can identify a few specific topics in this prompt that you can focus on in your essay. Swarthmore asks about the opportunities or experiences that you’ve had that have forced you to think outside the box. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a successful experience, but your reflection of it should be. Our failures teach us a lot about ourselves, so we often learn more from those experiences than our successes. If you do talk about a failure, make sure to reflect on the lesson you learned from it. 

When it comes to intellectual risks, there is a lot you can write about. One angle you can take is to write about the help you received during the experience. Maybe you were part of a project that required a lot of help from other people and you learned how to take input from others. This is a great topic to write about because, throughout your college career at Swarthmore, you will be surrounded by professors and faculty who are there to teach you. 

While attending college, you aren’t expected to be the smartest person in the room. Students attend college to learn as much as they can in their time at Swarthmore, so the ability to learn from others is a very valuable tool. 

Another great topic to write about is endurance or persistence. Whenever you take an intellectual risk or try to learn a new skill, there is often a steep learning curve. It takes determination to continue learning a skill you are new at because it can be quite easy to feel defeated working on something you aren’t good at naturally. 

This is the best way to learn, however, so writing about your perseverance is a great topic. College especially takes a lot of dedication and endurance because you are learning new subjects constantly.

How Swarthmore Students Take Risks

Swarthmore is a residential liberal arts college, so learning that happens outside of the classroom is as important as the learning that happens inside of the classroom. Admissions officers are looking for students who are going to be involved in wider campus communities, whether that is through volunteering, a campus organization, or college internships. 

Students can get stuck thinking about their learning solely in terms of academics. However, Swarthmore students aren’t like this. Students at Swarthmore are very focused on involving themselves in the college community and learning with others outside of the classroom. 

Ending Your Essay

At the end of your essay , no matter what topic you wrote about, you want to relate your experiences back to Swarthmore. Try to bridge the gap between the topic you wrote about in your essay and how this will help you during your next four years at Swarthmore. Whether this relates to your classes or the extracurriculars you want to be part of, you should end your essay establishing a connection to Swarthmore.

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

the essays are intellectually

Intellectually Gifted Children Essay

Many of us can concur that in a class there are those students who are exceptional performers. Some of us also belong to this bracket of intellectually gifted. What makes these differences between intellectually gifted learners and peers of the same standing in such a way that it’s like we do not belong to the peers who we are of the same age?

What are some of the difficulties experienced by such students owing to the fact that they are just smart without putting a lot of effort in their class work? This paper therefore is an insight as to the difficulties experienced by intellectually gifted learners.

In the classroom setting, different students have different abilities. However, schools tend to group students on the basis of their chronological age on the assumption that the students being of the same age have many interests in common (Gross, 2004). Schools therefore do not consider that there exist differences within the groups of equal standing (David, 2004).

Most of the times, a teacher will tend to teach the whole class as a group but when assessment is done, some students excel more than others. It intrigues keen observers that there are students who do not seem to pay attention to classroom work yet they do well in the exams. Other students demonstrate abilities that are beyond their age. Then, do we have learners who can be termed as geniuses?

My point of argument comes in, in that the teacher may use learner centered method of learning, actively engaging all students in the classroom and giving them equal opportunities to participate in the classroom, but there are those students who always emerge the best in class.

These are the students who are regarded as intellectually gifted students. These are the students who are born gifted to the extent that they cannot fit in with their other peers (David, 2004).

Intellectually gifted students have higher levels of cognitive development in that they are able to think in a more logical way, solve problems that would pose a challenge to the students who are of the same age with them and are also able to make decisions on complex matters. To say that they are average students who have studied and acquired knowledge would be ignorance of the highest degree.

Many scholars agree that students vary in their abilities for they are those with astonishing intellectual giftedness and others with modest intellectual giftedness.

Other students are fairly gifted and others are said to poses highly intellectual giftedness while another minority group of intellectually gifted students exceeds the giftedness of all intellectual gifted learners and are said to be overwhelmingly intellectually gifted (Gross, 2004). The overwhelmingly intellectual gifted learners are rare in a normal population.

All in all, one cannot fail to identify the academically gifted students in the classroom. In such a scenario, students grouped together on the basis of their chronological age exhibit many affective and cognitive differences which work to the disadvantage of the intellectually gifted student.

Although there is no universally accepted definition of intellectually gifted students, many people will agree that these students have a high intellectual quotient (I. Q.), excel in their work be it talent, academics just but to mention a few and also have cognitive and affective abilities so high to the extent of being noticeable or standing out from their peers who are of the same age (Gross, 2004).

These students go beyond being average even in their characteristics for they tend to be perfectionists and have so many expectations on themselves not to mention the expectations of their teachers’ peers, parents and society once it comes to their realization that a certain student is intellectually gifted.

Cognitive and affective differences determine the way the learner learns in the classroom and in turn their overall performance in the classroom.

Reis & Renzulli (2004) propose that intellectually gifted students have advanced cognitive abilities and their ability to develop a better understanding of the abstract concepts such as death. With these understanding in abstract concepts such as death, lack of substance of life and irrelevance of living, the gifted student develops common problems with students who are of the same peer (Reis & Renzulli 2004).

While the cognitive realm is the most widely used in identifying the intellectually gifted students, the affective domain also plays a major role. The intellectually gifted learners adjust well to the society (Jano, 1983) and are therefore said to be socially smart.

The intellectually gifted learner has the characteristic of dominating his/her peers of the same age who have profound confidence in him/her.

However, the intellectual sharpness of the gifted learner always lead the learner to experiencing social problems like being isolated from his/her peers and being too selective when choosing the people to associate with, with most studies done on the intellectual gifted students pointing that they prefer to be in the company of children older than them (Colangelo & Davis, 2003).

Researchers believe that by choosing the company of older peers that is where the intellectual gifted child feels that he/she can associate with peers of the same caliber in terms of their cognitive and affective development.

Intellectual giftedness is a unique gift in itself and a child who possesses such capabilities should be nurtured to allow him or her develop the gift in the areas he/she is gifted in.

However, the first challenge to this rare gift is that the school curriculum itself does not make any special programs that can accommodate these gifted children. More often than not (Colangelo & Davis, 2003), teachers themselves may not be willing to accept that there are students whose capabilities exceed that of their peers and therefore see no need to treat these gifted learners differently.

Teaching intellectually gifted students requires a school to have special program that differentiates the curriculum used by the gifted students from the one that is used by students who are of average performance. The task is even made harder when a student is gifted in only one subject.

For schools to effectively cater for the needs of the intellectually gifted; programs that allow gifted students to advance in their subjects and grades and be enrolled in two programs at the same time are needed and not many schools are willing to go to such heights (James, 1994).

For instance, in a case where a school may have an overly intellectual gifted learner, chances of meeting another learner who is overly intellectually gifted are rare if not close to zero.

Intellectually gifted students always feel isolated when they are with their peers because they do not fit in with their peers. They behave in a mature way and are able to solve problems and face challenges more than their peers. With these in mind, the gifted student seeks the company of other older students for him or her to fit in.

This characteristic makes people believe that the gifted student is antisocial with his/her peer and therefore branded a lonely person. Their affective abilities make them a bit critical of their friends and the feelings of their friends towards them. The intellectually gifted child will choose friends keenly than a child of average abilities and this makes them to have fewer friends (Ellen, 1996).

Intellectually gifted students are more intelligent than their other peers who are of the same status for their ability to process information is higher than that of their peers. Therefore, in a classroom setting, the gifted students will always feel dragged behind by others.

For instance, when a teacher is explaining a concept to students of average ability, the intellectually gifted student may feel bored because he or she has already grasped the concept and may find the teacher repeating her/himself. On the other hand, the intellectually gifted may also feel frustrated that the teacher is not going with the pace that he or she would want the teacher to go with (Colangelo & Davis, 2003).

For the teacher to effectively solve the problem in a classroom containing both gifted and average learners he or she needs to integrate learning styles that can also accommodate the intellectually gifted learners.

The teacher may also impact negatively on the gifted student in that he or she may assume that since the gifted student has already gotten the concepts that are being taught in the classroom, that they would be no need to focus attention on him/her. Here, the student’s intellectual giftedness works to his or her disadvantage (Vialle & Geake, 2002).

This further intrigues more questions in the intellectual gifted student’s mind of how weird he/she is not to deserve the attention of the teacher which leads to the student feeling neglected and not cared for by the teacher. This is very crucial especially to the development of a child.

A child needs to be loved and cared for and tendencies to focus more attention on other children leaving others out leads to children engaging in deviant behaviors just to seek the attention of the teacher. Not that the intellectual gifted students are mischievous, (Colangelo & Davis, 2003) they may engage in deviant behaviors so that they can also catch the attention of the teacher.

For the teacher who is a keen believer of disciplined students, the intellectually gifted may suffer the most at the hands of the teacher because the teacher will always be punishing the intellectually gifted child in the belief that he or she is instilling discipline in the intellectually gifted child (James, 1994).

When the gifted students are combined with students of average ability in the classroom, the intellectually gifted ones always feel that they have learnt everything there is to learn in the classroom for they are no more challenges for them.

This leads to underachievement of the student in the class in addition to being bored. Learning is made fun when a student discovers something new that he or she did not know and therefore is intrigued to find out more about that particular concept (Vialle & Geake, 2002).

On the same tone, the gifted child may not see the need to be in the classroom or pay attention when the teacher is explaining concepts for they are already familiar with them. This brings us to the point where these intellectually gifted students are seen as arrogant but this is not the case for they are simply bored.

The teacher can even punish the gifted student without knowing that he or she did not intend to be arrogant or not to pay attention. When these intellectually gifted students are not realized, they take a backseat in their academic achievements to the extent that they can even fail to complete classroom assignments. Some intellectually gifted students may become rebellious to their teachers and peers.

The students also face discrimination and stigmatization from their other peers in that their exemplary performance is regarded as weird (Benbow & Stanley, 1997). In most cases, other students will find their character abnormal and they would not understand why their character deviates from their own. The intellectually gifted are not taken as normal and students always view them as weird.

Some students of the same peer will even go to the extent of believing that the gifted students have some supernatural influence whereas we know that the gifted only possess innate intellectual capabilities which is not a basis to be discriminated against.

When a learner with intellectual gift, it also contributes to the learner asking him/her self many questions about his/her intellectual gifts. Some learners may even go to the extent of blaming themselves and develop shy characters.

Gifted students when discriminated by their peers will try to fit in, in all ways. One of the ways in which gifted students can try to fit in is through hiding their giftedness for they do not want to be regarded as weird and feel out of place.

When this happens, the gifted student regardless of his or her intellectual abilities will not let out his or her true self which becomes a hindrance to finding out who he or she really is. They do not discover their true identity and they hide in their cocoon by pretending to be like other students of average ability.

Other than being resented by his/her peers, the intellectually gifted also faces teacher’s resentment. As illustrated earlier on that the intellectually gifted student will most of the time ask silly questions and challenge the teacher in topics which are not in his/her caliber and show no interest in class work, a teacher who cannot identify the intellectual gifted child will probably resent such a child’s character (Ellen, 1996).

To counter the resentment from both teacher and peers, intellectually gifted children always tend to hide their abilities so as to be at par with the norm as that of the peers. When these children hide their giftedness just to appear normal to their peers and teachers, researchers proclaim that the drive in exploring educational fields disappears in addition to loosing the meaning of achieving (Painter, 1976).

The intellectual gifted learner will therefore attend school for the sake of attending school not for the desire to learn. Their exceptional abilities are therefore shunned from surfacing and being beneficial to the society and to the student. They do this trying to seek approval from their peers and teachers and they therefore have a hard time in seeking social approval if doing so means pretending to be who they are not.

The gifted learner struggles to be understood by the teacher and the learners and in a worse scenario where the teacher has no background information about the existence of intellectually gifted students.

The gifted students lack pride in themselves for they are seen to do things that are not normal. Their self esteem is greatly affected by their intellectual sharpness (Vialle & Geake, 2002). The problem becomes worse especially during adolescent when the student is trying to identify his or herself.

Many are the times that a gifted child on reaching adolescent develops identity crisis the reason being that the student cannot fully find out who he or she is.

Coupled with doubts about his or her true identity from his peers who they are of the same age, the intellectually gifted student develops self doubt of him/herself leading him/her to have a low self esteem. The teacher on the other hand should try as much as possible to help the gifted student in revealing his/her true identity (Benbow & Stanley, 1997).

Having intellectually gifted children in a classroom is a challenge itself to the teacher, the basis of my point being that these intellectually gifted children will often challenge the tutor while he or she is teaching (Painter, 1976). When this happens, the teacher may feel intimidated by the gifted child.

This causes misunderstanding between the child and the teacher for the gifted child interests in challenging the teacher may be solely contributing to the classroom discussion while the teacher may regard the student as a know it all type. For effective learning to take place, the teacher and the student have to be in good terms.

On the other end, students of the same peer may feel that an intellectually gifted student is disturbing their lesson by interrupting the teacher during content delivery. The teacher experiences two extreme ends where they are those who are eager to learn and others who are intellectually gifted and know it all thereby creating confusion in the classroom.

When a teacher discovers that a particular student is intellectually gifted, he or she may employ strict marking procedures when marking the intellectually gifted learner’s paper (Janos, 1983). Where a teacher has given marks to an average student, the intellectually gifted may fail on the same as a result of the high expectations that the teacher may have on the gifted learner (Reis & Renzulli, 2004).

Teachers also may ask hard questions to the intellectually gifted so as to prove to the other students that the intellectually gifted does not know everything that there is to know. In such cases, the resentment of the intellectually gifted learner to the teacher keeps on increasing and the more he or she becomes disinterested in school.

A teacher may also not feel compelled to answer a question asked by the intellectually gifted child and may ignore the question on the assumption (Janos, 1983) that the student both knows the answer and just wants to test the teacher or can research for him/herself and get the correct answer to the question. This further creates frustrations to the intellectually gifted child in his/her endeavors of learning.

While it is normal for the intellectually gifted student to want to discuss concepts to the very minor details, the teacher may only be interested in giving students the contents that will help them answer questions in the exam (Vialle & Geake, 2002).

The advanced cognitive abilities of the intellectually gifted again works to his/her disadvantage in that the teacher may not have the time to discuss concepts in the classroom in a detailed manner and this makes the learner who is gifted academically feel that he/she has been wasted or that the content discussed by the teacher is shallow.

Intellectually gifted children may find it hard to repeat exercises given by the teacher in the classroom. One of the distinctive characteristic of the intellectually gifted is that, the student will master the content after repeating it only twice in most cases.

When the teacher therefore make the intellectually gifted child to repeat a task for more than two times, the child loses focus and creates a negative attitude towards schools. Eventually, the IGC (Intellectually Gifted Child) may end up hating school altogether (Reis & Renzulli, 2004).

The gifted student has no contact with his/her peers. He/she does not enjoy the company of his/her peers and will most of the time prefer to be in the company of other older students who he/she can identify with. Therefore, the methods used by schools where these intellectual gifted students are grouped with students of average ability create a restrictive milieu for them (Ellen, 1996).

The school only assumes that the intellectually gifted students have the same abilities as that of their peers and shuns off the doors of exploration for the intellectually gifted learner. In addition, the content taught in the classroom where this intellectually gifted child is in on the basis of chronological age is also restrictive enough and does not offer room for exploration of the gifted mind of the learner.

The intellectually gifted learner may lack competition in the classroom (Ellen, 1996). Other than the teacher who the intellectually gifted would seem to engage in discussion in complex issues, his/her peers do not conform to his level.

The intellectually gifted child does not have the challenge and therefore being in the classroom with people who he/she cannot identify with and going through a curriculum that poses no challenge to him/her seems unbearable.

The schools assumptions that by mixing the intellectually gifted with the average ability learners, more positive outcomes of learning would be realized because of interactive learning is somehow questioning when it comes to dealing with intellectually gifted learners.

The extant literature shows that the intellectually gifted learners need a more challenging environment and an environment that does not put restrictive measures on the achievement of the learners.

To drive my point closer home, the intellectually gifted learner in the first place sees no similarities between him/herself with peers of same age. Then, how would we expect the learner to have the zeal in learning if there is none of the peers who can challenge him/her?

In conclusion, we must acknowledge that the intellectually gifted learner has abilities that need to be encouraged and that this can only be achieved if schools are willing to come of their cocoon of comfort of grading the students on the assumption that since the students are of the same age, then they must have many similar things in common. Schools ought to develop programs that accommodate the needs of the intellectually gifted learners.

Benbow, P. & Stanley, S. (1997). Inequity in Equity: How “equity” can lead for High Potential Students. Psychology: Public Policy and Law . 2 (2), 249 – 292.

Colangelo, N. & Davis, G. (2003). Handbook of Gifted Education . Boston. Allyn and Bacon. 3 rd Ed.

David, B. (2004). Children’s Thinking: Cognitive Development and Individual Differences . Stamford. CT. Wadsworth Publishing.

Ellen, W. (1996). Gifted Children . New York. Basic Books.

Gross, M. U. M. (2004). Exceptionally Gifted Children. London. Routledgefalmer.

James, W. (1994). “Nurturing Social Emotional Development of Gifted Children” Eric Clearinghouse on Disabilities and Gifted Education . Reston, VA. Web.

Janos, M. (1983). The Intellectual Ability Psychological Vulnerabilities of Children of very Superior . Unpublished Doctorial Dissertation. NY. New York University.

Painter, F. (1976). Gifted Children: A Research Study . Knebworth. England. Pullen Publications.

Reis, M. & Renzulli, S. (2004). Current Research on the Social and Emotional Development of Gifted and Talented Students: Good News and Future Possibilities. Psychology in the Schools, 41, published online in Wiley InterScience.

Vialle, W. & Geake, J. (2002). The Gifted Enigma . Cheltenham, Australia. Hawker Brownlow.

  • Chicago (A-D)
  • Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, December 20). Intellectually Gifted Children. https://ivypanda.com/essays/intellectually-gifted-children-essay/

"Intellectually Gifted Children." IvyPanda , 20 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/intellectually-gifted-children-essay/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Intellectually Gifted Children'. 20 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Intellectually Gifted Children." December 20, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/intellectually-gifted-children-essay/.

1. IvyPanda . "Intellectually Gifted Children." December 20, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/intellectually-gifted-children-essay/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Intellectually Gifted Children." December 20, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/intellectually-gifted-children-essay/.

  • Giftedness in the Classroom
  • Learning and Communication Disorders and Giftedness
  • Behaviors Associated With Giftedness
  • Giftedness Tests and Assessments
  • Gifted Students Identification
  • Essay About Gifted and Talented Students
  • Importance of Standardized Testing for Admissions
  • Socio- Affective Characteristics and Personalogical Development of the Gifted Child
  • Creativity and Gifted Students
  • Early Gifted Education: Why Is It Needed?
  • Education Reflection on Multicultural Perspective and Disability Classes
  • Positive Behavioral Supports
  • Young Australians and Racism
  • ADU Dorms Housing Policies
  • The Impact of Paid Employment on Academic Performance of Students

IMAGES

  1. The Essay Is the Essence of English Literature

    the essays are intellectually

  2. For the New Intellectual Essay Example

    the essays are intellectually

  3. Geoff Dyer Quote: “All the best essays are epistemological journeys

    the essays are intellectually

  4. School Makes Children Become Intellectually Dependent Essay Example

    the essays are intellectually

  5. Essay: Purposes, Types and Examples

    the essays are intellectually

  6. A research paper introduction sets the research on the thesis to make a

    the essays are intellectually

VIDEO

  1. Intellectually Impaired Tri-Nation Series

  2. Intellectually Impaired Tri-National Series

  3. The most intellectually stimulating video I’ve ever made 😌 #teacherlife #teacherproblems

  4. Why Success Doesn't Have A Definition

  5. Giving And Interpretting Criticism Well

  6. Intellectual Seerah

COMMENTS

  1. The Essayist as Public Intellectual

    A notoriously fraught and "open" form, Graham Good provides us with a useful working definition: essays are typically short nonfictional prose texts that are "provisional and exploratory, rather than systematic and definitive"; they derive authority from the essayist's "personality" rather than their formal credentials or technical vocabulary; a...

  2. How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the

    9780823266432 Print ISBN: 9780823263806 Publisher: Fordham University Press Book How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University Get access Jeffrey J. Williams Published: 15 September 2014 Abstract How to Be an Intellectual makes the case for a renewed critical writing.

  3. How to Write the Harvard University Essays 2023-2024

    Prompt 1: Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard? (200 words) Prompt 2: Briefly describe an intellectual experience that was important to you. (200 words)

  4. How to Write the Perfect Harvard Essay: 3 Expert Tips

    An intellectual experience (course, project, book, discussion, paper, poetry, or research topic in engineering, mathematics, science or other modes of inquiry) that has meant the most to you How you hope to use your college education A list of books you have read during the past twelve months

  5. What is "Intellectual Curiosity" and 3 Places You'll Find It

    And it isn't that we love readings, problem sets, or writing essays! Intellectual curiosity is a big phrase for something that's actually very simple—the passion for hearing each other out, learning from each other, and wanting to know more. We are all curious. At Yale, you are allowed to be.

  6. 3 Key Tips for Writing Successful Tufts Supplemental Essays

    How to Answer Prompt A. In this prompt, Tufts wants to hear about your curiosity and interests. There are two ways you can approach this essay, each of which has its benefits and drawbacks. First, you can choose an intellectual interest you have that relates to your future major.

  7. PDF Essays on Intellectual Property Bargaining and

    In this dissertation, I present three essays on the dynamics of intellectual property bargaining and trade, particularly of patents. The first essay pressents a game theoretic model examining the sale of intellectual property rights from small inventors with buy-ers of varying commercialization capacity across intellectual property rights regimes

  8. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

    Thomas Reid was the seventeenth century Scottish philosopher who, during his professorship at King's College in Aberdeen, led the attack upon Humean skeptici...

  9. Harvard University Supplemental Essays Guide: 2021-2022

    A well-written set of Harvard essay prompts can work in your favor. Use this Harvard supplemental essays 2021 guide to help you approach each Harvard application essay with a solid strategy and a clear timeline. Good luck! This 2021-2022 essay guide for Harvard University was written by Abbie Sage, Harvard '21.

  10. How to Be an Intellectual

    ISBN: 9780823263806 Page Count: 232 Hardcover eBook - EPUB Paperback $95.00 Buy Now OTHER RETAILERS Amazon Barnes & Noble Description Over the past decade, Jeffrey J. Williams has been one of the most perceptive observers of contemporary literary and cultural studies. He has also been a shrewd analyst of the state of American higher education.

  11. How to Write the Haverford College Supplemental Essays: Examples

    How to write each supplemental essay prompt for Haverford College. Prompt #1: "Intellectual curiosity" essay. Prompt #2: Community Values essay. Haverford College is well-known for three things: an outstanding educational experience, the Tri-College Consortium, and its Honor Code (which plays a strong role in its supplemental essays). In ...

  12. How to Write the Harvard Supplemental Essay

    Prompt #1: Community essay Prompt #2: Intellectual curiosity essay Prompt #3: Extracurricular activity essay Prompt #4: "Why us?" essay Prompt #5: Roommate essay Tackling the Harvard University supplemental essays is no joke. Why?

  13. How to Write the Yale "Intellectual Interest" Essay

    How to Write the Yale "Intellectual Interest" Essay This article is a first-person account by Hale Jaeger, a CollegeVine livestream contributor. You can watch the full livestream for more info. What's Covered Choosing Your Topic Why You Should Be Specific Make Your Writing Reflective

  14. How to Write the Swarthmore College Supplemental Essay: Examples

    How to write each supplemental essay prompt for Swarthmore College. Prompt #1: "Community" essay. Essay Prompt #2: "Learning" essay. If you're into talking about big abstract ideas like the nature of the universe or niche topics like Vermeer's choice of texture in that one painting from 1652, Swarthmore College might be the place for you.

  15. 5 Stanford Intellectual Vitality Supplemental Essay Examples

    Colleges give you other opportunities to demonstrate your personality or passion. Stanford, for example, asks for 3 additional supplemental essays. One of them questions an applicant's intellectual vitality. Here's the prompt: Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to ...

  16. How to Answer the Harvard Supplemental Essay Prompts (2023-2024)

    A great resource to begin with is our collection of real, successful supplemental essays, many of which answer similar prompts. For stellar examples of essays that discuss intellectual experiences, check out the last supplemental essay for Princeton, as well as the first sample essay for UPenn. Download 50+ Real Supplemental Essays for Ivy+ Schools

  17. Why This Stanford Supplement Essay Works

    Prompt: Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development (250 words). As with any prompt, the first step is to take a close look at exactly what the question is asking for you to discuss in your response. Many colleges have some variation of this prompt ...

  18. Harvard Supplemental Essays

    Regular Decision: January 1st. Harvard application note: The Harvard supplemental essays for the 2023-2024 cycle have changed from past years. All five Harvard supplemental essays are required for all applicants. #1 Harvard Essay Tip: Your essays are your opportunity to show Harvard how you've interacted with the world.

  19. Essay on Intellectual Revolution

    And if you're also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic. Let's take a look… 100 Words Essay on Intellectual Revolution What is an Intellectual Revolution? An intellectual revolution is when people start thinking in new ways. It's like a big change in how we understand the world.

  20. Harvard University Supplemental Essay 2023-24 Prompt Guide

    These supplemental essays give you a good idea of what Harvard values, such as personal development, intellectual activities, and the positive impact you have made on your community. Your responses should demonstrate how your experiences, passions, and responsibilities have shaped you and influenced your view of the world.

  21. EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence

    As part of its digital strategy, the EU wants to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure better conditions for the development and use of this innovative technology. AI can create many benefits, such as better healthcare; safer and cleaner transport; more efficient manufacturing; and cheaper and more sustainable energy.. In April 2021, the European Commission proposed the first EU ...

  22. How to Write the 'Intellectual Risk' Swarthmore Essay

    Writing About Your Experience. When writing about a time you took an intellectual risk, focus on how that experience shaped you and led you to have more questions. Learning is a never-ending process and, sometimes, the answer to one question leads you to others. Swarthmore includes this prompt as one of their options because they want to know ...

  23. The Concept of Intellectualism

    Summary. The concept of intellectualism has developed a considerable degree of social stigma as seen in the essay "Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids". Despite the considerable contributions of intellectuals towards the modernization of the world today through science and technology, they are still thought of as being a pox on ...

  24. Intellectually Gifted Children

    Intellectually Gifted Children Essay Exclusively available on IvyPanda Updated: Dec 20th, 2023 Many of us can concur that in a class there are those students who are exceptional performers. Some of us also belong to this bracket of intellectually gifted.