Yale Young Global Scholars (YYGS) Essays Guide 2026

The Yale Young Global Scholars (YYGS) application is now open. Despite its price tag, this program is an excellent use of summer time for rising juniors. While it is not RSI, students still gain meaningful experience and are challenged in ways that admissions officers value. Participants learn from top Yale professors in a collaborative environment alongside other ambitious and bright young minds. YYGS is absolutely worth including in a well-balanced list of summer programs to apply to.

In this blog post, we’ll guide you through how to approach the essays they require, so you can maximize your chances of being admitted to the program, and, in turn, strengthen your overall college application profile.

1. Please reflect on a time when you changed your opinion about another person. What was your understanding of this person previously, what caused you to see them differently, and what did you learn from this?
(300-400 words)

This person can be anyone: a friend, a family member, a teacher, someone who works at a bodega you frequent, or even a historical figure you’ve never met but have only read about. The key, as with all summer-program and admissions essays, is to ensure you remain the main topic. The reader wants to learn about you, the applicant, so the essay must begin with you.

Start with a vivid, first-person experience that only you could write. This experience could be a direct interaction with the person (whether in-person or through reading about them), or it could be an earlier moment in your life that shaped a set of values you later used to interpret your encounter with them.

If you begin with the moment you met or learned about this person, clearly explain the impression they left on you, and then reference a separate personal experience that shaped the initial opinion you formed of them. If you instead begin with a personal experience that shows how you developed the values you used to evaluate this person, follow it by describing your interaction with them and the impression they made on you. In either structure, make sure your descriptions are vivid, specific, and rooted in concrete sensory detail.

No matter how you open, you should then describe another experience or moment of reflection that caused you to change or evolve your perception of this person. The lesson you learned must be specific to you and grow organically out of the anecdotes you shared and the interaction you described. This ensures the essay remains deeply personal, introspective, and uniquely yours.

2. If you could spend a day shadowing one person (for example, as many people do as part of an internship) to learn more about them and their job, who would it be and why? Please note that this does need to be a current, real person (not a historical figure nor a fictional character). (280 characters)

The key to this essay is letting your unique voice come through. With only 280 characters, you can’t share much information or tell a full story, so your natural tone and perspective must distinguish you from others. Choose someone who has accomplished something meaningful and whose work intersects with your lived experience. For example, if a person helped develop a treatment for a disease that has affected you or someone close to you, they may be a strong choice.

The person you choose should signal to the reader that you actively follow the frontiers of your favorite academic fields. It’s essential that you mention them only briefly, just their name, key identifying details, and what they accomplished, and use the rest of the space to convey your own motivations for wanting to shadow them. This limited space should reveal as much about you as possible.

3. What is your favorite word, and why? Please note that this does need to be one word (not two words or more), and it can be in any language, though if in a foreign language then you need to do your best to translate or explain it as part of your response. (280 Characters)

Don’t be fooled, unless the word is a slur or a curse word (which would disqualify you on the spot), it doesn’t matter what word you pick. What matters is your reason for choosing it. Your reasoning should be rooted in a circumstance you’re facing or in specific experiences you’ve had. Do your best to help the reader visualize the events in your life that make this word your favorite.

4. We want to learn more about your background, beliefs, values, and/or the important people in your life. Please tell us about something that has influenced you and articulate how it has shaped you.
(150-200 words)

It is vital that you focus on one experience or event for this essay. The event can be a conversation with someone, witnessing something spectacular, whether in a good or bad sense, learning a fact, or a meaningful social interaction. Whatever you choose, the event should clearly relate to how you developed one of your most important values.

Once you have identified that event, open the essay by vividly depicting it. Then explain how it led you to develop a very specific and well-formulated perspective, and how holding that perspective motivated you to either improve the lives of others or take control of your own education to advance it as much as possible.

To conclude, you can either reflect on the event from the perspective of who you are today, contrast your present self with your past self, show how taking action based on that initial conception of the values you hold today refined those values over time, or you can end with a scene that shows you doing something you commonly do today, one of those things that people will remember about you when they either meet you for the first time or hang around you long enough.

If you want help applying to YYGS or any other summer research program, or would just like someone to help you strengthen your overall extracurriculars, schedule a free consultation with an admissions expert today.