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Many colleges ask a supplemental question about the perspective you would bring to campus: your background, your identity, a community you belong to or an experience that shaped how you see things. These are usually called diversity essays, even when the word never appears in the prompt.
The question is broader than many applicants assume. It is not asking you to prove you belong to a category. It is asking how your particular experiences shape the way you think, and what that would add to a classroom, a dorm or a team.
What colleges mean by diversity
- Cultural, ethnic, racial or religious background.
- Family circumstances: first-generation, immigrant, military, rural, caregiving.
- Language, nationality or growing up between places.
- Disability, health or neurodivergence, if you choose to share it.
- Socioeconomic experience, such as working to support your family.
- Perspectives and interests: an unusual hobby, a way of thinking, a minority view in your community.
How to choose your angle
- 1Write down three experiences that shaped how you see the world differently from the people around you.
- 2For each one, write what you notice, value or question because of it.
- 3Pick the one where you can show a specific moment, not only describe a category.
- 4Make sure it is not the same story as your personal essay. The diversity essay should add a new side of you.
Read next: The community essay
A structure that fits 250 to 500 words
- 1Open with a specific scene or detail from the experience.
- 2Explain briefly what the experience is, only as much as a stranger needs.
- 3Show how it shapes the way you think, act or engage with others, with one concrete example.
- 4Connect it to college: how you would bring that perspective into a seminar, a club or a friendship.
Mistakes to avoid
- Writing about a category instead of an experience. Naming your background is a starting point, not an essay.
- Focusing on hardship without showing your response to it.
- Writing about someone else's experience, such as a parent's, without returning to yours.
- Ending with a generic promise to "bring a unique perspective". Show the perspective instead.
- Feeling you must share something painful. You never have to write about trauma, and a perspective rooted in an interest or a community is just as valid.
Read next: The additional information section
An illustration
Illustration, about an invented student: a student who grew up in a town of 900 people writes about being the person who fixed everyone's phones and printers. The essay is not about being rural. It is about learning to explain technical things to people who are embarrassed to ask, and how she wants to keep doing that in a computer science department full of people who learned the vocabulary early.
Questions
A score out of 100, a note on every sentence, the paragraph costing you most and a 10-point draft check, in 5–10 minutes. We never write a word of your essay.
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