How to Write the Yale Admissions Essay

 Yale Excerpt

by Sarah O'Neill, Coatesville, Supreme Editing

“Yale welcomes applicants from all backgrounds. The Admissions Committee seeks students with the potential to add to the Yale community and take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities available here.”


According to Yale admissions (via the website).


Check Out: Admissions Advice: Essays


When crafting your essays and short answer responses, delve into something that holds personal significance for you. Use your own unique voice. Don't feel pressured to incorporate elaborate vocabulary or complex sentences. If you stay true to yourself and discuss something that truly matters to you, your essay will resonate more effectively.

We know that no one can fit an entire life story into a few short pieces of writing, and we don’t expect you to try. Pick topics that will give us an idea of who you are.  It doesn’t matter which topics you choose, as long as they are meaningful to you. We have read wonderful essays on common topics and weak essays on highly unusual ones. Your perspective – the lens through which you view your topic – is far more important than the specific topic itself. In the past, students have written about family situations, ethnicity or culture, school or community events to which they have had strong reactions, people who have influenced them, significant experiences, intellectual interests, personal aspirations, or – more generally – topics that spring from the life of the imagination.

Show how you are a good fit with the values that emerge in the questions themselves. Have fun with the shorter response essays. Show something unique about yourself that your application does not reveal. Avoid special effort to include impressive vocabulary words or overly complex sentences. Showing your perspective – the lens through which you view your topic – is far more important than the specific topic itself.


In history, the types of students admitted consisted of people who answered 

start strong with a specific event or image: showing, not telling. They answer the prompt directly without veering from the path. All ideas look inward to the applicant. Time spent away from the applicant is quickly connected back to the reflective nature of the applicant. The essays showcase something beyond the application/transcript to show a window into the student as a whole. They say something unique about the student. They show movement from the past to a revelation/learning, then they apply to the present self and to show what the student will be like at Yale and what they can offer the Yale community.


Supplemental Essay Example:

Prompt:What is it about Yale that has led you to apply? (125 words or fewer)


Yale’s ambitious and interdisciplinary spirit resonates deeply with me. I visualize myself in the future, a Y-shaped engineer, immersing in Daniel Spielman’s riveting data science lectures while tackling issues from healthcare to educational inequity with the Statistical Machine Learning Group. With his name sprinkled throughout my bibliographies, I am eager to flip through Henry Kissinger’s papers at the Johnson center, absorbing diplomatic wisdom between the lines. On weekends, I can't wait to sit in Woolsey Hall for a refreshing orchestra concert, at JLA for a heated playoff game, or at AASA for a vibrant project meeting. And above all, I aspire to join the ambitious yet humble Bulldogs I met during my campus tour - both as a scholar and friend. 

by Sarah O'Neill, Coatesville, Supreme Editing

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