Johns Hopkins offers undergraduate students a mid-sized college experience within a major research university. Located in the heart of Baltimore, Maryland, the university is #1 in the United States for research and development spending and has housed 29 Nobel Laureates. It is particularly known for programs in medicine, medical research, and medical engineering, especially public health. The acceptance rate is 9%, and 98% of admitted students are in the top 10% of their class.
The 2020-2021 Johns Hopkins supplement has only one prompt, but it’s a tough one! Luckily, you’ve got us to walk you through writing an ace answer.
Founded in the spirit of exploration and discovery, Johns Hopkins University encourages students to share their perspectives, develop their interests, and pursue new experiences.
Use this space to share something you’d like the admissions committee to know about you (your interests, your background, your identity, or your community), and how it has shaped what you want to get out of your college experience at Hopkins. (300-400 words)
Before we even get to the prompt part of the prompt (aka the second paragraph), Johns Hopkins’ prompt has an intro paragraph that offers significant insight into what they are looking for from you as an applicant.
When Johns Hopkins says that they encourage students to “share their perspectives, develop their interests, and pursue new experiences,” they are asking you to go deep and be bold. They don’t want cookie-cutter answers. If they did, they would give you a more cookie-cutter prompt. Instead, they want you to be vulnerable and push your limits to share a piece of yourself.
But how should you pick a piece of yourself to share? To do that, we need to look at precisely what the prompt asks…which is two things.
Share something about yourself.
Connect that thing you shared with what you want to get out of college at Hopkins.
Since the thing you focus on can’t be wholly disconnected from college, so should it be academic? Not necessarily, and for most applicants, it probably shouldn’t be. They are asking this question because they want to see beyond your transcript.
Before you start writing, take a look at the word count. Four Hundred words is a solid amount of space, but it can also be a trap. In that many words, it’s easy to try to pack a lot of information into not a lot of space. It’s too much room to force concision, but too little to have room to roam. To make the most of the space you have, you need to figure out how to pare things back. Instead of going broad, get specific.
Now it’s time to start brainstorming. We recommend working backward. Instead of deciding what you want to share and then fabricating a way that it has shaped what you want from college, start with what you want from college and then let that guide you toward a story.
For example, if you want to be somewhere that is full of public health students who want to change the world, you could link that to your earliest exposure to public health.
If you want a particular piece of you to be accepted (an identity, orientation, disability, etc.), share a story that illuminates that side of you.
As you write, consistently remind yourself that details can take a supplement from blah to wow. Adding little, seemingly unnecessary, things provide the taste, hearing, and touch that a bland essay lacks. For example, if you are running to catch a bus, add what the weather was like. If you are shopping for groceries, what’s on your list? If you see or touch or smell something, try your best to translate it for the reader so that they can immerse themselves in your world. Adding details like this helps you get closer to “show, don’t tell.”
While you work on your supplement, think back to that first paragraph from Hopkins. Remember that they want you to be bold, they challenge you to be brave, and they want to see the real you.
If you’re struggling to build a bland supplement into a compelling story, send us an email. We help students stand out so they can get into their dream school.