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How To Answer Harvard's Supplemental Essay Prompts 2022/23

11/10/2022•14 minute read

College Essays, Harvard, College Applications

How To Answer Harvard's Supplemental Essay Prompts 2022/23

So, you’re thinking about applying to Harvard, arguably the most prestigious university in the world. Although last year the acceptance rate was less than 5%, you have many chances to impress the admissions committee through your stellar grades, test scores, and extracurricular achievements, as well as your supplemental essays.

Of course, Harvard wants to see that you’re a winner who has achieved great things, and your resume should demonstrate this. However, your supplementary essays allow you to show your maturity, drive, and interests and how these passions will benefit the larger Harvard community.

Harvard University Supplemental Essay Requirements

Harvard requires two 150 word essays and one non-required third essay. There is also a 50-word supplement for International Students.

What are the Harvard University Essay Prompts for 2022/23

Prompt 1 (Required)

Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. (50-150 words).

Prompt 2 (Required)

Your intellectual life may extend beyond the academic requirements of your particular school. Please use the space below to list additional intellectual activities that you have not mentioned or detailed elsewhere in your application. These could include, but are not limited to, supervised or self-directed projects not done as school work, training experiences, online courses not run by your school, or summer academic or research programs not described elsewhere. (150 words).

Prompt 3 (Optional)

You may wish to include an additional essay if you feel that the college application forms do not provide sufficient opportunity to convey important information about yourself or your accomplishments. You may write on a topic of your choice, or you may choose from one of the following topics:

Unusual circumstances in your life

Travel, living, or working experiences in your own or other communities

What you would want your future college roommate to know about you

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

The Harvard College Honor code declares that we “hold honesty as the foundation of our community.” As you consider entering this community that is committed to honesty, please reflect on a time when you or someone you observed had to make a choice about whether to act with integrity and honesty.

The mission of Harvard College is to educate our students to be citizens and citizen-leaders for society. What would you do to contribute to the lives of your classmates in advancing this mission?

Each year a substantial number of students admitted to Harvard defer their admission for one year or take time off during college. If you decided in the future to choose either option, what would you like to do?

Harvard has long recognized the importance of student body diversity of all kinds. We welcome you to write about distinctive aspects of your background, personal development or the intellectual interests you might bring to your Harvard classmates.

If none of these options appeal to you, you have to option to write on a topic of your choice.

International Students

What specific plan do you have, if any, for using the education you hope to receive? (0-50 words).

How to answer Prompt 1 (Required)

Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. (50-150 words)

In this simple essay, Harvard wants to assess whether you can (1) coherently describe something you’ve done and (2) demonstrate you learned something from it.

It’s probably best to start with one of the top activities on your Common App extracurricular list. You only have 150 words, so try to hit these four points:

1. Describe your commitment

Give the reader a sense of the activity and how dedicated you are to it. For example, if it’s a part-time job - is this every evening, or only on the weekends?

2. What have you learned from the experience?

Try to get specific here. For example, if your activity is playing a sport, it’s not enough to say you “learned the value of hard work.” Instead, you could write about how despite learning that many academic subjects warrant alternative outcomes to posed problems, you had to put aside this knowledge to benefit your team by following the coach’s strict direction for a successful outcome. Though you only have 150 words, that is plenty to demonstrate that you’re a deep thinker and learner.

3. Where have you struggled?

What has been the most difficult or surprising part of this activity? And what made you realize this?

4. Where have you been more or less successful?

Give an honest (but humble!) assessment of your success at this activity. Maybe you won the state robotics championships - but what are you still struggling with? Maybe your basketball team never won a single game - but what did you do well?

Remember, focus on giving the reader lots of your impressions rather than descriptions of the activity. An easy way to assess how you’re doing this is to look at the verbs you use.

Are you using lots of “be” verbs - e.g., “choir is fun,” “dance classes are a good learning experience?”
Or are you using lots of impression verbs - e.g., “choir seemed to be the best way to nerd out on classical music,” or “dance classes endowed me with a renewed sense of what my body can do?”

If your essay contains the former, try to institute more of the latter.

How to answer Prompt 2 (Required)

Your intellectual life may extend beyond the academic requirements of your particular school. Please use the space below to list additional intellectual activities you have not mentioned or detailed elsewhere in your application. These could include but are not limited to supervised or self-directed projects not done as school work, training experiences, online courses not run by your school, or summer academic or research programs not described elsewhere. (150 words)

Here Harvard is directly asking you to show us that you are an interesting person outside of what your school/parents demand you to be. These are “intellectual activities,” so learning a new trick on your skateboard doesn’t count.

Format: don’t worry about writing beautiful prose here, as long as your grammar is strong. Just use the 150-word limit to get all your thoughts down. Even bullet points with a short description should be fine.

Here are a couple of examples:

Letters to the editor

I’ve recently become passionate about community recycling and write a bi-weekly column for our city newspaper about the impact of recycling on our local environment.

Duboce Prose

Saturday mornings, a group of friends and I meet in Duboce Park and practice writing short stories. Some other local passersby have started joining as well, and it’s become a 20-30 person weekly event. Once a month, we do readings at the public library.

Java Juice

I'm working on coding a computer program that varies the motor speed of my blender depending on the ingredients. It's the perfect combination of my love for coding and cooking. You can see my working code here on GitHub (link).

What do all these activities have in common?

These activities are all intellectual and demonstrate initiative (going out and doing things independently). Finally, they're all a little bit fun and quirky, giving the reader the sense that you are a fun person.

Ultimately, this essay should demonstrate that you can't quench your intellectual curiosity through typical schooling.

How to answer Prompt 3 (Optional)

You may write on a topic of your choice, or you may choose from one of the following topics:

Unusual circumstances in your life
Travel, living, or working experiences in your own or other communities
What you would want your future college roommate to know about you
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
The Harvard College Honor code declares that we “hold honesty as the foundation of our community.” As you consider entering this community committed to honesty, please reflect on a time when you or someone you observed had to choose whether to act with integrity and honesty.
The mission of Harvard College is to educate our students to be citizens and citizen-leaders for society. What would you do to contribute to the lives of your classmates in advancing this mission?
Each year a substantial number of students admitted to Harvard defer their admission for one year or take time off during college. If you decided in the future to choose either option, what would you like to do?
Harvard has long recognized the importance of student body diversity of all kinds. We welcome you to write about distinctive aspects of your background, personal development, or the intellectual interests you might bring to your Harvard classmates.

Let’s get this out of the way first: this essay claims to be optional, but you should consider it mandatory! Remember, this is Harvard - you need to take any opportunity you can to stand out from other applicants with similar profiles to you.

Here’s how you should think about this essay: generally, you can only express yourself as much as the application prompts allow you in the college admissions process. But here, Harvard is telling you to use this space to help them get to know even more about you.

Choosing a topic: First, look through the example options Harvard provided. If one of them jumps out at you - “oh, that will be a great opportunity for me to express myself / show how I’m different from other applicants” - then go for it.

Let’s consider two of the example options Harvard has provided.

An unusual circumstance in your life

Here’s an excellent opportunity for you to describe (if applicable) anything Harvard might want to know about your upbringing, your family, or your abilities. Maybe you grew up in a family where you couldn’t participate in extracurricular activities because you had to earn money at your job. Or perhaps you had difficulty focusing on school because you spent time caring for a loved one. In any case, if you think Harvard should have some more context on the hard facts of your application - here’s where you can share that.

Travel, living, or working experiences in your own or other communities

Is there something distinct about your hometown or a place you’ve been that will allow you to demonstrate your maturity and perspective?

If your hometown

One of the best ways to show your maturity in an essay is to describe a group of people (respectfully and thoughtfully!) and how you are similar to/different from them. Maybe everyone in your hometown has a unique identity, background, or perspective on life. What is it, and how are you similar to/different from this?

If other communities

Is there somewhere you’ve traveled that stuck with you? If you have travel experiences that helped you understand something about yourself or your community, feel free to share them. You should avoid sounding privileged or being too general here. For example, say you visited your grandparents’ hometown in rural China. Seeing their relative poverty, you realize how lucky you are to live with so much comfort and so many possessions in life.

As you write, consider that every other applicant who visits that town probably thinks the same thing! So it’s perhaps not very interesting for Harvard to read this. Instead, try thinking about what you have in common with this town - do you see yourself or your parents reflected in your grandparents’ life? Are the pains and joys of life they experience similar to yours? Go deeper in describing your travels than you would in a Facebook post or Instagram caption.

How to answer the International Students Prompt (Required for International Students)

What specific plan do you have, if any, for using the education you hope to receive? (0-50 words)

This question is pretty straightforward; however, show your introspection and thought process when you answer it. Although you have only 50 words, try to focus on the unique aspects of your plan and be as specific as possible.

How to stand out in your Harvard Supplemental Essays

As you review the prompts below, keep in mind three primary goals of the Harvard supplements:

1. Pass the “red flags” test

By making you write about yourself, Harvard allows you to demonstrate any “red flags” about yourself that wouldn’t otherwise come out in the application. That is, you want to avoid the following:

Sounding too privileged or out of touch (e.g., “And when my parents bought me a second Ferrari, then I finally understood…”)
Seeming condescending to your peers (e.g., “being the smartest person in the class is hard.”)
Showing low attention to detail or effort (e.g., spelling/grammar errors)

2. Demonstrate mature, intellectual interests

Harvard wants to admit people who stay up all night debating public policy or rehearsing for their play rather than students who sleep in, watch Netflix, and play video games.

3. Differentiate yourself from applicants with the same resume

There will be tens of thousands of applicants to Harvard with perfect GPAs and SATs and thousands who have won state championships in sports or made fundamental discoveries in research labs. But only a select few applicants can match this profile and write a coherent, engaging essay where they discuss a complex subject and demonstrate their ability to gain insight from their experiences.

Final Thoughts

As you consider these or the other optional essay topics, remember to avoid the “red flags” and put your best foot forward to Harvard. Try writing about something that means a lot to you, and be honest with yourself: is this something that everyone else applying would probably write, too?

Crimson Education is the world’s leading university admission consulting company. Our expert admission strategist can help you narrow down your ideas and word choice to help you craft the perfect essay prompt response. Get your essay reviewed today!

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