How should I approach Dartmouth's supplemental essays for 2025-2026?

Dartmouth's essays ask you to show how you'll benefit from their offerings while enriching the academic and social experience of your peers. Here's how to approach each section:

Required Essay: Why Dartmouth? (100 words)

Write a hypothetical scenario explicitly showing how you'd engage with opportunities at Dartmouth. Show yourself conducting research with specific professors by name, discuss special classes associated with unique academic programs, and depict yourself contributing to student organizations and attending events at research centers. Ensure your engagement aligns with a singular objective and goal. As you show how you envision interacting with these opportunities, reflect on how your specific experiences, interests, and values lead you to engage with Dartmouth in these ways.

Section 2: Choose ONE (250 words)

Prompt 2a: Environment and Impact

Don't try to tell your whole life story, you'll create a watered-down mess. Open with a vivid depiction of a seminal experience that set you on a path toward developing a perspective that will contribute to Dartmouth's intellectual diversity. Show how that perspective evolved as you gained experiences and took actions shaped by that worldview, actions reflecting who you are at your core. Conclude with a clear picture of who you are today and how that perspective informs how you understand your environment. Demonstrate that your lived experiences will bring something distinctive to Dartmouth.

Prompt 2b: Introduce Yourself

Don't start with "Hi, my name is..." If you can think of a creative pseudonym capturing who you are, that could be a compelling hook. Show how you'll make Dartmouth more interesting by discussing your core beliefs, the experiences that led to those beliefs, and how they shape how you interact with others. This prompt is very similar to 2a in its goals.

Section 3: Choose ONE (250 words)

Prompt 3a: What Excites You?

Focus on an academic subject, an act of creativity, or creating tangible positive impact. Write vividly in first person, showing what it looks and feels like when you're fully engaged in this pursuit. Show the lived experiences that shaped your motivation and made this meaningful. Make the reader feel that excitement too.

If you choose an academic subject, convince them the world needs someone, specifically you, to study it. For creating impact, discuss barriers you face and why Dartmouth can give you tools to dismantle them. For creativity, persuade them the world needs more people engaging in this endeavor and explain why Dartmouth's resources would let you pursue it at a high level.
Conclude with a vivid depiction of how this pursuit can meaningfully impact the world, or reflect on how pursuing it at Dartmouth will recontextualize the experiences that sparked your passion.

Prompt 3b: Making an Impact

Open with a vivid, first-person description of either an experience motivating you to make a particular impact, or a moment showing how you're already making one. "Impact" means tangibly improving a real human being's life, not increasing shareholder profit.

Either demonstrate how you explored the academic side of the impact your experiences inspire, or explain why you're doing your current work and what you're learning that shapes future goals. If you haven't made an impact yet, cite small actions like explaining a concept to someone, helping with homework, or raising awareness of a seldom-discussed issue in a presentation.

Conclude with a vivid picture of how you plan to make positive impact using your Dartmouth education.

Prompt 3c: Reading and Insight
Writing about something you read independently is better than school-assigned reading, though both work. Don't summarize the book or waste space quoting it. Explain in your own words what you read and why it mattered. Weave in elements of your lived experiences that made you especially receptive to finding the text insightful.

Describe in vivid detail how what you read influenced your actions: how you interact with others, academic interests you developed, research projects you initiated, or extracurriculars you pursued. Conclude by showing what you did as a result that deepened your understanding or caused you to reinterpret that insight today.

Prompt 3d: Difficult Conversation

Start either with a strong personal anecdote establishing connection to the topic you disagreed about, or describe how you felt when this person disagreed with you. Ideally, disagree with a peer, since that's primarily who you'll disagree with in college.
Demonstrate you're someone who benefits from intellectually vibrant, diverse communities where disagreements happen, and that when they do, both parties become more educated. After your hook, explain the disagreement's nature or provide a personal reason why you couldn't let it slide. Show the disagreement in detail and explain how both parties learned something, especially what you learned, a specific, tangible lesson.

Conclude by reflecting on how this disagreement impacted your goals and aspirations or how it makes you recontextualize the events that made you emotionally invested in the outcome.

Prompt 3e: Celebrate Your Nerdy Side

Dedicate this essay to nerding out about a single topic or subject area. Use technical language if it helps make deeper points, but ensure the reader feels your enthusiasm. Include not just thoughts on the topic but lived experiences that shaped your curiosity, moments when engaging with this subject made you feel alive, gave your life meaning, or allowed you to make tangible impact.

Help the reader genuinely want you to study this subject at Dartmouth. Balance passion for the topic with awareness of the broader world, show your fascination connects to real people, real problems, or real growth. Make your personal reasons for loving this subject compelling and cheer-worthy.

Prompt 3f: Embracing Difference

Highlight your understanding of difference's importance. Show how difference generates new and novel ideas humanity needs to tackle big problems and answer old questions. Focus on life experiences where differences led to fruitful, positive outcomes, moments when being different sparked intellectual conversations that broadened both your horizons and those of others.

Reflect on how being around diverse people fostered your growth. Explain how you learned that your identity is shaped through others and only fully makes sense in the context of growth made possible through interaction with people different from you or who see aspects of you differently.

If being distinctively different has been challenging, show how you overcame challenges, how they contributed to development, and how your difference helped you become more fully who you are.

Prompt 3g: Failure and Growth

Only choose this if you experienced an unusual or significant struggle. Failing a test or being rejected are experiences officers have heard countless times. Choose this only if the failure involved substantial stakes, like a robot you built that cost significant money or a situation with serious social consequences atypical for high school students.
Begin with a vivid depiction of how you failed, or describe how you envisioned success and then show how everything unraveled. Describe the sting of realizing what you lost. The most important part is how you turned things around, be vivid and detailed describing steps you took to recover, grow, or reinvent yourself. Take responsibility for shortcomings and avoid blaming others.

Conclude by showing how that failure and its consequences became indispensable to your growth, and how you're genuinely better because of it. If the failure was so extreme that you're still suffering significant negative consequences, it may not be the best choice. This is likely Dartmouth's most difficult prompt, so approach thoughtfully.