Yale Essays 2025-2026

Yale University Supplemental Essay Prompts: 2025-2026

Yale recently released its supplemental essays for the 2025-2026 admissions cycle. In this article, we will explain exactly what they are looking for in responses from applicants, so you can write an essay that will get you admitted there.

1. Students at Yale have time to explore their academic interests before committing to one or more major fields of study. Many students either modify their original academic direction or change their minds entirely. As of this moment, what academic areas seem to fit your interests or goals most comfortably? Please indicate up to three from the list provided.

This is not a trivial question. You want to pick majors that your in-class work and extracurriculars clearly indicate you've been preparing for. Despite Yale touting that students don't pick majors until their second year, Yale admissions still prefers students who know what they want to do over students who don't. Admissions officers are trying to curate an incoming class, which means they want to understand from your essays, academics, and extracurriculars what type of student you will be on campus and how you will contribute to and benefit from being there. If you are truly undecided, that is fine, but you need to pick something that best aligns with what you have currently done. Whatever you answer here is not binding, so be strategic and pick what will make you a stronger applicant.

2. Tell us about a topic or idea that excites you and is related to one or more academic areas you selected above. Why are you drawn to it? (200 words or fewer)

This question is another reason to be strategic about what you pick for question 1. You want to choose topics that will allow you to write the most compelling essay based on your lived experiences. For this essay, you should start with a strong, vivid anecdote that enables you to establish a deep personal connection to this topic. Remember, in this essay, they chiefly want to learn about you, not the topic itself.

From there, you should describe how this powerful, meaningful experience either introduced you to the topic or made something click when you first encountered or learned about it. You don't need to tell the complete origin story of how you came to know about this topic, just detail a specific event that demonstrates your strong personal connection to it.

Next, you should explain how learning more about this topic is essential for you to change the world in some meaningful way. Discuss how you'd like to change the world and how deeper knowledge of this topic can help you achieve that goal. Make sure you convey a strong personal motivation for wanting to impact the world in a positive way. The idea is to make the reader invested in seeing you learn more about this topic because of how you plan to use it to make the world better.

Conclude with a vivid snippet that shows the reader exactly how you can create a positive impact through this topic, or how learning more about this topic will recontextualize the anecdote you used to open your essay.

3. Reflect on how your interests, values, and/or experiences have drawn you to Yale. (125 words or fewer)

For this essay, write a hypothetical scenario in which you explicitly show the reader how you would engage with opportunities at Yale that interest you. Show yourself conducting research with professors, name them specifically, and discuss special classes associated with unique academic programs. Also, show yourself contributing to student organizations and attending events at research centers on campus. Make sure your engagement aligns with a singular objective and goal of yours. As you show the reader how you envision interacting with these meaningful opportunities at Yale, reflect on how your specific experiences, interests, and values are leading you to engage with Yale in the ways you describe.

4. What inspires you? (35 words)

For this response, describe vividly something you do that you consider meaningful, and explain how it inspires you. Ideally, your source of inspiration should be related to or connected with your area of study.

5. If you could teach any college course, write a book, or create an original piece of art of any kind, what would it be? (35 words)

Imagine that you could tell the world one thing you believe they need to know. Whatever that topic is should be what you write about. Ideally, the topic would be something related to your area of study or your research focus. For example, if a real-world problem you care about has a complicated sub-problem that needs to be solved, you could write about that sub-problem.

6. Other than a family member, who is someone who has had a significant influence on you? What has been the impact of their influence? (35 words)

For this question, it is best to pick a peer. Yale wants to see that you are someone who will benefit from being around the incredibly smart, driven, and eclectic group of students they want in their incoming class. You want to be very clear about how their influence has impacted you, how it has nudged you toward productive activities you otherwise would not have pursued, helped you improve in your current activities, or pushed you outside of your comfort zone.

7. What is something about you that is not included anywhere else in your application? (35 words)

If you didn't include in your application the value that means the most to you, the one you will fight for, include it here. If any other interests of yours intersect with life in New Haven, you can mention those as well. Make sure you establish a strong personal connection to whatever additional interest you bring up.

You only need to respond to one of following essays.

8a. Reflect on a time you discussed an issue important to you with someone holding an opposing view. Why did you find the experience meaningful? (400 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.

8b. Reflect on your membership in a community to which you feel connected. Why is this community meaningful to you? You may define community however you like.

This is a classic community essay, nothing more. What admissions officers are looking for is a first-person snapshot of you within a community that simulates the type of campus environment you will find if you are admitted and decide to attend Yale. Ideally, your chosen community should be one that you are currently part of, is filled with smart, highly ambitious peers, and has a respectable number of members. Large school clubs certainly count.

If you aren't part of a community that fits these criteria, you are not out of luck. As long as you pick a community from which you can demonstrate that you have tangibly benefited and to which you have given back, you can craft a very strong response to this question.

Once you have chosen your community, you want a powerful hook to draw the reader in. This can be a vivid first-person snapshot of your community carrying out its main aim or goal, a moment of triumph or sorrow for your community, or you bantering with members of your community to immediately establish that you are close to them. The key is that your hook demonstrates to the reader that you are indeed writing about a community in which you are deeply entrenched.

After your hook, you want to create a narrative showing how reciprocal social interactions within your community allow your group to accomplish its main priority and goal. It is vital that your community has a clear goal or priority and isn't just a loose collection of people. During this section, where you show how your community achieves something meaningful, it is critical that you provide first-person anecdotes of your social interactions with other members. Demonstrate how those social interactions made you grow as a person in some specific way and helped you become more refined.

Then you want to show how you have benefited members of your community. It is key that after reading this essay, admissions officers can visualize the type of community member you'll be on their campus over the next four years. To conclude the essay, discuss how this community has shaped your future goals as they relate to your hook and personal strengths.

8c. Reflect on an element of your personal experience that you feel will enrich your college. How has it shaped you?

This is a perspective-based essay, which means it is vital that you put forward a well-thought-out, salient perspective on something that demonstrates you will add to the intellectual vibrancy of Yale's incoming class. If you choose this prompt, there are two main ways you can start the essay. The first is a punchy and bold description of your perspective; the second is a vivid personal anecdote that both establishes a personal connection to the perspective you'd like to share and can be used to argue for and support it.

From there, you should either begin arguing for your perspective with powerful descriptions of your lived experiences or start discussing how it will inform your social interactions with members of Yale's community. The ‘element’ in question in this prompt is the aspect of your experiences that pushed you toward adopting this belief, one that, if brought to Yale, would increase the intellectual diversity of the incoming class. You want to articulate how your perspective will inform your goals and aspirations at Yale. By college, Yale means it dormitories. So make sure to show vividly how you would engage in the student spaces that the colleges have in common, and how having this perspective will enable you to contribute to them and their students in a positive way.

To show that this perspective has shaped you, after making clear what your perspective is and demonstrating that it's born from personal experience, show the reader the activities it compelled you to pursue. Explain how those activities further confirmed the validity of this perspective and perhaps even refined it.

Finally, conclude by discussing how this perspective will help you change the world for the better and how, given your life goals, having this perspective is indispensable to you. Alternatively, you can conclude your essay by reflecting on the experiences you discussed to show how you developed this perspective or argue for it, and how being part of Yale's community will recontextualize one or two of these experiences.

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.