Brown Supplemental Essay Prompts for 2025–2026
You’ve heard the headline about Brown: the Open Curriculum. You don’t just sign up for classes; you design an education. That kind of freedom is exciting, and it’s also a test. Your supplements should show that you choose thoughtfully, chase questions past the first answer, and turn ideas into something real.
This year, every first-year and transfer applicant writes three essays (200–250 words each): one on academic interests, one on your upbringing and contribution, and one on joy. You’ll also complete three very short answers: three words that describe you, a 100-word class you would teach, and a one-sentence “Why Brown.”
Here’s you can can approach each prompt this year:
1) Academic Interests — Curiosity with proof
Brown is not asking for a list of subjects you like. It is asking whether you carry a focused question that you can keep pushing forward.
Start with a narrow idea that genuinely pulls you in. Instead of “biology,” you might explore how sleep spindles consolidate memory. Instead of “public policy,” you might look at whether fare-free buses expand job access for teenagers. Then show a piece of evidence that you already act on this curiosity—a script you wrote, a small experiment you ran, a dataset you built, an interview you conducted, or a competition entry that made you iterate.
After that, connect your thinking to Brown’s ecosystem with intention. Name one or two resources you would use, such as a lab, a center, a seminar, an independent study, or a UTRA, and explain what you would try to produce there: a paper, a pilot, a toolkit, an exhibit, or a public dataset. You do not need a perfect ending. In fact, leaving one live question on the table often reads as more authentic, because real inquiry rarely ties up neatly.
Quick test: if an AI could have written most of your paragraph, it is too vague. Add one proper noun, one metric, and one verb that shows work.
2) Personal Reflection — Context, character, and campus value
Brown frames this prompt around “making your home on College Hill,” but the deeper question is how your background will shape the way you show up for other people.
For instance: maybe your mornings began by translating medical bills for your parents, where a single mistranslation could mean a missed payment. That habit of precision made you the person friends trust to fact-check a group project. Or maybe you biked an hour to school every day, which taught you how to manage effort and endurance — a rhythm you later brought to leading your debate team through late-night prep.
What matters is the through-line: the behavior that grew from your environment and how others can count on it. At Brown, that might surface in seminar discussions where you ground claims with clarity, in labs where persistence drives iteration, or in community projects where you connect dots across differences.
3) Joy — Precision over performance
This prompt seems simple, but it reveals what energizes you when no one is keeping score.
Pick something specific and real. It could be the click when tests pass after hours of debugging, the smell of solder during a first clean weld, the calm of sketching city corners in a notebook, or the laughter in your grandmother’s kitchen when you record her stories in two languages. Add sensory detail so the moment feels lived. Then say what this joy teaches you—focus, patience, play, care for detail—and give one line about how that energy will travel with you to Brown.
If your draft reads like a greeting card, you can improve it by cutting generalities until you can almost smell the room.
The Very Short Answers — Sharp and personal
Three words. Pick words that triangulate rather than echo. “Restless, systems-minded, wry” says more than three synonyms for “hard-working.”
Teach a class (100 words). Give your course a clear title, a precise angle, and one concrete assignment. For example: Failure Forensics: how to read, log, and redesign broken projects. Students would publish a short public post-mortem with a proposed fix.
Why Brown (50 words). One reason, one lever, one outcome. You might write that the Open Curriculum, paired with specific institutes or studios, would let you connect two fields and produce a visible result, such as an open dataset for Providence teens or a small performance-science study with student musicians.
A few advanced moves that help
Use AI like a whiteboard, not a ghostwriter. Brainstorming is fine; final language should be yours. Replace most generic lines with names, scenes, and numbers only you can supply.
Let context work for you. If your school lacks APs or labs, show the alternatives you built, whether that was a community-college class, a journal club, a self-run project, or a local partnership. Readers evaluate you relative to your environment, but they can only do that if you tell them what that environment is.
Aim for “proof beats promise.” In each essay, try to include a named artifact, a small measurable change, a specific Brown resource, and one next step that remains open.
Many applicants will sound qualified. The essays that stand out sound credible. They show focused questions, real evidence, unfinished edges, and a sense of usefulness to others. If a sentence could appear in anyone’s application, trim it until it could only be yours.
At Ivy Link, we help you turn “I’m passionate” into a plan with proof. From brainstorming to final polish, we keep your voice while raising the bar so your Brown supplements read clear, human, and ready for an environment built on freedom and responsibility.
If Brown is your dream — or if you’re applying across multiple Ivies — we’re here to help you approach the process with confidence and clarity. Contact Ivy Link to learn more.
