Acing Dartmouth College’s 2024-2025 Supplemental Essays
2024-2025 DARTMOUTH SUPPLEMENTAL ESSAY PROMPTS
Dartmouth has unveiled its supplemental essay prompts for the 2024-2025 admissions cycle.
Join us in learning how to ace their supplemental essays!
1. Required of all applicants. Please respond in 100 words or fewer:
As you seek admission to Dartmouth’s Class of 2029, what aspects of the college’s academic program, community, and/or campus environment attract your interest? How is Dartmouth a good fit for you?
Given the short word count, you only have space to discuss one or two aspects of Dartmouth that appeal to you. Consider what personal desires or goals your application supports and how specific resources at Dartmouth, such as professors and their research, clubs, and other organizations and spaces, will help you achieve your goals.
2. Required of all applicants, please respond to one of the following prompts in 250 words or fewer
A. There is a Quaker saying: Let your life speak. Describe the environment in which you were raised and the impact it has had on the person you are today.
In this essay, Dartmouth wants to understand how your lived experiences have shaped your intellectual journey, including the development of your thoughts and perspectives. Colleges value intellectual diversity, and what one believes or how one perceives the world is strongly influenced by one's lived experiences. Therefore, applicants should summarize their worldview or provide a perspective on something very important to them and justify to themselves that worldview or perspective through their lived experiences.
B. “Be yourself,” Oscar Wilde advised. “Everyone else is taken.” Introduce yourself.
When writing this essay, avoid repeating information that will be included in other essays you are submitting to Dartmouth. One effective approach is to reveal who you are as a person in environments where you can truly be yourself. Think about the spaces where you feel most comfortable, and show the reader who you are in those settings. Describe any social interactions and demonstrate what you contribute to those spaces by being yourself. Remember, in your essays, whenever you have the chance, you should showcase the value you can bring to spaces and communities filled with your peers.
3. Required of all applicants, please respond to one of the following prompts in 250 words or fewer:
A. What excites you?
The goal of this essay is to transform what excites you into something that also excites the reader. Think about your biggest dreams and aspirations, those that, if fulfilled, would immensely help humanity or advance our knowledge of the world. Discuss why these dreams excite you, and try to convince the reader why they should be excited by them as well. Alternatively, if you have a favorite academic topic, theorem, or results, explain why it excites and in doing so, do your best to convince the reader why it should excite them as well.
B. Labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta recommended a life of purpose. “We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things,” she said. “That is what we are put on the earth for.” In what ways do you hope to make—or are you already making—an impact? Why? How?
In this essay, it is best to demonstrate how you are already making an impact in the world. The source of this impact should either be a well-developed hard skill, such as building apps, or soft skills, such as using interpersonal skills or empathy to positively impact members of a local community. In this essay, you should show, not tell, the reader the impact you’ve made.
After illustrating the impact you've had, explain why this impact is significant and persuade the reader to support your continued efforts. Then, describe the impact you hope to achieve by fulfilling your career dreams. If you haven’t made an impact yet, consider small actions you’ve taken, such as explaining a physics concept to someone, helping someone with their homework, or raising awareness of a seldom-discussed issue during an in-class presentation. Citing examples like these would be beneficial for this essay, followed by articulating the impact you hope to achieve in pursuing a specific career. Ensure your hopes and aspirations are grounded in reality and believable.
The aim of this essay is to show the reader how you plan to pursue your course of study at Dartmouth and what it will lead to after graduation. Describe what you imagine doing research with specific professors would be like or how engaging in impactful activities related to your field of study at an academic club would feel. Share your dreams, hopes, and aspirations that you aim to achieve through your course of study. Specify the job titles you are interested in and what you hope to accomplish in those positions. Present your dreams in a way that convinces the reader to support your vision and want to see it come true.
The goal of this question is to demonstrate to the reader that you can benefit from disagreeing with a peer by refining the idea you defended in that disagreement. This usually occurs when you critically engage with someone else’s idea or position, even if you strongly disagree with it. Do your best to show yourself critically engaging with someone else’s position, even if you disagree with it. Do your best to understand it and see it in the most charitable light possible. The aim is to show that you can have a strong disagreement with someone yet come out of it better by learning something about the shortcomings of your own position. Be specific about what you learned; the goal isn’t to boast about defeating someone’s argument or making them change their mind. This question evaluates whether you will benefit from being part of Dartmouth’s intellectually vibrant student community, a non-negotiable prerequisite for admission to Dartmouth.
E. Celebrate your nerdy side.
In this essay, you should aim to demonstrate your ability to discuss an academic concept in a high-level, technical manner while also making it engaging for a layperson. Additionally, you want to highlight how a technical understanding of the topic enriches your daily life and convince the reader of its importance.
F. “It’s not easy being green…” was the frequent refrain of Kermit the Frog. How has difference been a part of your life, and how have you embraced it as part of your identity, outlook, or sense of purpose?
In this essay, you want to highlight your understanding of the importance of difference. Showcase how difference is the genesis of new and novel ideas needed to tackle humanity’s biggest problems or answer our oldest unanswered questions. Focus on life experiences where differences have led to fruitful, positive outcomes. You might also want to discuss repetition and how it is a precondition for difference. Explain how the repetition of your identity through other people's lived experiences, and that of your ancestors, has allowed your difference to take on a unique characteristic, providing you with the potential to accomplish things that have never been done before. You can frame your lived experiences in terms of repetition and difference and explain how they have endowed you with a clear purpose. If you do, be specific about what your purpose is.
G. Buddy Teevens ’79 was a legendary and much-beloved coach at Dartmouth. He often told parents: “Your son will be a great football player when it’s football time, a great student when it’s academic time, and a great person all of the time.” If Coach Teevens had said that to you, what would it mean to be “a great person”?
This is one of the most open-ended questions we at Cosmic have come across. You can distinguish between "great people" and "Great People" as posited by the Great Man Theory and explain whether or not you believe in this theory. You can also share examples from your life of people you believed were great and positively impacted you, describing the traits that constitute their greatness. Another approach is to discuss historical figures and explain how their actions and accomplishments inform your understanding of what it means to be great. In the end, be sure to present a clear position on what it means to be great, or perhaps why the concept of greatness itself should not be applied to people.
If you would like a review of your Dartmouth essays by an admissions expert or have any further questions about Dartmouth’s essays or other college admissions essays, please schedule a free consultation with us below. We would be more than happy to answer any questions you may have.
