Cornell University, Supplemental Essay 2021–2022
Cornell is a private, Ivy League university and the land-grant university for New York state. Cornell’s mission is to discover, preserve and disseminate knowledge, to educate the next generation of global citizens, and to promote a culture of broad inquiry throughout and beyond the Cornell community. Cornell also aims, through public service, to enhance the lives and livelihoods of students, the people of New York and others around the world.
— Cornell University —
Content Table
- 2021–2022 Cornell Supplemental Essay Prompts
- Breakdown the prompts: How to write a successful essay for each topic
2021–2022 Cornell Supplemental Essay Prompts
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Why This Major? — Why are you drawn to studying the major you have selected? Please discuss how your interests and related experiences have influenced your choice. Specifically, how will an education from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and Cornell University help you achieve your academic goals?
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning
Originality — What is your “thing”? What energizes you or engages you so deeply that you lose track of time? Everyone has different passions, obsessions, quirks, inspirations. What are yours?
College of Arts and Sciences
Why This Major? — Students in Arts and Sciences embrace the opportunity to delve into multifaceted academic interests, embodying in 21st century terms Ezra Cornell’s “any person…any study” founding vision. Tell us about the areas of study you are excited to explore, and specifically why you wish to pursue them in our College.
Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
Originality — What kind of a business student are you? Using your personal, academic, or volunteer/work experiences, describe the topics or issues that you care about and why they are important to you. Your response should convey how your interests align with the school(s) to which you are applying within the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business (Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and/or the Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration).
College of Engineering
Instructions: Applicants must write responses to two of the three essay options. They may choose which two prompts they write about — their choice. Each response is limited to a maximum of 200 words.
Prompt 1, Originality — Engineering is inherently collaborative. What does collaboration mean to you? What strengths do you bring to the collaborative process?
Prompt 2, Why Us? — For you, what makes Cornell Engineering special? Why do you want to attend Cornell Engineering?
Prompt 3, Community Engagement — Diversity in all definitional forms is intrinsic to excellence in engineering. Indeed, devising the best engineered solutions to complex problems is often achieved by drawing from the diverse ingenuity of people from broadly different backgrounds, lived experiences, and identities. How do you see yourself contributing to the diversity and inclusion of the Cornell Engineering community? What is the unique voice you would bring to the Cornell Engineering community?
College of Human Ecology
Why This Major? — How has your decision to apply to the College of Human Ecology been influenced by your related experiences? How will your choice of major impact your goals and plans for the future?
School of Industrial and Labor Relations
Originality — Using your personal, academic, or volunteer/work experiences, describe the topics or issues that you care about and why they are important to you. Your response should show us that your interests align with the ILR School.
Breakdown the prompts: How to write a successful essay for each topic
— How to write Why This Major?
“Why this major” essays are the opportunity for you to display how you became interested in a specific major and how you have actively explored the field. First, list all the moments in your life that made you interested in the major — the experiences don’t have to be exclusively from extracurricular activities. Then, create a brief outline putting the events in a chronological order, which should be tied by a common theme of how passionate you are about the major. Lastly, give a detailed explanation of how you plan to develop this interest further in college.
— How to write Why Us?
“Why us” essays are designed to see if you are a good fit for the school. The key here is to illustrate not just how you will benefit from the school, but how you will contribute to the school as well. So first, learn about the various features that make the school you’ re applying to stand out — whether if it’s curriculums, undergraduate research programs, or traditions and cultures. Next, connect yourself to these features, and explain how you will be able to make the best out of these programs at the university. Admissions officers want to learn all about how you will develop yourself in college!
— How to write Community Engagement
The goal of the “community engagement” essay is to find out how students will contribute to the student body. So first, list all the communities you were part of. You can write about one community, or the various communities you interacted with that display the qualities you have. Next, brainstorm moments when you influenced your community, by making an influence on someone. When writing these moments down, make sure to include what you’ve done, how it influenced others, and what you learned from the experience. Then, define a quality within yourself that can be found from the story. Choose a few words to describe yourself in the community, and center the essay around these words. The last step is to connect this quality to the features the school is looking for. If this step is difficult, you can do more research on the school to gauge what kind of students the university you’re applying to is looking for.
— How to write Originality
Admissions officers want to learn more about the intimate, personal sides of students through an “originality” essay. So what you need to do is detail the challenges and backgrounds that led to the person you are today. First, make a list of everything that makes you who you are — the things that can’t be left out when you describe yourself. Choose 1 ~ 2 words and create a sentence. Or, you can list 10 key moments in your life and 10 things colleges want to know about you, and choose 1 from the list. Afterwards, explain how a certain event affected you, which should be centered around what colleges will find out about you after reading the essay. You can follow a chronological order or connect individual events around a common theme when writing the essay.
