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. Located just outside Philadelphia, Swarthmore is known for being very liberal and, in part because of its Quaker history, for its intense focus on community-building. It’s also a place where nerding out is accepted, even celebrated. If this sounds like you, we have some tips and examples below to help you ace your Swarthmore supplemental essay.
Want to get an even better sense of what Swarthmore is looking for? You’ll find an extensive, by-the-numbers look at its offerings, from enrollment and tuition statistics to student life and financial aid information, on its Common Data Set. For deep insights into how this private college envisions student success (and how it wants to grow and evolve), read its Strategic Directions plan.
What are the Swarthmore College supplemental essay prompts?
Swarthmore College Supplemental Essay Prompts
Please complete both prompts below.
- Swarthmore College maintains an ongoing commitment of building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive residential community dedicated to rigorous intellectual inquiry. All who engage in our community are empowered through the open exchange of ideas guided by equity and social responsibility to thrive and contribute as bridge builders within global communities.
Our identities and perspectives are supported and developed by our immediate contexts and lived experiences – in our neighborhoods, families, classrooms, communities of faith, and more. What aspects of your self-identity or personal background are most significant to you? Reflecting on the elements of your home, school, or other communities that have shaped your life, explain how you have grown in your ability to navigate differences when engaging with others, or demonstrated your ability to collaborate in communities other than your own. (150-250 words)
- Swarthmore’s community of learners inspire one another through their collaborative and flexible approach to learning. Swarthmore students are comfortable with intellectual experimentation and connection of ideas across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and interdisciplinary studies through a liberal arts education.
Tell us about a topic that has fascinated you recently – either inside or outside of the classroom. What made you curious about this? Has this topic connected across other areas of your interests? How has this experience shaped you and what encourages you to keep exploring? (150-250 words)
Let’s look at each prompt in more detail.
How to Write each Supplemental Essay Prompt for Swarthmore College
how to write Swarthmore Supplemental Essay Prompt #1
Swarthmore College maintains an ongoing commitment of building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive residential community dedicated to rigorous intellectual inquiry.
All who engage in our community are empowered through the open exchange of ideas guided by equity and social responsibility to thrive and contribute as bridge builders within global communities.
Our identities and perspectives are supported and developed by our immediate contexts and lived experiences – in our neighborhoods, families, classrooms, communities of faith, and more.
What aspects of your self-identity or personal background are most significant to you? Reflecting on the elements of your home, school, or other communities that have shaped your life, explain how you have grown in your ability to navigate differences when engaging with others, or demonstrated your ability to collaborate in communities other than your own.
(150-250 words)
While identity and background can relate to things besides community, one way to approach this prompt is to treat it as what we call a “community essay.” Reflect on how a specific community in your life has shaped you in an important way. Here’s a step-by-step guide to “community” prompts, including multiple samples and analysis, but here’s the short version:
The “What Communities Am I a Part Of?” Exercise
Time: 10-15 minutes
Instructions:
Step 1: Create a “communities” chart by listing all the communities you’re a part of. Keep in mind that communities can be defined by ...
Place: Groups of people who live/work/play near one another
Action: Groups of people who create change in the world by building, doing, or solving something together (examples: Black Lives Matter, Girls Who Code, March for Our Lives)
Interest: Groups of people coming together based on shared interest, experience, or expertise
Circumstance: Groups of people brought together either by chance or external events/situations
Use four columns in your chart, like this:
| PLACE | ACTION | INTEREST | CIRCUMSTANCE |
|---|---|---|---|
| - Los Angeleno (where I live now) - Third-culture kid (I grew up in both Latin America and the United States) - North Carolinian (related community: Family members with Southern accents!) |
- Day Laborer Theater Without Borders (for a year I helped organize a theater group that promoted worker rights in immigrant communities) - ACCEPT (Admissions Community Cultivating Equity & Peace Today) |
- Book-lover (loved reading ever since I was young) - Basketball (played in high school) - Theater (high school theater geek, studied in college) - Jazz-listener (speaks for itself) - Travel (visiting every continent is on my bucket list) |
- Male-identified - European ancestry - Missionary kid (MK) - Rider of public bus 56 (this is the one I took home during high school; met some pretty cool people) |
Your turn.
Step 1: Create a “communities” chart by listing as many of your communities as you can think of. Keep in mind that, as shown above, communities can be defined in a variety of ways, including place, culture, interests, political beliefs, hobbies, even your favorite sports team. Get creative.
Step 2: Use the BEABIES exercise to generate your essay content for 2-3 of these communities that seem like your strongest options (as in, they show sides of you that you haven’t gotten to illustrate elsewhere). Simply ask yourself and jot down notes to these questions:
What kinds of problems did I solve or work to solve (personally, locally, or globally) in that community?
What specific impact did I have?
What did I learn (skills, qualities, values)?
How did I apply the lessons I learned inside and outside that community?
Step 3: Pick a structure for writing this essay and focus on the community that you feel is most compelling and reveals the most about you, then connect those experiences to how you’ll impact the Swarthmore community (for more on how to do this, check our “Why this College” guide).
Here’s a strong example of a community essay.
Example:
I belong to a community of storytellers. Throughout my childhood, my mother and I spent countless hours immersed in the magical land of bedtime stories. We took daring adventures and explored far away lands. Imagination ran wild, characters came to life, and I became acquainted with heroes and lessons that continue to inspire me today. It was a ritual that I will never forget.
In school I met many other storytellers—teachers, coaches, and fellow students whose stories taught me valuable lessons and enabled me to share stories of my own. My stories took shape through my involvement with theatre. I have learned that telling stories can be just as powerful as hearing them.
When I tell a story, I can shape the world I live in and share my deepest emotions with the audience. This is exactly why I love theatre so much. The audience can relate to the story in many of the same powerful ways that I do.
I love to perform with my theatre class to entertain and educate young audiences throughout my community. To tell our stories, we travel to elementary and middle schools performing plays that help educate younger students of the dangers of drugs, alcohol, and bullying. As storytellers, we aim to touch lives and better the world around us through our stories. (219 words)
— — —
Tips + Analysis
Start with a powerful hook, if you can. From the beginning, this student draws you in. Starting off by saying she’s part of “a community of storytellers” is vague, but declarative and intriguing. We want to hear more. The shortness of the sentence adds to its power because it leaves so many questions unanswered. Think of your first sentence (or two) as your first impression on the reader. Starting out strong is a good way to invite them in and engage their interest.
Use structure to create clarity. Notice how the writer breaks her essay into small bite-sized chunks of 2-3 sentences. Instead of one big dense block of text, she’s made the reading experience much more manageable by using mini-paragraphs. Even better is that each block of text touches on slightly different but connected themes and/or moments. The first explores her history of reading stories with her mom, so we get a bit of context as to how storytelling became a force of influence in her life. Then she uses each of the next three paragraphs to map out how storytelling created a broader community outside her home—at school, in theatre, and in the elementary and middle schools where her troupe performs. You can think of this approach as a montage, which we liken to a beaded bracelet, with each short paragraph a bead that connects to an element of the community, and the thread of “storytelling” binding it all together.
Explain the impact you’ve made. Remember, your answer to this question shouldn’t stop at the end of your learning experience. The prompt asks how you’ve “grown or changed” because of the community’s influence on you. Notice how this student talks about learning experiences with her mom and in her theatre program but ends on a final paragraph about teaching younger students in her community. This is an important addition because it conveys a sense of how the student is paying her lessons forward. We all learn lots of things on a daily basis; it’s what we do with that knowledge that sets us apart—and that’s exactly what Swarthmore is seeking to learn about you.
how to write Swarthmore Supplemental Essay Prompt #2
Swarthmore’s community of learners inspire one another through their collaborative and flexible approach to learning. Swarthmore students are comfortable with intellectual experimentation and connection of ideas across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and interdisciplinary studies through a liberal arts education.
Tell us about a topic that has fascinated you recently – either inside or outside of the classroom. What made you curious about this? Has this topic connected across other areas of your interests? How has this experience shaped you and what encourages you to keep exploring? (150-250 words)
This prompt really gets at the core of Swarthmore’s intellectual spirit. You can tell that school officials place a lot of value on learning, both inside and outside the classroom, and on learning in unconventional ways. That means (yay!) you don’t have to talk about the 20 AP or honors classes you took in high school (besides, all that’s clear from your transcripts). Instead, try to think creatively about what learning looks like and the contexts in which it can take place.
Here are some steps you can take that might help you approach this essay:
Step 1: Do the Values Exercise. Why? Your values are the things that inspire, motivate, and drive you through life, and those are exactly the insights Swarthmore wants to know about you. Use the exercise to come up with your top 10 values, then think of a learning experience that required you to stretch or take a risk—one that also allows you to show as many of the 10 values as you can.
Step 2: As you brainstorm and write, keep referring back to the original question. Notice how Swarthmore asks you to contemplate “what encourages you to keep exploring?” This might get overlooked if you focus all your energy on describing what you learned. Asking thought-provoking questions is an essential part of learning, so don’t feel like you have to have all the answers (in fact, asking complex questions can be more interesting and impressive).
Step 3: Write it long first, then cut it. In our experience, this tends to be easier than writing a very short version, then trying to figure out what to add.
Step 4: Don’t forget to include specific impacts and reflection. That will allow you to connect your learning experience to a meaningful outcome. You should be able to say, “I did X, and that resulted in Y.” The Y is just as important as the X, because it shows your learning experience paid off and (maybe even) inspired some kind of change. Or, put another way, the “so what” is at least as important as, and generally more important than, the “what” in a prompt like this.
Here’s a great example for this prompt.
Example:
When I was doing customer research for my chemistry practice website, I came across another, much larger issue with education: the lack of personalized learning. It stuck with me. I knew if I could create a solution, I would be helping many students, like my friends, reach their goals. Also, the idea of an engine that can recommend lessons based on your learning style just seemed super cool. As I dug deeper into the issue, I realized I didn’t have the skills to even scratch the surface. So I started developing what I needed to build a system that recommends lessons based on learning style.
On my own time, I learned about machine learning algorithms, from linear regressions to k-nearest neighbor classifiers, and whenever I could I applied these skills on mini research projects—finding trends, then using data to create an algorithm that predicts other data. At school, I took a rigorous machine learning course where one of my final projects was using data from Portuguese schools to analyze what factors lead to good grades.
Looking ahead, I’m hoping to study computational neuroscience to properly know how the brain solidifies connections and recalls information. With the two together, I could create a model of how a person learns based on different stimuli, and recommend different lessons based on the stimuli. I still have quite a bit to learn, but if I manage it, it could have a powerful impact on the educations of students around the world.
— — —
Tips + Analysis:
Geek out (a bit), but stay on track. Remember that Swarthmore is known for its nerdy and intellectual student body. This prompt is all about embracing that side of yourself. This student does a great job of balancing specific jargon like “linear regressions” and “k-nearest neighbor classifiers” with informal reflections like “the idea of an engine that can recommend lessons based on your learning style just seemed super cool.” This allows him to demonstrate his deep knowledge of the subject without confusing the reader or bogging us down in a bunch of details. You can do this too (just don’t do too much of it, as that can be off-putting). Offer some specific language that shows you know your stuff, but write in a way that’s still accessible to someone who doesn’t know a lot about your topic.
Connect your intellectual projects to your academic interests. This student does a great job of using his specific machine learning project as a segue into other relevant insights about himself. He talks about classes he’s taken and his general interest in computational neuroscience. He’s also able to sneak in some neat details about working for a chemistry practice website and helping friends out academically. Through this one topic, we get a more complete picture of who he is and the values that guide him. Remember, when you answer this prompt, treat the experience or moment you write about as a launching point into other connected parts of your life.
Consider looking to the future. Note how this writer ends his essay. He doesn’t just talk about his one machine-learning project or class and then end it there. Instead, he talks about what he hopes the future holds for him and how he might like to expand on what he’s already done. This is great because it shows he’s curious and has an appetite for learning. Swarthmore is looking for applicants who are willing to push past what they know and envision future questions, projects, discussions, etc. When you end your essay, consider leaving your reader with a sense that there’s more to come (if you have some idea of what that might look like). Learning and experimentation are lifelong pursuits that sometimes lead to more questions than answers. Embrace that.
Special thanks to Luci for contributing to this post.
Luci is an audiophile and storyteller with a love of all things radio and writing. In the wild, you might catch her struggling through a NY Times crossword puzzle, snuggling her abnormally fluffy dog Oreo, or saying her favorite expression “cool beans.” Crosswords, cute dogs, cool beans. What more could you ask for?
Top values: Interpersonal connections | humor | openness to new experience
