Brainstorm — decide what’s most impressive to say before reading the prompts 

Prompt’s essay-writing method starts with figuring out what you want to say. (Then we slot that into the essay prompts that are available.)

So what should you say on your college application? Easy. Your entire task is to show admissions officers that you will succeed in college and beyond.

Okay, but how do you show an admissions officer you’re likely to succeed? This is also, surprisingly, not that hard: you do it by talking about your experiences that show one or more of the 5 Traits Colleges Look for in Applicants:

• Drive (grit)
• Initiative
• Contribution
• Intellectual Curiosity
• Diversity of Experiences

That brings us to brainstorming. Before you can begin talking about “Why Duke” or thinking about which of the four optional essays might be best for you, you need to write down all of your high school experiences, which is easier said than done. Brainstorm things like your:

• Academic interests
• Extracurricular activities and interests
• Self-learning or independent projects you’ve undertaken
• Work experiences or substantial domestic obligations
• Any other skills you’ve developed or meaningful experiences you’ve had

If you create a free Prompt account, you can develop these ideas through our brainstorming modules. 

At the end of this process, you should have a solid idea of what experiences you’ve had that best show off one or more of the 5 Traits. The very best of these should go into your personal statement. (Re-write your personal statement if that’s not so!)

But the “next-best” after that should find their way into these three Duke supplements. 

Why Duke — Your college interests + how they fit with what’s at Duke

Here is the prompt:

What is your sense of Duke as a university and a community, and why do you consider it a good match for you? If there’s something in particular about our offerings that attracts you, feel free to share that as well. (250 word limit)

The reason that schools ask “Why Us” is two-fold. They want to see:

• that you’ll actually choose their school if you get in — (read Demonstrated Interest for more on how powerful this can be) and 
• that you’ll be a good fit at the school — (read “Why Us” essays to get a full sense of how admissions readers assess “fit”). 

What this boils down to is that you need your essay to cover:

1. Your college-related interests and
2. How they’ll be a great match for Duke.

This means that — despite the fact that the prompt begins by asking about Duke “as a university and a community” — your process should begin with going over that brainstormed list of your own experiences. In particular, look over the academic/extracurricular interests. This will help anchor the essay to what you can contribute to Duke as a “university and community,” (which, of course, is what the admissions team is looking for).   

Once you know what your strongest academic/extracurricular experiences are, it’s research time — dive into the Duke academic and news websites for opportunities there that you’ll take advantage of given your interests. This is the “something particular about our offerings that attracts you” piece. The prompt posits this as optional, but adding in specific resources is both easy and powerful, so take the time to do it. 

If you visited the campus, you can work those experiences into your essay, too. Colleges love knowing that you went to the trouble to visit, and formed strong connections in person.  

Writing up the essay is now just a question of describing your interests and naming a few Duke resources that match well with them. One example is below. 

“Why Duke” — example essay

Please note that Prompt strongly believes that influencers shouldn’t influence your college essays and that, for essays that get published in flashy places, you don’t know if the essay got that student in or if they got in despite what was maybe a bad essay. 

So please take this made-up example essay with a grain of salt. 

Because you want to answer every piece of the question, here’s the prompt once more:

What is your sense of Duke as a university and a community, and why do you consider it a good match for you? If there’s something in particular about our offerings that attracts you, feel free to share that as well. (250 word limit)

Example essay:

Duke is unique as a research university because of assets like the Duke Forest, a teaching and research laboratory. (I have subscribed to its newsletter since 10th grade!) My ultimate goal is to become a forest ecologist — that is, to protect and restore forests so that they can maintain healthy animal, plant, and especially mushroom life. That’s why I’m so excited to be a part of a university that not only offers a broad and rigorous liberal arts education but also has this hands-on resource related to my chosen field.

As a city kid, I know that seems surprising. But I slowly got more interested in mushrooms as a child visiting my grandmother, who hunts them. By high school, foraging for edible mushrooms had become a full-blown passion, as well as hiking and being in nature more generally. 

Now, I’m eager to transition from reading voraciously about mushroom species and their properties to doing my own research. I’m particularly excited to study with mycologist and biology professor Rytas Vilgalys, whose work I’ve long admired (especially on how fungi help trees grow). 

As a community, Duke seems warm and exciting. I didn’t get to visit Duke, but the admissions office put me in touch with a student studying Mycology. I’ve learned so much from them not only about their research and study, but also of a caring campus culture. I can’t wait to be a part of it, too. 

Notes:

• Word count: 238
• The student comes off as extremely enthusiastic about Duke. It seems like a good match, based on the essay, and the student seems likely to choose Duke (Demonstrated Interest), particularly because the student subscribes to one of its newsletters and asked the admissions office to be put in touch with a current undergrad.
• The student comes off as dynamic and full of intellectual curiosity, one of the 5 Traits. 
• The essay answers all parts of the prompt (Duke as a university; Duke as a community; particular offerings). 
• Note: we at Prompt added the links just so you could see where we got some of the info - you don’t need links in your essays!

The four optional prompts — choose the two that best show off the 5 Traits

Here are the optional prompts:

‍We want to emphasize that the following questions are optional for all 2022-23 applicants. Feel free to answer them if you believe that doing so will add something meaningful that is not already shared elsewhere in your application. 

Four optional questions are available – a maximum of two can be selected. Please select 0 – 2 optional essay topics. (250 word limit for each)

1. We seek a diverse student body that embodies the wide range of human experience. In that context, we are interested in what you’d like to share about your lived experiences and how they’ve influenced how you think of yourself.
2. We believe there is benefit in sharing and sometimes questioning our beliefs or values; who do you agree with on the big important things, or who do you have your most interesting disagreements with? What are you agreeing or disagreeing about?
3. What has been your best academic experience in the last two years, and what made it so good?
4. Duke’s commitment to diversity and inclusion includes sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. If you’d like to share with us more about your identity in this context, feel free to do so here.

[We added in the prompt numbers.]

There’s a lot to digest here. We have two thoughts on how to choose which two prompts to respond to. (Because, to repeat, you should definitely answer two of these prompts.)

First, let your brainstormed experiences list guide you. Think about the best experiences you have to talk about that you haven’t yet presented (or presented fully) in your application. Which prompts allow you to talk about stuff that makes you look like a student full of potential to succeed? Answer those.

Second, we don’t think all these prompts will tend to lead to equally good essays. Here are our particularized thoughts on which prompts are likely stronger than others:

#1 — Diversity prompt — Strong potential. 

There are many, many ways to stand out as “diverse,” and it doesn’t have to be by race, religion, or ethnicity. Even if you come from an underrepresented background, focus on the words “lived experiences” in this prompt. 

Use this prompt to show how:

• your heritage (Cherokee) or 
• a unique experience (going mushroom hunting with your grandmother!) or 
• a combination of both (going mushroom hunting with your grandmother who learned this skill as part of the Cherokee tribe)

influence how you see the world and guide your actions. 

What do you do because of your Cherokee heritage? How does that identity inform the actions you take? How does it affect how you view the world in a unique or unusual way?

The more you keep action-oriented in the essay and focused on revealing the 5 Traits, the better this prompt can make you look. 

Overall, every student has something unique to add to a college campus, and drawing that out in a short essay is a good idea.

#2 — Sharing or questioning a belief or value — Approach with caution.

The issue we worry about with this prompt is that it puts you in a combative posture. You’re going to have to spend time talking about a belief or value that you don’t subscribe to, and then why you don’t. Not only does this cast you in a negative rather than a positive light (pulling something down rather than building something up), but you need to spend time in your essay talking about something other than yourself — a value you don’t believe in. 

Even if you talk about “who do you agree with on the big important things,” which is an option the prompt gives you, that’s still talking about someone other than yourself.

So, though we agree with Duke that “there is benefit in sharing and sometimes questioning our beliefs or values,” we don’t agree with them that talking about it makes for a great college essay. Maybe save that essay for an op-ed to your local paper.

#3 — Your best academic experience — Must-write prompt.

At Prompt, we believe that colleges love students who love school. Obvious? Maybe. But doesn’t that provide some clarity about why this is a good prompt to answer? And, in fact, you might even think about what it means to admissions officers that a student applying to a selective university would skip this piece. We say: write this prompt no matter what. 

#4 — LGBTQ prompt — Write this if it fits you.

The best way to think about this prompt is as a continuation of prompt #1 (diversity). For those of you whose most unique point of view and “lived experiences” come from their gender identity or sexual orientation, write this prompt!

Your approach should be the same as for the diversity prompt — that is, don’t just write to say “I’m gay” or “I’m nonbinary.” That’s passive and won't help you set yourself apart. Instead, write about how your particular identity informs your actions and your point of view. Write with lots of action verbs and I-statements so the admissions team can see how much you’ll contribute to the Duke community. 

The four optional prompts — Definitely write “Academic interests” and, next, write either “diversity” or “sexual orientation” 

Just to summarize what we wrote above: 

• Must-write: Every student should write the “academic interests” prompt.
• Next-most-important: The “diversity” prompt or the sexual orientation/gender identity prompt if it fits you.
• As a guiding principle, use your own experiences and focus on those that best demonstrate the 5 Traits. If that’s sexual identity, write that. If it’s mushroom hunting, write that, and mention, in passing, that you’re also nonbinary. 

Optional prompt examples

Diversity prompt (1):

We seek a diverse student body that embodies the wide range of human experience. In that context, we are interested in what you’d like to share about your lived experiences and how they’ve influenced how you think of yourself.

Note: The example below is similar to the Why Duke essay. However, you should not write two essays about the same topic as we’ve done here. Rather, make sure your three essays (Why Us, Diversity + Academic Interests) all showcase different experiences. For the purposes of illustration, by writing the same topic as an example here, you can see our point that prompts are extremely flexible, and that you should use them to show off your most valuable experiences. 

Diversity example:

I’m probably the only student in my high school who can forage for edible mushrooms. I wish I wasn’t. Understanding the natural world and being able to harvest it respectfully is, simply, life-affirming. I want more people to have this skill.

I owe this knowledge to my grandmother, a member of the Cherokee Nation, who learned from her mother and grandmother before her. Every time I visited, since I was little, she took me with her as a way to get out of the house, be in nature, and get something for dinner! My brother didn’t want to come, and that was okay. In fact, my grandmother ties this knowledge to the ancient Cherokee tradition of treating women as heads of households. By being able to provide for the family and pass on knowledge to me, she feels she’s upholding an important cultural value of her people. 

For my part, I love supplementing this heritage with scientific knowledge. I graduated from reading my grandmother’s one mushroom hunting guidebook to getting really into the scientific literature on mycology. Today, I’m particularly taken with the research of academics like Duke’s Rytas Vilgalys, who has shown how critical fungi are to the health of trees and forests. 

My experience of hunting for mushrooms with my grandmother informs how I see my cultural heritage, my values as a person who loves nature and wants everyone to share that love, and even my academic and career interests. 

Notes:

• Word count: 241
• This essay has many I-statements and shows an active, interesting person with lots of intellectual curiosity and drive. The student shows that it’s not their Cherokee heritage alone that makes them interesting (although it does!), but also how they interact with and deepen that heritage and what they’ve done with it.
• Note also that this essay could work if the student didn’t have a unique ethnic/racial heritage to share — just the experience of knowing so much about nature and mushrooms is an interesting “lived experience” worth sharing in this space.

Agree/Disagree prompt (2):

We believe there is benefit in sharing and sometimes questioning our beliefs or values; who do you agree with on the big important things, or who do you have your most interesting disagreements with? What are you agreeing or disagreeing about?

Agree/Disagree example:

My grandmother believes that there’s tremendous value to understanding nature and being able to harvest from it respectfully. She taught me this in the innumerable mushroom-hunting walks that we’ve taken together since I was young. As a Cherokee Nation member, her knowledge was passed down from her mother and grandmother. She prizes that legacy, particularly as it connects her to the Cherokee tradition of treating women as the heads of households because of their ability to provide for the family. 

For my part, I’m dedicated to passing on this knowledge to the world. I’m always encouraging my friends to come with me when I go mushroom-hunting to learn what it means to be able to gather at least part of your meal from nature. I love sharing this experience with as many people as I can. 

More than that, I want to become a forest ecologist and work toward preserving and restoring forests using a deep knowledge of nature. I also want to continue my interest in mycology while at Duke, by learning from professors like Rytas Vilgalys and doing research in the Duke Forest. My grandmother got me started down this path, and I know that she’s proud of how I uphold her cultural heritage and her love of mushroom hunting.

Notes:

• Word count: 212
• OK, while we don’t recommend writing this essay, this example is pretty good. Here’s why:
• First, this essay focuses on the “positive” part of the prompt (who do you agree with) and not on the “negative” part (who do you have your most interesting disagreements with). While disagreeing is an important skill, again, we just don’t think it makes for an easy college essay.
• Second, this essay spends a little bit of time on the “agree with” person (the grandmother) and a lot on what the student herself does with that agreement - how she’s learned, what she wants to do, examples of her intellectual curiosity. If you write this essay, keep a big focus on you as an active, interesting person, and try not to get excessively mired in the other person’s worldview. 
• Again, this essay is repeating the same topic, but please don’t do that yourself!

Academic prompt (3):

What has been your best academic experience in the last two years, and what made it so good?

Academic example:

My best academic experience was a high school summer fellowship with the Mount Desert Island (MDI) Biological Laboratory. At MDI, I was able to develop my research skills even as I continued one of the happiest and most fulfilling of my family traditions: mushroom hunting — something I’ve done for years with my grandmother. 

My grandmother taught me what it means to understand nature and to harvest from it respectfully. In particular, she taught me to forage for edible mushrooms. As I grew, this interest became an obsession for me. Beginning with her one mushroom-hunting guide, I ended up reading countless books and articles on mycology. (I particularly love Duke professor Rytas Vilgalys’ work showing how critical certain forms of fungi are to tree health and thus the health of forests.) 

This is why I loved Biology and saw it as a way to get to maybe turn my love of nature (and mushrooms) into a profession, which I’d like to do. Because of how much I loved that class, my teacher and I spent time looking for opportunities for me to develop my interest further. That’s how we found MDI, which I partook in last summer. 

At MDI, I was able to do work with mentors on research showing how a rare fungus combats pathogens that can affect humans, including two types of common viruses. This work was hard and slow, but it was exhilarating to connect my love of nature with a benefit for the wider world. 

Notes:

• Word count: 245
• The last paragraph on what the student actually did at MDI is a bit weak — the student should spell out what they did in more detail. However, we at Prompt are college essay coaches, not biology majors, so we couldn’t quite fill that in as well as you might be able to. 
• While this essay leaves out the grandmother’s cultural heritage, of course that’s something you could still work in as an aside, even in an essay like this one. (Don’t hide the things that make you interesting and unique!)
• This essay shows a student who is active, dynamic, and has an enormous love of learning (intellectual curiosity). Colleges love that. 

Sexual orientation/gender identity/expression prompt (4):

Duke’s commitment to diversity and inclusion includes sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. If you’d like to share with us more about your identity in this context, feel free to do so here.

Sexual orientation/gender identity/expression example:

It began with one book — one book which I discretely checked out, hidden amid a thick pile of others that interested me far less: Maia Kobabe’s memoir Gender Queer. This comic book tells eir story (Kobabe uses e/em/eir pronouns) in deceptively simple, powerfully relatable prose. E was a person who, like me, didn’t conform with the gender expectations that e constantly felt barraged with (ie: e couldn’t take off eir shirt while swimming because e was a girl). 

Many books followed, fiction and nonfiction alike: Jamie Windhurst’s In their shoes, the essays in Gender Euphoria, Alok Vaid-Menon Beyond the Gender Binary.

Today, these books have helped me get to where I am: feeling secure and fully myself in what seems to many like a “new” identity. And, while I’m the only out non-binary student at my school, because of these books, I don’t feel alone. Ever since freshman year, I’ve been able to use them to educate my peers and my friends about what the nonbinary identity is. 

For example, through the school’s LGBTQ club, I led a “nonbinary book club,” that was transformative in terms of gaining a set of friends who understood me on a deeper level. I also worked with the school librarian to curate a shelf of nonbinary books that I love (it’s the best shelf in the school library!) for any students curious about that identity, or about their own. 

Notes:

• Word count: 240
• This essay shows a dynamic, active student who contributes to their community and has considerable intellectual curiosity. 
• In other words, not only does this student have a rare and interesting gender identity, they also have many of the 5 Traits, which is even more valuable to the admissions reader. 
• Was it nice to get a break from mushroom hunting? You absolutely could write an essay that tied mushroom hunting (or some other pursuit) to your gender identity. Go for it! But it’s important that if you write this essay, your main focus is on the gender or sexual identity issues first, and the other interests play a “supporting” role. (Ie: fully answer the prompt.)

Helpful info on all the “other” stuff you’ll consider as you apply to Duke (and other schools)

A few helpful resources for the non-supplement parts of your application:

• Common App: Duke requires either the Common Application, Coalition Application, or QuestBridge Application. If you choose CA, read our guide to acing everything to do with writing your Common App application. 
• Whether to submit test scores: Duke remains test-optional for 2022-23. Our test-optional article will guide you through the tricky waters of making this decision. 
• Early options: Duke offers Early Decision as well as Regular. Read our Early Admissions article so you know how to approach this decision. 

BTW, here’s our guidance for approaching any college supplement + here’s where you can find our guides for almost every college’s supplements. 

Feeling inspired? A great place to start is at our College Essay Help Center. 

More articles on Prompt.com’s admissions-boosting methods:

• Work with a college essay coach
• Strong essays increase your chance of admission by up to 10x
• Don’t let influencers influence your college essays
• Should I apply test-optional?
• Early admissions: Everything you need to know
• College Essay Help Center