Carleton College is a private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota, a small town about 45 minutes outside of Minneapolis. Carleton offers 33 majors and 37 minors but is especially known for its undergraduate teaching program. Their acceptance rate hit a new low this year of 16.5%. Their supplement only has one question and they let you choose between 3 prompts. Let’s break them down.
Please share your thoughts on one (1) of the following prompts, in no more than 300 words.
1. Carleton’s community plan for inclusion, diversity, and equity aims to nurture and develop an even stronger community where students, faculty, and staff belong and thrive. How might you contribute to a sense of belonging at Carleton?
These prompts all come with links. Click them. Read them. It will help you contextualize your answer. This question is a little tricky because it is pretty broad. We suggest telling a story about a time in your life when you contributed to your community. Sometimes students think that community has to be connected to a religious, ethnic, or racial minority status. It doesn’t need to be. A school, friend group, and team: they are all communities.
Tell a story about a community that means something to you and a time when you gave back or created a sense of belonging in that community. After you have done this, connect it to Carleton. This is important, you need to connect it. You should connect the skills that you showcased in your story to what you will do at Carleton. For example, if you did membership outreach for a club, name a specific club at Carleton that is related and talk about how you plan to get involved on campus.
2. Before graduation, every Carleton student completes a senior project, known as “comps.” Comps projects take many different forms: a few recent examples are formal research papers, public presentations, and even a live staging of a theater production. Based on your current academic interests, what type of comps project or topic would you explore, and why? (No pressure, we won’t hold you to this!)
For this question, you should say what you are going to major in. It is going to help you talk about the specifics of your project. You should get pretty specific for this question. Many comps projects are just papers. If you think yours will be a paper, it might be worth choosing a different question. There is nothing wrong with writing a research paper, but it’s a little boring for a 300-word essay to talk about writing a research paper. The more unique the project the better here.
Start this essay by introducing your passion for the subject that you want to study. This should be in the form of a personal story about when you fell in love with the topic. For example, if you plan to be a computer science major, maybe it was coding your first website or building your first computer. Whatever it is, it should show a spark.
Once you have introduced your topic, get creative and specific about a related project. The why in this essay is also important. Make sure you answer why you would choose the project you do.
3. Traditions at Carleton center around building and appreciating community. Some examples include the new student frisbee toss, Friday flowers, and baking cookies at Dacie Moses House. If you were tasked with creating a new Carleton tradition, what would you propose and how would you emphasize community within your idea?*
This is probably our favorite of the prompts, mostly, because it’s just fun. Take note of the traditions they list. They are small impactful moments. Your suggested tradition should be in line with this. That being said, you can get creative with this question.
The best answer to this question is connected to something you already do and shows something about you. Yes, this is about traditions, but it’s also an opportunity to talk about yourself. Don’t talk about something that sounds good on paper but you have never done. Instead, maybe you are in your school’s slam poetry troupe so you want to start a monthly open mic on campus. Maybe you make empanadas with your grandmother and would love to do a cooking class that rotates students’ family recipes. Whatever you choose, use this prompt to show a little about your world and tell a story about why this tradition connects to you.
The final point to hit in this essay is how it “emphasizes” community. If you tell a good story, it will come up fairly naturally in your story, but make sure the reader understands how this tradition will help connect the Carleton community.
The Carelton supplement is a little more creative than it has been in the past. Use that to your advantage. It’s harder to get into Carleton than ever and showing out-of-the-box thinking and having an interesting supplement is going to give you an edge.
Still need help? We got you. Reach out here.