Harvard Essays 2025-2026

Harvard University Supplemental Essay Prompts: 2025-2026

Harvard, The Big H, the school millions dream of attending, has just released their supplemental essays. Below, we tell you exactly what you need to do to write essays that will impress Harvard admissions officers and give you the best chances of being admitted.

1. Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a student body with a diversity of perspectives and experiences. How will the life experiences that shaped who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard? (150 words)

For this essay, you want to show the reader explicitly how you will contribute to Harvard. Harvard is looking for students with vision, and they want to see your vision regarding the multitude of ways you will contribute to Harvard. This means you should write an essay in which you envision your time at Harvard and show the reader hypothetical scenarios in which you are contributing to certain clubs at Harvard, asking pointed questions in class, taking part in traditions, and being someone who is seen and contributes to student spaces. Name names, such as the names of clubs, classes, and student spaces. As you vividly show the reader in first person how you will contribute to spaces at Harvard, explain how engaging in these activities makes you reflect on certain lived experiences, which you should convey, and how those experiences motivated you to pursue these particular contributions to Harvard.

2. Describe a time when you strongly disagreed with someone about an idea or issue. How did you communicate or engage with this person? What did you learn from this experience? (150 words)

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

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate to admissions officers that you are 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, even if their minds don't change, end up becoming more educated as a result.

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

To conclude, reflect 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.

3. Briefly describe any of your extracurricular activities, employment experience, travel, or family responsibilities that have shaped who you are. (150 words)

For this essay, I'd stick with describing just one activity. You only have 150 words, which isn't much. You want your essay to be as deep as possible, so it's best not to risk watering it down by choosing more than one activity. You want to start this essay with a vivid, first-person description of a pivotal moment during the extracurricular activity you choose, and explain how that moment changed your thinking somehow. From there, you want to show the reader how you applied that thinking to other activities and areas of your life. The best way to explain who you are as a person is to show them who you are, not tell them. Remember, they're not asking you to write about the single activity that crystallized all of your personal qualities, they simply want to hear about one activity that impacted you and made you grow as a person in some way. Conclude this essay by either discussing how this activity shaped your goals and ambitions, or what it means to you today to look back at that experience.

4. How do you hope to use your Harvard education in the future? (150 words)

This essay is very similar to the first one, in the sense that you should write this essay in a first person perspective, explaining a hypothetical, in which you detail events in your life 5 to 10 years after graduating Harvard. Show the reader the exact companies that either exist or you find, organizations, and insittuiutes you will associate with, think about how you can contribute to those entities, and how doing so will help you achieve your personal goals. You want to show the reader vividly and explicitly your vision for you for you will working towards making the world a better place. While detailing these hypothetical moments in which you are working towards achieving your life goals and making the world a better place, reflect on how certain research exeriences, classes, and other academic opporutines at Harvard prepared you to do actions that you will show yourself doing in this essay which bring you close to achieving your life’s goal and making the world a better place. You want to name the names of professors, research institutes, classes, and academic organizations, and be clear what is it about them motivated you and helped you

5. Top 3 things your roommates might like to know about you. (150 words)

Stanford famously asks a similar roommate question. I would not reuse the Stanford answer here. Harvard can tell if you simply trimmed your Stanford essay. For this essay, connect your most important values and perspectives to activities that you and your roommates can do together. For example, if you greatly value underdog stories due to certain experiences in your life, convey those experiences and explain how they will influence you to watch movies or shows with underdog themes together. If you love the arts, explain why and how you're always eager to visit an art museum with them. If you love fitness, explain why it means so much to you and how they'll have a reliable workout partner in you.

The purpose of this essay is to convey your most important values and interests to the admissions committee, and show how they will impact your interactions with peers at Harvard. Aim to demonstrate how your values and interests will encourage you to engage with your peers in ways that enrich their academic and social experience at Harvard.

If you want your college admissions essays to be the decisive factor that gets you into your dream school, schedule a free consultation with an admissions expert today to have all of your questions answered.