Swarthmore is a small liberal arts school in Swarthmore, PA—a small town outside of Philadelphia —with about 1,600 undergraduates. It’s a part of the tri-college consortium in the area, which consists of Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford. Students are able to take classes relatively easily within the tri-college consortium, as well as cross-register with the University of Pennsylvania.
Their supplement is quite short—just one 250 word response to a prompt, which makes it quite challenging. The goal is to fit as much of a cohesive story as you can into this brief statement while also keeping your answer focused and detailed. The real challenge is to answer the question that they are asking. Colleges can tell when an answer is distracted or not quite on topic, and that won’t benefit your application as a whole. So make sure your response is acting as both an answer and a story about you.
Let’s run through the options and how to answer each of the three prompts.
In addition to the Common Application's personal statement (you can choose one of seven essay prompts), we ask you to submit no more than 250 words in response to a short answer question. For the 2020-2021 admissions cycle, students will be asked to choose one of the following three questions:
Swarthmore students’ worldviews are often forged by their prior experiences and exposure to ideas and values. Our students are often mentored, supported, and developed by their immediate context—in their neighborhoods, communities of faith, families, and classrooms. Reflect on what elements of your home, school, or community have shaped you or positively impacted you. How have you grown or changed because of the influence of your community?
This is the “community” question that we see on a number of college supplements—or at least some version of it. Yale, U Mich, Penn...they all have slight variations of this same question, so it’s important to pay attention to the question at the end of this prompt: “Reflect on what elements have shaped you” AND “How have you grown or changed because of….”—so, this response should be two parts of a cohesive story: the first part should focus on the specific elements of your community that you value or that have impacted you, and the second part should be your growth story. But the entire thing should have a cohesive narrative arc, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
First, you have to decide how and what you’re defining as your community/support system for this essay. Is it a person, a group of people, or a larger entity? Is it a physical space, or an idea? We like to first make a list of every single “group” that we are a part of and then hone in one 1-2 that you can tell a specific story about. The “growth” aspect is key here, and that’s where the story comes in. It’s hard not to make this whole response cheesy, so it might take some tweaking and reflecting to find the right story to tell. It also doesn’t need to be profound—and actually, anything that you consider to be “profound” probably wouldn’t read that well here. Think small, think discrete, and think specific. How, through one small experience within the context of your life, have you been impacted in a larger way such that it made you recognize the importance of being a part of something bigger than just you.
We are inspired by students who are flexible in their approach to learning, who are comfortable with experimentation, and who are willing to take intellectual risks that move them out of their comfort zone. Reflect on a time that you were intellectually challenged, inspired, or took an intellectual risk—inside or outside of the classroom. How has that experience shaped you, and what questions still linger?
Alright. This is a tricky one. “Intellectual risk,” is a bit hard for us to stomach because, honestly, it’s not like current high school curricula leave that much space for controversy. So, this will probably need to be some interaction that you had outside of the classroom.
We see this response being about something quite small, like most other prompts. Perhaps about something that you experienced and how you processed it internally. Perhaps about a time when you confronted your own internal prejudices and challenged yourself to dig deeper. We think it’s best to position yourself as a listener and a learner, rather than a speaker or a teacher, in response to this prompt.
What do we mean by that? Let’s just say, we cringe at the idea of telling a story about a time when you were #brave and spoke loudly about something you cared about. It’s just not that interesting, and given the likely position of privilege that you might be in (in some way), it’s then more of a story about asserting your privilege because you feel safe to speak up, rather than “risking” anything. Also, it doesn’t provide an easy narrative arc to demonstrate growth.
So really think about this one if you’re tempted to answer it. What does the story you’re tempted to tell say about you? Does it highlight how you’re willing to be open, to listen and learn, and to change your opinion given new information? In our opinion, evidence of being truly open to changing your opinion given new information, and that internal growth, is more of a challenge than evidence of more traditional “intellectual risks,” like speaking up or saying/doing something “brave.”
Why are you interested in applying to and attending Swarthmore?
This is “Why Swarthmore?” in 250 words or less—a challenge, but a great way to evidence specifics around why you are excited about Swarthmore and why you want to attend the school more than anywhere else. We’d suggest reading through this post on the composition of a “Why X College?” supplement and then deciding on specific academic highlights to write about. This question should really be: how does Swarthmore enable you to study exactly what you want, more than anywhere else, and why does that excite you? So find specific classes, professors, and academic tracks that are unique to Swarthmore and that would expand your academic interests. Focus on that. Every school has an English program, but what about Swarthmore’s English program makes it so uniquely appealing such that no other school could take its place in your heart?
Let us know if this helps or if you have any more questions —this isn’t an easy one, particularly because it’s so short!