Swarthmore is a small liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, right outside of Philadelphia. The college was founded by Quakers in 1864, and is a private non-religious school with an emphasis on melding the arts and humanities with STEM pursuits like engineering. There are more than 40 courses of study open to the 1,730 undergraduate students, and two-thirds of students take part in undergraduate research or independent creative projects. It also doesn’t hurt that the campus is simply stunning in all four seasons. Swarthmore has become immensely popular in recent years, transitioning from a selective college to an exceptionally difficult school to get into. The acceptance rate is only 7.5%.
Swarthmore is test-optional, so you can decide whether you want to submit your ACT or SAT scores. If you aren’t sure whether it’s worth submitting your scores or not, let’s look at the numbers. More than half of accepted and enrolled first-years in the fall of 2023 submitted SAT or ACT scores. To successfully have your scores be an asset in your application, you should aim to submit an SAT over 1520, or an ACT of 34 or above.
Swarthmore invites students to learn differently, so they look for students who think differently. They seek to challenge their community to explore new ideas, and in your supplements, you’ll want to show that you’re exactly the type of adventurous, curious, and community-minded student they treasure. In this post, we’ll breakdown how to do this in detail to empower you to write your best work.
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The Swarthmore supplements can be a bit confusing. The prompts are long, and it’s easy to get lost in them. Before you twist up your face in frustration or feel like you took the wrong turn in a corn maze, let us help.
There are two prompts, and you need to answer both in a maximum of 250 words each. And each prompt is very long, so you may need to read it a few times before you start brainstorming.
Topic 1: Swarthmore College maintains an ongoing commitment of building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive residential community dedicated to rigorous intellectual inquiry.
All who engage in our community are empowered through the open exchange of ideas guided by equity and social responsibility to thrive and contribute as bridge builders within global communities.
Our identities and perspectives are supported and developed by our immediate contexts and lived experiences — in our neighborhoods, families, classrooms, communities of faith, and more.
What aspects of your self-identity or personal background are most significant to you? Reflecting on the elements of your home, school, or other communities that have shaped your life, explain how you have grown in your ability to navigate differences when engaging with others, or demonstrated your ability to collaborate in communities other than your own.
Oh, thank you @Swarthmore for the four paragraph prompt description that is more than half the length of your permitted response. There is absolutely no way to condense this! This prompt is so unnecessarily lengthy that we suggest they submit it to the English department and request the liberal use of a red pen. But it is what it is, and this is what we have to work with. The central question is also really good. They ask you to share what about your background or identity is most important to you. That’s a valid and useful prompt, and it offers so many opportunities for creativity, and exploration.
To answer this prompt, don’t do what Swarthmore did and spend three paragraphs to ‘set up’ the point. Instead, you need to build a story that shows, not tells, what you feel Swarthmore needs to know about you. We can’t tell you what about your identity or background matters most, but we can guide you towards a good pick. Take a piece of paper, and write down three things that define you that are not within your control. This could be economics, race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, or anything else that you were born with or born into. Then, once you have three options, connect a story to each. For example, if you have gone to Sunday dinner at your grandmas for culturally important food nearly every week of your entire life, that is an epic story to tell in a supplement. Is it high-octane? No. But does it connect with any reader who picks up your application through the themes of family and food and the strength of a community with shared history, and that’s all pure gold.
Next, you need to figure out the “navigating differences” or “ability to collaborate” bit. So, take your list of three things with three stories, and run it through this filter. Which of the three stories can best also accommodate either the “navigating differences” or the “ability to collaborate” angle. For example, if you were writing about those Sunday dinners at grandmas it would work well to frame the story around disagreeing about politics while bent over a pot of hot oil frying chicken.
This is just one example, and you should use it as inspiration, not a template. So, make that list, build your story, and share it with Swarthmore.
Topic 2: Swarthmore’s community of learners inspire one another through their collaborative and flexible approach to learning. Swarthmore students are comfortable with intellectual experimentation and connection of ideas across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and interdisciplinary studies through a liberal arts education.
Tell us about a topic that has fascinated you recently – either inside or outside of the classroom. What made you curious about this? Has this topic connected across other areas of your interests? How has this experience shaped you and what encourages you to keep exploring?
While the previous prompt was all about who you are, this prompt is all about what excites you academically. We love this, because it offers the opportunity to build upon the groundwork you’ve already laid in your application, from your Common App essay to your activities section to your transcript to the previous prompt. They know who you are and what you’ve done at this point, but now it’s time to match all that really clearly to Swarthmore and the specific type of learning environment they seek to cultivate.
To do this, pick a topic within your major that is super specific. It doesn’t have to be something you’ve studied actively in school, but should be something you’ve explored through another avenue, such through as an internship or independent research. Be as specific as you can here. For example, if you want to study literature, you could focus on letters the novelist Nabokov wrote to his wife Vera. If you are interested in majoring in a natural science, you could focus on a water use issue relevant to your local area. Once you’ve picked your topic, tell a small enough story that you can provide a lot of detail.
The most important piece of this supplement isn’t what you pick, but how you make the reader feel about what you pick. They should feel your enthusiasm jump off the page! And what encourages you to keep exploring? Consider linking this to Swarthmore directly.
When Swarthmore evaluates your application, they are going to look for you to show curiosity, enthusiasm for learning, and passion. They don’t like students who are just going through the paces, but get excited about students who are truly invested in the journey that is learning. Remember this as you write, and you’ll be in great shape!
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