How To Stand Out in Your Brown Supplemental Essays 2025/26

Brown's 2025/26 Supplemental Essay Updates: What's Changed?

Gaining admission to Brown, or any Ivy League institution, is no small feat. In such a competitive environment, where the acceptance rate can sink below 6% and where virtually every qualified applicant has soaring grades and exceptional resumes, the Brown-specific supplemental essays and short answer questions offer applicants a crucial opportunity to stand out as individuals.

Almost every year, top-tier universities like Brown will make at least minor adjustments to their application process in order to get a deeper understanding of their applicants.

Only Small Changes for 2025/26 Brown Supplementals

• For the 2025/26 admissions cycle, the three essay prompts for Brown remain unchanged from last year.
• For the short answer prompts, three remain unchanged from last year, but one of the four has been eliminated, reducing the total number of short answer items to three.

What Are Brown University’s Essay Prompts and Short Answer Questions for 2025/26?

For 2025/26 Brown applicants must submit responses to the following:

• 3 Short Essays Prompts
• 3 Short Answer Questions

A hallmark of the Brown Supplemental Writing prompts and questions for 25/26 is that they encourage students to share and reveal what they're most passionate about, what is most central to their character, voice, and aspirations, and latitude and freedom to approach each prompt with imagination, inventiveness, and individuality.

I. The Three Short Essay Prompts

Students applying to Brown, first-year and transfer applicants, are required to submit to responses to each of the three essay prompts below.

The length requirement is 200 to 250 words, for each prompt.

Garnering a More Personal and Holistic View of Applicants

From academic exploration and your intellectual passions and the influences and experiences that shaped you, to introspection on what gives you joy, Brown's three key essay prompts are designed to give admissions officers deeper insights into why you're attracted to Brown's Open Curriculum approach, your deeper motivations, values, and perspectives, and your inner resilience (such as how you find joy) as you navigate day-to-day life now and with an eye to how you'll navigate the excitement, freedom, and challenges of university life at Brown.

II. Three Short Answer (and Very Short Answer) Questions

First-year and transfer applicants are also asked to reflect briefly on three very short answer questions. Depending on the prompt, the length of your answers will range from only a few words to 100 words maximum.

A Big Picture Approach to the Brown Supplementals

While your responses need to be short or very short, they offer you a chance to demonstrate significant introspection.

To give the larger supplemental more impact, you'll also want to ensure your short answers add to a unified applicant profile, that's consistent, authentic, and memorable.

How To Answer Brown's Supplemental Essay Prompts?

Each essay prompt is designed to probe different aspects of you — your interests, values, goals, and perspectives, but all of them also offer you an opportunity to introduce yourself with a good dose of authenticity and vulnerability, which should help you make a more memorable impression on the reader.

All three essays are also a crucial opportunity to reveal a compelling bridge linking your core interests, character traits, and values to your excitement about getting into Brown, and why you're a good fit for Brown.

This includes sharing excitement and insights that demonstrate how you can thrive at Brown and contribute to Brown's unique academic community, one that stands out as attracting students who are curious, self-directed, and excited about the school's student-centered philosophy and Open Curriculum approach.

This first essay combines two classic admissions questions: “Tell us about your interests” and “Why Brown?” The primary goal of this essay is to show genuine passion or intellectual curiosity in your areas of interest and how Brown will help you pursue these interests.

In addition, Brown wants to know how your learning preferences and intellectual curiosity make you a good fit for what Brown offers, in particular exceptional freedom and flexibility to pursue an individual line of study and inquiry but a freedom also meant to encourage students to explore broadly.

• How will you portray your authentic academic interests and passions?
• How can you describe a compelling alignment between your interests and passions and why you're excited about Brown — about the learning environment and signature freedom to pursue and to explore that Brown offers?

1. Narrate Lived Experiences

For the first part, talk about the experiences that drew you to your current interests.

Ask yourself the following:

• Did they evolve because you were looking for ways to help or challenge people, or were they strictly personal endeavors?
• Did a particularly inspiring book, teacher, or experience first get you interested in a certain subject?
• How has your passion for this subject grown or developed over time?

It’s perfectly fine to be undecided. Instead, describe specific areas of interest you may pursue.

The focus should be on the reasons why you find a subject so compelling rather than why you’re so amazing at it.

2. Probe and Share Your Interests or Excitement About Brown's Open Curriculum

Now that you have engaged the admission committee with your interests and academic passions, explain why Brown’s Open Curriculum will help you further your pursuits.

A Brown student might be a biomedical engineer who has taken every Ancient Egyptian archeology course, a comparative literature student who originally intended to study applied math, or a neuroscientist double-concentrating in philosophy...

Recap

A solid response to this question integrates gathered knowledge about Brown’s specific offerings into a personal narrative based on your stated interest. Leverage research combined with personal insight to demonstrate with individuality and authenticity how Brown’s unique opportunities represent an obvious next step in your development.

Utilize Brown’s website as much as possible to brainstorm specific ways the Open Curriculum will help you further your interests. You can even search Researchers @ Brown to connect your interests with the specific interests of professors.

While the first essay helped Brown admissions learn more about you and how you'll benefit from attending Brown, the second essay puts more emphasis on connections you see between your background and the influences and experiences that shaped you and will shape the contributions you're likely to make to the Brown community.

Your response needs to be authentic, including sharing an aspect of your background that inspired or challenged you so that there is a natural and compelling link between your background formation and how this will give unique shape to the ways you contribute to campus life at Brown.

1. Find a Compelling Challenge or Inspiration to Probe

...Share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you...

You can try brainstorming from two different directions as you look for background experiences and influences that are compelling, authentic, and also relevant for this context.

A. think about an experience that shaped a core challenge, commitment, inspiration, or purpose you have.

• What happened or what's the influence?
• What lasting insight did you take from it, or what lasting commitment or inspiration?
• Inspiration to do what?

B. For an alternative approach, start by envisioning ways you feel uniquely and genuinely motivated to engage in college life at Brown. Then, working backwards or looking backwards, ask yourself what experience, influence, challenge, insight, or inspiration is driving this motivation and where it came from?

Both approaches could help you as you identify a past experience or influence that's core to your individuality and that will offer a rich bridge for sharing how you'll engage in campus life, be it in ways big or small.

2. Think Inclusively About "Community"

Community can be anything from a study group or affinity group to a club, team, dormitory cohort, theater or dance troupe, or a community service commitment.

Keeping an inclusive approach could be useful both for your brainstorming about past challenges or insights that shape you that may involve "community," and for the kinds of settings in which you see yourself making contributions to campus life.

3. Think of "Contributions" Broadly: Both Big and Small

If the aspect of your character that you home in on for this essay sets you up to be a formidable changemaker on campus, then be you, and power to you! But...

Keep in mind that Brown leaders already know they're attracting highly motivated, creative, and energetic students, so being a spectacular changemaker may not be the same as actually standing out...

For example, you may have an experience that gives you a special brand of empathy or a unique way of helping a peer get through a rough patch...

Or, you may have a spirit of generosity that translates into small but meaningful acts of kindness and service...

You may be the person who can diffuse an argument, or help others find common ground..

Or you may simply be that person who excels at looking for ways to help others grow and succeed instead of having a narrow commitment only to your own pursuits...

Or yes... you may be the person who arrives eager to launch a STEM research lab just for first-generation college students on campus!...

From the small to the spectacular, think about focusing on what's authentic for you, and on how you can convey it authentically, and memorably.

1. Finding the "What"

This prompt gives you several options, including “small, mundane, or spectacular.”

Choose something that brings you genuine joy.

Your response shouldn’t simply be a play-by-play of your position in a chosen sport or activity. Instead, focus on a specific place in time or memory that stands out. Be clear, detailed, and original.

Think deeply about your life, your family, and your surroundings. If you are having trouble identifying a unique topic, start with the five senses.

• What do you look at that makes you happy?
• Does a particular smell evoke happiness?
• Have you ever touched something that made you smile?

Remember that witnessing the joy of others is also an option, like being a “gift giver” who revels in presenting loved ones with a surprise.

2. Show Instead of Telling

Your focus reveals a lot about you, so think about how you want to be perceived. You can write about a personal experience or how you shared your joy with someone else. Maybe you witnessed something new, or you find joy in your everyday life.

And, while there's no strict rule here, you're likely to find that simply telling admissions officers what brings you joy may not be as captivating, revealing, and memorable as it will be if you put a vivid vignette or vivid personal narrative at the center of your essay. This narrative approach can make it easier to reveal the intimate contours of personal experience so that you, and your insights have a super sharp focus that make a more memorable and singular impact on the reader.

3. Enjoy Being You; Avoid Clichés

The essay can be humorous or serious, light or dark, but challenge yourself to offer up an original and memorable take on a universal emotion.

• avoid clichés and platitudes
• make sure you're humble (and that your joy is not at the expense of another person, of course)
• consider spotlighting a source of joy that deepens a key theme in your larger applicant narrative
• you might use this essay as an opportunity to reveal subtle powers of thought and observation, such as describing something seemingly small and remarkable only to you or thanks to a unique lens or perspective

Recap

Like Brown's Open Curriculum, this essay topic gives you lots of freedom, making it an opportunity to show how even mundane kinds of observation, indulgence, gratification, or gratitude-giving will keep you grounded and excited to take advantage of all that Brown offers.

How To Answer Brown's Short Answer Questions

If you like having less to write, you'll love the remaining supplementary questions. Your answer for the first of Brown's short answer questions is capped at three words. For the next two questions, the limits are 100 words and 50 words respectively.

As in writing about what gives you joy, this short answer question gives you absolute freedom, but also quite a challenge:

• how much can you reveal about yourself with just three words?
• how will you use this unusual exercise to be memorable and differentiate yourself from other applicants?
• how can you be highly evocative and also ensure the response resonates with and adds new layers of nuance to a unified applicant narrative?

There are adjectives, and then there are pictures...

This prompt may remind you of a commonplace job interview or ice-breaker question, like "What three words best describe you?"

A natural response might be to think of simple adjectives, like friendly, hard-working, pizza-loving

However, you can broaden your notion of using words.

For example, some "words" can paint a picture or resonate with rich layers of meaning, for instance, serving as metaphors vs. mere adjectives:

Black Sheep

Under Construction

Tornado

Number Poet

Open Window

Either/Or

Sponge

As you can see, mere adjectives and nouns may work for you, but word images can be more evocative, in ways that are either more striking, more resonant, or even enigmatic.

Brown is challenging your own creative impulses, but you can also challenge your reviewer (playfully that is), by using words that present some more open-ended and evocative layers of meaning!

Imagination Warm-Ups

Here's a playful but effective way to get your imagination into high gear.

• Think of a couple of friends or family members: what three words would be describe them if they were applying to Brown?
• What three words would these people use to describe you?

Or, try this. Imagine you're the admissions officer at Brown...

Then play around with some word trios of your own — what does each one reveal about the applicant and about how they might enrich the Brown community?

For example:

Self-directed, Lost in the Woods, Serene

Buddha, Butterfly, Bookworm

Boat Person, Moonshot, Question Mark

Gentle Giant, All Business, Unfazed

Ally, Tempered, Halcyon

Baker, Quaker, Candlestick Maker

Hopefully these exercises can give you a wider creative lens as you brainstorm ideas for your response.

Recap

With a more playful and plastic approach when it comes to words and word images, and some mental warm-ups to stretch your creativity, you should be well on your way to finding the word trio you're looking for, one unique in the very same ways you are!

Once again, Brown is giving you space to reveal your voice, creativity, and intellectual playfulness — key hallmarks of the Brown experience.

Since the prompt says your imaginary class can be about virtually anything academic or otherwise you may want to think about your overall strategy.

• What will the class be about in light of what aspects of you you want to use this prompt to reveal — about your mind, passions, and values (and perhaps about your voice and creativity as well...)?
• How does this fit in with and complement (and not simply repeat) insights into your personality and character you've shared across Brown's short essays and short answer questions?

1. Start With the Spark

What excites or obsesses you enough that you’d build a whole class around it? It can be niche, unconventional, or personal, or it can fall into a more traditional or classical area of academic study.

The point is that what you choose to create a class for should have an authentic connection with something you love to think about, know a lot about (or want to know lots about), or because you find it satisfying in some way to have mastery of this topic. In short, a strong answer will be one that feels distinctly yours — not something you've chosen because you want to sound impressive.

2. Be Inventive and Specific

"Art History" or "Math" are obviously too broad and unable to reveal anything interesting and memorable. Instead, try “The Mathematics of Time Management,” “Political Comic Strips 101," or "What Your Dreams Can Teach You." The sharper, more nuanced and inventive, and more personal the lens, the better the odds (in most cases) it will prove more memorable and authentic.

3. Show your Thinking

Use your 100 words not only to name the class, but to describe what it would explore, in ways that matter to you, and including what students will or might take away.

You'll also be showing how you want to engage your reader.

• Do you want your course description to capture your passion for the subject? certain intricacies or nuances of your own thinking process, or a personal brand of intellectual curiosity?
• Do you want to be more attuned to the reader's own curiosity, what they can learn from your course description, or why they would love this course?

4. Don't Overthink It

For this prompt, as with other Brown prompts, there are so many possibilities — which can be a double-edged sword for the writer.

• Keep in mind the old adage: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There may be several good ideas that come to mind, but perhaps none that seems perfect. That's okay. Review the tips above and use them to guide you to the best "good" approach.
• Prioritize an approach that will allow you to explore and reveal some aspect of your personality that you haven't yet explored as fully in the other essays and short answer responses.

Recap

There are many directions you can take with this short answer prompt. That said, it certainly seems to offer an invitation to reveal something you feel particularly passionate about, that you find intellectually intriguing and stimulating (even if it's not an academic topic or subject), that exposes your own self-awareness — about how you think and reason, about where you mind likes to go, or what you're most curious about.

This prompt is so open-ended that we can only suggest that most students will want to link their answer to the why Brown question to something core to their personality, values, or interests.

But, in light of the length limit, this is not any conventional "Why Us/Why You" college essay prompt.

Instead, think of this question as a challenge — one that tests your powers of clarity and synthesis.

With just one sentence, Brown wants you to link a core aspect of your identity, perspectives, or aspirations to a meaningful aspect of motivation for attending Brown.

This is your opportunity to reveal:

• What drives you most — a belief, curiosity, creative instinct, or intellectual hunger.
• And how that drive aligns with something essential about Brown — its open curriculum, student-led initiatives, collaborative ethos, interdisciplinary approach, or even its broader cultural sensibility or broader educational philosophy.

1. Start with You

If you do want to anchor your answer in a core personal value or interest, you may want to go about finding this core individual trait through a process of distillation:

• What are your most core and bedrock values, traits, and aspirations?
• Which of these are most foundational to your sense of purpose, meaning, and/or intellectual drive and curiosity?
• Of these, which single one is most central to your college journey — and to your desire to attend Brown in particular, over other schools?

2. Find the Brown Connection

Next, you'll want to be sure your sentence links your personal driver to a defining Brown quality — whether that’s the freedom to shape your learning, the encouragement of experimental thinking, or the trust placed in student agency. This doesn’t have to be a concrete offering, program, or policy either — it can be a vibe, a culture, or a pedagogical philosophy.

Again, think about distilling something that's most essential about Brown — something that equates to the overriding reason you want to attend Brown based on the personal driver you chose to focus on.

3. Constructing Your Sentence

For this prompt, there's probably "good" sentences that could be very succinct (since this is an exercise in distillation and synthesis to begin with), and "good" sentences that are the opposite: complex, more "packed" with words and explanation, more syntactically intricate...

With that in mind, you'll probably want to think primarily about crafting a sentence that feels natural, eloquent, and poised.

• Use the most suitable and precise word choice, so what needs to be said is clear and sharp but you're not creating anything bloated or overwrought.
• Avoid clichés or a cliché formulation, striving to make the wording and structure as equivalent to the idea you wish to capture, with balanced syntax and powerful concision.
• Consider the power of hyperbole vs. the power of understatement: which direction do you want to lean to, or not?
• Might using a poetry lens rather than an expository writing lens help you open up an approach or sentence format you hadn't thought of?

Recap

Unlike conventional approaches you'd use for a longer Why Us/Why You college essay, Brown's one-sentence version requires you to focus on authenticity, distillation, clarity, and synthesis.

Beyond that, the prompt is so radically open-ended that, ultimately, creative possibility reigns supreme. Therefore you're in the driver's seat...

Think of the guidelines above — for this prompt and for all of the prompts — as essentially tips and suggestions — not as black and white formulas or prescriptions — for what your response requires. After all, the Brown experience isn't really about confining students to rules and prescribed academic tracks, and — once you get started on these prompts — it's hard to know where the fusion of imagination, language, intellect, creativity, and individuality may lead you...

Final Thoughts

While writing these essays, don't get overwhelmed by the possibilities, and lean into authenticity as your guide and compass.

Then, be sure you look for ways to refine each response without losing the creative spark and personal voice you want to shine through.

Ask yourself if each sentence offers unique insight that’s original to you and keeps each response evocative but chiseled and concise.

Don’t linger on accomplishments or activities covered elsewhere in your application materials, but introduce yourself with narrative clarity and focus that help make each response unique and memorable.

If you want to take some of the stress out of the writing process, you can be sure you're not alone!

Each year, our expert admissions consultants guide and encourage student growth and help students navigate essays and track and perfect their applications.

If you want a consultant in your corner, and want to be confident you're making the most of your college journey, it's time to get connected with our team...

• Learn more about the Crimson story
• Join some of our upcoming admissions webinars and events
• Be sure see our student results

For a more tailored discussion about your own college journey and best next steps, start by scheduling your own free consultation — we'll discuss your goals, explain how we work, and outline how you too can stand out and get in to your top-choice schools.