How To Write Brown's Supplemental Essays For 2025/26

How To Write Brown's Supplemental Essays For 2025/26

Providence, Rhode Island · Private

Mariama A

Former Brown Admissions Officer

What are Brown's supplemental essay questions?

Brown's supplement for the 2025/26 cycle has three required essays of 200 to 250 words each, plus three very short answers.
PLME applicants write two additional essays.
Brown-RISD Dual Degree applicants write one additional 650-word essay. The full prompt set sits below.

Brown's Supplemental Essay Prompts 2025/26 Admission Cycle

Required Essays

Prompt 1 | Open Curriculum
Brown's Open Curriculum allows students to explore broadly while also diving deeply into their academic pursuits. Tell us about any academic interests that excite you, and how you might pursue them at Brown. (200-250 words)
Prompt 2 | Community Contribution
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)
Prompt 3 | Joy
Brown students care deeply about their work and the world around them. Students find contentment, satisfaction, and meaning in daily interactions and major discoveries. Whether big or small, mundane or spectacular, tell us about something that brings you joy. (200-250 words)
Short Answer Prompts
— What three words best describe you? (3 words)
— If you could teach a class on any one thing, whether academic or otherwise, what would it be? (100 words)
— In one sentence, Why Brown? (50 words)

Brown asks you to design an education with no required courses outside your concentration. All three essays are versions of one question: handed that freedom, what would you do with it?

Additional PLME essays (Program in Liberal Medical Education applicants)

PLME applicants write two more essays on top of the three required of every first-year.
PLME | Prompt 1
Committing to a future career as a physician while in high school requires careful consideration and self-reflection. Explain your personal motivation to pursue a career in medicine, and why the Program in Liberal Medical Education (PLME) will best meet your professional and personal goals. (500 words)
PLME | Prompt 2
Healthcare is constantly changing as it is affected by racial and social inequities, economics, politics, technology, and more. Respond to one of the following:
— How will you, as a future physician, make a positive impact?
— How has your personal background uniquely shaped your perspective on the field of medicine? (250 words)

Additional Brown-RISD Dual Degree essay

Brown-RISD Dual Degree applicants write one more essay on top of the three required of every first-year.
RISD Dual Degree Prompt
The Brown | RISD Dual Degree Program draws on the complementary strengths of Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to provide students with the opportunity to explore and engage with diverse spheres of academic and creative inquiry.
Considering your understanding of the academic programs at Brown and RISD, describe how and why the specific blend of RISD's experimental, immersive art and design program and Brown's wide-ranging courses and curricula could constitute an optimal undergraduate education for you.
Reflect on how you might integrate or synthesize content, approaches, and methods from these two distinct learning experiences.
Additionally, how might you contribute to the Dual Degree community and its commitment to interdisciplinary work?

The Open Curriculum question comes up always. That's Brown's pride. How will they utilize this Open Curriculum? They look for students who will take advantage of it.

Mariama A

Former Brown Admissions Officer

How to approach Brown's supplemental essays

The three required essays work as a set, and the strongest applicants draft them that way. Read together, they have to confirm one student. Your Open Curriculum essay points at how you'll use Brown academically. Your community essay points at what you bring into the dorm and the classroom. Your joy essay points at who you are when no one is grading you. If a reader can describe you in one sentence after reading all three, the supplement is working.
The 250-word ceiling on each main essay is doing its own work too. Tight word counts force you to choose one moment, one image, one thread per essay rather than reach for a whole life story. Specificity wins under that kind of pressure. The grandmother's recipe, the moment in the lab, the specific Brown class you want to take are all more effective than abstract framings of who you are.

How to approach the Open Curriculum essay

The Open Curriculum prompt is the one every Brown reader stops on. They want a concrete answer to how you'll use a curriculum with no required courses outside your concentration.
The strongest essays name specific classes beyond your declared concentration, explain why those classes matter to your interests, and tie them back to something you've already started doing. Generic enthusiasm for Brown's flexibility, or paraphrased descriptions of the Open Curriculum from Brown's website, fail the question readers are actually asking.
Treat this essay as the one place to get specific about Brown. Name professors whose work connects to yours. Name fellowships, institutes, or programs you'd apply to.
Name classes by title, paired with a sentence on why each one matters. The Open Curriculum essay is where vagueness costs you the most.

How to approach the community contribution essay

The community essay rewards a small, specific detail from how you actually grew up over a broad framing of identity or background. The hand-written note your mother left for a teacher, the conversation you had at your father's shop, the way your neighborhood marked a holiday.
What makes the essay work is the second move: connecting that specific detail to what you'd bring into a Brown dorm, a seminar, or a campus organization.
Try not to frame your background as a hardship to be overcome unless that's truly the story you want to tell. Brown sees many essays that flatten complex identities into a single struggle narrative.
The version that succeeds usually goes the other direction: small, specific, and tied to how you actually see the world.

How to approach the joy essay

The joy prompt is the one applicants most often overthink. The reader is after the texture of who you are when you're not performing for anyone, which is closer to the small daily detail than to a profound source of meaning.
The Duolingo streak you've kept up for 600 days, the way you reorganize your bookshelf by color, the bad puns you make with your sibling. Small joys come across as more honest than big ones, and they tend to reveal more about how you actually live. Brown's own prompt invites exactly this, asking about something that brings you joy whether it's big or small, mundane or spectacular.
The joy essay also gives readers the most direct sense of your voice. If your Open Curriculum essay and your community essay sound formal, the joy essay is where readers expect to hear how you actually talk. Loosen the cadence here. Use the words you'd use with a friend.

How to approach the very short answers

The three words, the class you'd teach, and the one-sentence Why Brown each carry weight despite their length.
The three words give readers a frame for the rest of the file, and they should be words you can defend in committee rather than aspirational adjectives.
The class-to-teach prompt rewards specificity over cleverness: a real syllabus you'd actually run, named with a real subject.
The one-sentence Why Brown is the only place to compress fit into a single line, and it almost always works better when it names something concrete about Brown rather than something flattering about Brown.

When it's written for us, we can tell. They're saying everything they think we want to hear, rather than telling us who they are. The story of who they are.

Mariama A

Former Brown Admissions Officer

Brown essay examples from successful admits

The two essays below are real responses from a Crimson student admitted to Brown's Class of 2030, annotated by Lauren Pluchino, Crimson's Director of US Essay Mentoring. Lauren has mentored students across the world through their college essays, and her annotations focus on the critical choices that turn a 250-word essay into a portrait of one specific student writing for Brown.

Example 1

Brown's Open Curriculum allows students to explore broadly while also diving deeply into their academic pursuits. Tell us about any academic interests that excite you, and how you might pursue them at Brown.

Crimson Student Accepted to Brown class of 2029

My bedroom wall is mosaiced with pictures of piano tiles, opera masks, olympiad equations, and doorknocking pamphlets. Erratic to most, I’m the sum of these many disparate parts. 

With Brown’s Open Curriculum, I’d continue my diverse exploration of performing arts and politics through a structured pathway. I will keep on learning through the theatre, while also sampling every aspect of policymaking. Through the Annenberg Institute's Undergraduate Fellows Program, I will research ways to make educ

Example 2

If you could teach a class on any one thing, whether academic or otherwise, what would it be?

Crimson Student Accepted to Brown class of 2029

Grassroots to Government: The Anatomy of a Political Campaign. In the media, we all see, hear, and talk about political parties elected to government. But how often do we see the youth delivering campaign flyers and hosting voter outreach calls? In this course, students become agents of change themselves. The community is the classroom. In cafes, local meetings, and Providence neighborhoods, students listen to the ‘unheard’ conversations. Students study ‘Activism, Inc’ to highlight different gra

What makes this work
The class description aligns with the narrative of the previous essay, painting one picture of a student driven by accessibility, youth engagement, and surfacing marginalized voices. It also adds another layer where in-person engagement at cafes and a culminating action project make the student's commitment to grassroots activism deeply believable. This goes beyond performative engagement and points to a value rooted in equity and empowerment.
The title of the class, "Grassroots to Government: The Anatomy of a Political Campaign," presents a unique vantage point where the student is challenged to see "anatomy" through the lens of breaking down the often overlooked parts of a political campaign. This puts a new spin on politics that goes deeper than government itself and shows that there are so many influencing parts that are often overlooked.
Takeaway for applicants
When you creatively align values, interests, and a strong narrative theme, this question becomes an opportunity to deepen insight into your unique approach to a topic that excites you. Government or grassroots activism on its own wouldn't be as unique, but the student's ability to connect a grassroots narrative to political movements shows their understanding of how multilayered and complex the process is.
From youth delivering campaign flyers to making Providence neighborhoods the classroom, the student paints the picture of someone so familiar with this topic that the connection becomes undeniable. This builds expert-level familiarity with the subject matter, without having to force connections with language that sounds stiff or impersonal.

What is Brown really looking for in your essays?

Brown's essays are evaluated for whether they reveal a real, distinctive student behind the credentials. Polish on its own doesn't qualify the file. The essays that work are the ones where the student has done the harder, quieter work of figuring out who they actually are before sitting down to write.

Open Curriculum fit

Specific Brown classes, programs, and professors, each named with a real reason it matters.

Authentic voice

The essay sounds like a real 17-year-old, and the voice matches the rest of the file.

Show, don't tell

Concrete scenes and specific images. Skip abstract claims about qualities you want noticed.

Narrative coherence

The three essays form one student. Each one confirms what the others already say.

Engaging across difference

Brown wants people who can room with someone they disagree with and value the conversation.

Brown is looking for kindness. They want nice people. They have something special on campus, and they want to continue that. They want people who want to have an impact on the world.

Mariama A

Former Brown Admissions Officer

What are the most common mistakes in Brown essays?

Most Brown essay mistakes happen when students try too hard to perform for the reader. The result is writing that sounds rehearsed, generic, or written for an admissions officer rather than by a real student.

Writing about someone else

If a reader learns more about your grandfather than about you, the essay fails its job.

Paraphrasing Open Curriculum

Restating Brown's website instead of applying the Open Curriculum to your specific interests.

Poems and indirect language

Brown readers move fast. Poetry wants a slow read most officers won't give it.

Thesaurus essays

A word like plethora reads as performance. The words you'd actually use are the right ones.

Ghostwriting by an adult

Polished essays that don't match the voice of the rest of the file get flagged in committee.

We want to admit you, not your grandfather. Your grandfather might be this amazing man, but we're not admitting him. If we're learning more about him than we are about you, that's not a strong application.

Mariama A

Former Brown Admissions Officer

Nearly every Brown essay mistake comes down to writing that could belong to anyone. If the reader can't picture the distinctive person on the page, the essay has failed the one thing it's there to do.

How do the Brown essays connect to the rest of the application?

Your Brown essays connect to the rest of the application by carrying the one thing the other parts can't: the why behind your choices. A transcript shows what you took, an activities list reveals where your hours went, and recommendations capture how others see you. None of those can tell a reader what any of it meant to you, and that's the work the essays exist to do. They confirm or contradict the account the rest of the file is already making.
This is why a mismatch costs so much. A student declaring international relations whose three essays orbit grassroots advocacy, policy research, and a local civic experience gives the reader one coherent person whose motives match their record. A student declaring math whose essays talk only about creative writing leaves the reader holding two files that don't agree, and forced to decide which version to believe. That decision rarely breaks the applicant's way.
When the essays and the record point the same direction, the file moves forward on its own momentum in committee. The reader isn't doing reconciliation work; they're watching a single person come into focus from several angles at once. That's the quiet advantage of an application that hangs together, and it's almost impossible to fake, because it comes from having actually made consistent choices over years, not from writing three essays in a weekend.

You want a cohesive story, a narrative seen throughout the whole application. Is the story told in your transcript, testing, activities, essays, and what teachers write about you? All of that has to be consistent.

Mariama A

Former Brown Admissions Officer

Your transcript and activities are the record of what you did. Your essays are the only place that says why, and when the why doesn't fit the record, a reader trusts the record over the essay.

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