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

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

Essay 1: List of Texts and Resources (100 words or fewer)

This is the easiest question any college has ever asked. They simply want you to list the resources you have used to further your education. Follow Columbia's guidelines exactly:

Items separated by commas or semicolons
Items don't need to be numbered or in any specific order
Don't italicize or underline titles
No author names, subtitles, or explanatory remarks needed

Critical warning: Students mess up this question by not following directions. They try to be "creative" by writing an essay or adding quirky commentary, completely contradicting Columbia's very specific instructions. This approach gets even top students automatically rejected from Columbia. Don't deviate at all from their directions, and avoid including anyone controversial. If someone's controversy section on Wikipedia is extensive, or if they write songs with NSFW lyrics, don't include them.

Essay 2: Lived Experience and Columbia's Collaborative Environment (150 words or fewer)

Vividly showcase yourself in the first person, participating in one of your extracurricular activities. Since you have very few words, ensure this response synergizes best with your entire application, of which your extracurriculars compose a large part.
After showing what it was like participating in a select, formative and impactful extracurricular activity, extrapolate from the experience a clear perspective or life lessons you gained. From there, demonstrate your vision for how you'll apply this perspective and these life lessons to collaborate with students at Columbia.

Mention names of specific clubs at Columbia and student spaces where you might work with other students. Try to enable the reader to visualize you in those spaces, interacting productively with the students who inhabit them. Show the reader both how you'll contribute to those collaborations and how collaborating with students would help further your education. Show them how hearing diverse perspectives will help sharpen some academic aspect of your top-choice area of study.

Essay 3: Disagreement and Engagement (150 words or fewer)

There are two ways to start this essay. First is a strong personal anecdote in the first person that establishes a connection to whatever topic you'll reveal later that you strongly disagreed about. Second is to describe how you felt when this person disagreed with you. Ideally, the person you're disagreeing with should be a fellow peer, because in college, that will be primarily who you'll be having disagreements with.

The purpose is to demonstrate you're someone who will benefit from being part of an intellectually vibrant and diverse community where disagreements are bound to happen, and that when disagreements emerge, both parties end up becoming more educated as a result.

After your hook, either explain the nature of the disagreement or provide a personal reason why this disagreement was something you couldn't just let slide. For the remainder of the essay, show the disagreement in detail and explain how both parties learned something from it, especially what you learned. Give them a specific, tangible lesson you gained from the experience.

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

Essay 4: Navigating Adversity (150 words or fewer)

Don't talk about struggling in classes. Columbia expects its students to find coursework easy so they have plenty of time to pursue extracurricular activities and make their campus vibrant. You might describe the fallout of disagreeing with someone from the previous question and how you navigated that. You might discuss generational differences between you and your parents, doing the right thing and being punished for it, difficulty making friends in high school, or overcoming illnesses or injuries while balancing schoolwork.

If you're a researcher, you can talk about when something went wrong in the lab—when a machine broke, your data was corrupted, or you thought you had made significant progress, but one small error invalidated all of your work. The key is to create some type of metaphorical dragon that you slayed.

Whatever topic you choose, open with a vivid hook, detail the magnitude of this challenge, and describe powerfully how it emotionally affected you. Next, describe the steps you took to overcome it and what it felt like executing those steps, including any resistance you experienced. Finally, conclude with the main lessons you learned from navigating through this challenge.

Essay 5: Why Columbia? (150 words or fewer)

The most powerful response will focus on showing the reader your vision for life at Columbia and explaining why the specific choices you make regarding how you envision yourself at Columbia are motivated by particular events that happened in your life.

One way to pull this off is to write this essay in the first person, describing a hypothetical day or week at Columbia. Focus on the social aspects of attending Columbia and the Core Curriculum. Show the reader how Columbia's unique traditions, events, and non-research opportunities, as a result of its location in NYC, draw you in. Make sure to name specific Core Curriculum classes you'd like to take there.

Show the reader your vision of yourself participating in these aspects of Columbia University, and as you vividly describe in the first person your vision of what this participation might look like, cite a personal experience of yours as motivation for pursuing this activity there. Conclude by stating how taking advantage of these social, curricular, and geographic opportunities at Columbia will help you achieve your life's goals.

Essay 6: Why This Major at Columbia? (150 words or fewer)

This is not just a "why major" or "why school" essay. This is a "why major at this school" essay. The reason I recommended not discussing Columbia's research aspects in the previous essay is that it would be best to save that content for this essay.
Like the last one, I'd recommend writing about a hypothetical day or week at Columbia, where you showcase your participation in events at specific research institutes, working in professors' labs, and taking advantage of other opportunities to pursue the technical aspects of your academic interests. Make sure to name names and be specific. Emphasize the geographic opportunities available to you and other academic resources at Columbia, such as specialized libraries.
Like the previous essay, motivate every engagement with Columbia's academic opportunities through a personal reason.

Conclude this essay by showing the reader specifically how you'll use your Columbia education to impact the world in a positive way. Enable them to envision just a tiny bit how you will change the world.