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The Community Essay is a standard supplemental essay type that mines for information about your social habits and favorite causes. Since you will become a member of whichever college community you choose to attend, it’s not surprising that admissions is curious to learn more about the communities you are already a part of and the roles you play.
This supplemental essay type provides you with the opportunity to reveal more about yourself to admissions while leaving an impression. Don’t overlook this chance to distinguish yourself!
Read on to learn all about Community Essay: prompt examples, research strategies, writing tips, and mistakes to avoid!
The Community Essay prompt, at its core, wants to glean what kind of community member you are and how you will contribute to your college community. The way colleges pose their prompts can vary. There are two main subtypes of the Community Essay Prompt:
Let’s dive into each of these subcategories and take a look at some prompt examples.
This Community Essay subtype seeks to understand how applicants have been shaped by the community they grew up in. Let’s take a look at some prompt examples:
Students entering Brown often find that making their home on College Hill naturally invites reflection on where they came from. Share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you, and what unique contributions this might allow you to make to the Brown community. (200-250 words)
The communities we belong to shape our values, our aspirations, and who we are as people. Share a story of the community that has impacted you the most and how it will influence what you will bring to the Clark community. (250 words)
Cornell: We all contribute to, and are influenced by, the communities that are meaningful to us. Share how you’ve been shaped by one of the communities you belong to. (350 words)
Remember that this essay is about you and your lived experience. Define community in the way that is most meaningful to you. Some examples of community you might choose from are: family, school, shared interest, virtual, local, global, cultural. (350 word limit)
We advise applicants to write authentically about their experiences while reflecting on the impact of their background. It is also wise to project into the future. What kind of community member do you hope to be? What do you hope to share with others about your lived experience? How will you incorporate this element of your identity into your life at school?
These kinds of prompts offer applicants the opportunity to paint a picture of how they’ll leave their mark on campus. Applicants would also be wise to connect their past community experiences to those offered on campus.
For example, maybe you were raised in a Senegalese community in Harlem and are excited to celebrate your heritage and customs by joining or creating a Senegalese club on campus. Maybe you found a sense of community at your local game cafe and look forward to bringing people in your Residential Hall together as an inclusive Dungeon Master.
This Community Essay subtype seeks to understand how you engage with others in your community. It’s less concerned with how your community shaped you and more concerned with how you interact with other community members and navigate difference:
Harvard: Describe a time when you strongly disagreed with someone about an idea or issue. How did you communicate or engage with this person? What did you learn from this experience? (100 words)
At Boston College, we draw upon the Jesuit tradition of finding worthwhile conversation partners. Some support our viewpoints while others challenge them. Who fulfills this role in your life? Please cite a specific conversation you had where this conversation partner challenged your perspective or you challenged theirs.
It’s no secret that we’re living through a particularly polarizing time in American history, so it’s no surprise that American institutions of higher education are curious to learn how you will navigate differences of opinion and/or having your beliefs challenged. In fact, we would argue that no college experience is complete without reflecting on your perspective and worldview!
With these prompts, you’ll want to tell a story about a time when you considered a new point of view. You don’t have to have changed your mind (or anyone else’s) for your response to make an impact. Your goal should be to show admissions that you’re capable of holding space for multiple viewpoints and engaging in difficult conversations.
Maybe you’ve always been outspoken and pride yourself on speaking up for what you believe is right. Perhaps you’re more of a wallflower but recently had a conversation that offered you a wider lens of the world. Whatever your story may be, you’ll want to be specific and dedicate words to what happened, how you felt, and what you took away from the dialogue.
Maybe you were introduced to a point of view that you hadn’t considered before? Did you and your conversation partner find a middle ground or did you feel even more resolute in your viewpoint than you did before the conversation? Maybe what you took away wasn’t so much about the topic of the conversation, but the mechanics of holding a difficult conversation. Show admissions that you can consider new ideas and engage with others about important issues.
Princeton values community and encourages students, faculty, staff and leadership to engage in respectful conversations that can expand their perspectives and challenge their ideas and beliefs. As a prospective member of this community, reflect on how your lived experiences will impact the conversations you will have in the classroom, the dining hall or other campus spaces. What lessons have you learned in life thus far? What will your classmates learn from you? In short, how has your lived experience shaped you? (Please respond in 500 words or fewer.)
Remember that the recurring theme with all Community Essays is how you will contribute to the campus of the school you’re applying to.
One of the most common questions students have is some variation of “what counts as a community?” The answer is: almost anything.
Here are some types of communities you could address in your Community Essays:
If you feel like a contributing member of a community, then it is one. Don’t overthink it! Instead, focus on what that community adds to your life and vice versa.
To write a Community Essay that stands out from the pack, we recommend being authentic and as specific as possible. Those tiny little details that may seem significant can really bring a story to life and pull a reader in.
It’s also in your best interest to take time to reflect and articulate what your community has meant to you. Has it made you feel like you have a place in the world? That you belong somewhere? Has it introduced you to new people, ideas, and languages? Has it impacted the way you interact and understand the world as you know it?
Finally, the best Community Essays often connect back to the school in question. It never hurts any applicant to spend a little time on your top college’s website (the About page, to be specific) to find out more about the place you hope to call home for the next four years. If you can connect your experiences with community to the college’s mission, culture, and/or values, all the better.
You’re going to write your Community Essay just like you do any of your other admissions essays.
You’ll start by brainstorming. Jot down any community you can think of that you belong to.
Next, look at your list of communities and write a few sentences about each of them.
Odds are one or two communities will jump out at you for having had the biggest impact on who you are, how you engage with others, and who you’d like to be on campus.
We recommend freewriting, which is the art of writing down whatever comes to mind (while still staying on task, that is) without editing. You can edit later. For now, get all your thoughts down on the page.
Once you have run out of ink or acquired a pinky cramp, take a break and look at the material you have on the page. Did you accurately describe the community and your role within it? Could you use more specific examples to pull your reader into the story and make them feel like they’re at a community event with you?
When you feel comfortable with the material on the page, it’s time to cull and revise until you have an essay that fits within the word count parameters.
At College Essay Advisors, we do not believe any topic is off-limits. We have, however, seen essays that miss the mark and/or do not address all aspects of the prompt.
If you would like to write about a community that you believe may potentially be polarizing to readers, you’ll want to do so thoughtfully and authentically. You can’t know who will be reading your essay, but you can ensure that you are writing with tact.
Let’s say, for example, you are very politically engaged and are the president of your high school’s Republican or Democratic Club. You can definitely write about that experience in a Community Essay—admissions offices are looking for diverse classes full of students with different perspectives. You’ll just want to stay focused on addressing what the prompt is asking of you and avoid veering too far away from how that community has shaped you or how you held space for difficult conversations. Your job isn’t to convince your reader that they should join that community, so steer clear of argumentative tactics or trying to prove that your views are the only correct ones out there.
The most common mistakes we see students make in Community Essays are:
Lackluster Community Essays are often ones that address aspects of community without providing any specific examples/anecdotes or describing interactions. How can you make your reader feel like they’re in the room with you at one of your community events? Those kinds of details will help bring your story to life.
We can’t tell you how many times we meet students who have—let’s face it—boring Community Essays drafted, and after a meeting, we discover they actually have a vibrant, unique Community Essay inside them just waiting to meet the page. Don’t box yourself in by thinking only of structured communities in your life. For more examples, see “Types of Communities to Write About” above.
There is bound to be a little overlap between your Activities List and your supplemental essays, but that overlap should be minimal. Your supplemental essays can expand upon an item in your Activities section, but the essay should reveal brand new information to admissions officers. Anything redundant has to be cut!
We at College Essay Advisors have been guiding students one-on-one through the Community Essay writing process for school-specific supplements for over twenty years. We take a holistic approach to these essays, considering each student’s application package as a whole while helping them select and write about a community that is meaningful to them while revealing more about their role and contributions.
Our Advisors accommodate each student’s scheduling needs to virtually brainstorm, draft, and revise winning Community Essays. It’s incredibly important to us that each student’s voice is preserved, and we pride ourselves in helping students write successful essays that differentiate them from similarly qualified applicants. For more information, submit a contact form and/or review our one-on-one advising services.
"I’m not sure if [my son] told you but he got accepted to his dream school…Cornell!! Thank you so much for all your help! Your style of creative brainstorming, thoughtful follow-up questions, and invaluable editing resulted in unique, interesting essays that represented [my son] well. We are so appreciative of your expertise and patience throughout this stressful process!"
– CEA Parent, Cornell, Class of 2028
"I am writing to express my deep gratitude for your work with [my daughter]. Her Brown essays exceeded my wildest imagination. Best of all, they reflect the very best of her while still revealing the grit and street smarts that make her so unique."
– CEA Parent, Brown University, Class of 2025
We do not recommend writing about a community with which you are no longer involved. There will always be exceptions to the rule; however, we generally recommend that applicants write about a community that they are currently involved in and have been involved in for some time.
We often find that applicants who feel like they are not strongly connected to any community are thinking about “community” in a limited way. Your community can be your group of six friends who get together every Saturday night to watch old movies and talk about life. Your community can be your nuclear family or your church congregation or the support group you found for people with chronic illnesses like your own. Applicants do not have to choose their community from a list, which means they have the freedom to create their own.
We generally recommend that applicants focus on one community, especially if the word count is on the smaller side, that way they can give admissions insight into what their community is like while also having room to reflect on their role in the community and their plans for fostering a sense of community at college.
Details, details, details! We at College Essay Advisors always say that, if your essay was lost in a pile, no one else should be able to put their name at the top, meaning that the details should be so specific to your lived experience that no one else could claim them as their own. Your reflection will also differentiate you from others writing about a common community, which is why we recommend giving yourself some time to think about your angle and not rushing to write your essay just before the deadline.
