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

Carnegie Mellon'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: Passion for Your Area of Study (300 words)

For a school as competitive as CMU, it's vital that your chosen major aligns most closely with your applicant profile. Contrary to what admissions officers say, elite colleges don't favor undecided students or those who want to start over. Students who have pursued one focused interest throughout high school, conducting research, participating in competitions, tackling real-world problems that intersect with that interest, and who state their intention to continue this path will always be favored over undecided students.

Examine all your extracurriculars and classes and put yourself in the shoes of an admissions officer who will spend at most eight minutes reviewing your application. Ask yourself: given what they'll see, what would they think is my favorite subject or the real-world problems I'm most passionate about solving? Then choose a major that best aligns with their likely assessment. Once you enter CMU, you can always change your major, but to get admitted, it's vital that you curate the extracurriculars you report and align them with a field of study the university offers.

Begin this essay with a vivid personal anecdote establishing a strong personal connection to your field of study. Perhaps describe how a real-world problem intersected with your life, exposure to some natural phenomenon that sparked your curiosity, or an event that left you with lingering questions. From there, explain how your chosen field would enable you to satisfy this deep-seated need to dive deeper into the experience you use as your hook. Feel free to be technical to demonstrate you understand what this field entails.

Conclude by discussing what it would personally mean to you to pursue this area of study. One effective approach is exploring how you hope to recontextualize the experience you chose as your essay's hook through pursuing your selected major.

Essay 2: Defining Successful College Experience (300 words)

Start with a strong, vivid personal anecdote that motivates a specific goal of yours, either a long-term career goal or a shorter-term personal goal. From there, explain how acquiring a particular skill or experience needed to achieve your career goal, or how accomplishing your personal goal, is made possible through specific social or academic offerings at CMU.

If you focus on a career goal, highlight the additional skills and experiences you hope to gain at CMU that will help you reach that long-term objective. If you choose a personal goal, explain what achieving that goal would mean to you, what new aspirations it might inspire, and how CMU's vast opportunities will empower you to pursue those future goals.

Conclude by painting a vivid picture of yourself after college, making a positive impact on the world through the goals you accomplished at CMU.

Essay 3: What to Emphasize (300 words)

Don't write a response to this question until you've completed your Common App essay and the first two supplemental essays. You don't want to risk repeating yourself. Once those essays are finished, reflect on what elite colleges like Carnegie Mellon actually value: intellectual curiosity, team players, applicants who can elevate peers' social and academic experience, students who hold well-thought-out compelling perspectives that enrich classroom discussions, and character and social skills.

Once you identify moments and experiences in your life that align with one or more of these traits, choose the trait you haven't yet demonstrated in your other essays. Then write a vivid, first-person narrative that demonstrates how your actions and experiences reveal that quality.