Cornell Supplemental Essay Prompts 2025–2026
When students picture Cornell, they often think of the gorges, the slope in spring, or the sense of scale across its colleges. But the application is where imagination meets detail. Cornell’s prompts ask not just what excites you, but how your choices, habits, and communities reveal readiness for one of the most diverse Ivy environments.
Cornell University Essay (350 words)
Prompt: We all contribute to, and are influenced by, the communities that are meaningful to us. Share how you’ve been shaped by one of the communities you belong to. Define community in the way that is most meaningful to you. This community example can be drawn from your family, school, workplace, activities or interests, or any other group you belong to.
Community at Cornell can mean almost anything, but your essay has to show how it changed you. Think proof over adjectives: what happened, how did it alter your perspective, and how does it stay with you?
Consider these frames:
A student who grew up in a restaurant family, absorbing the rhythm of kitchens where Spanish, Chinese, and English blended — learning that survival depends on listening closely, not just speaking loudly.
A robotics club building in a firehouse basement, where the wiring was unreliable and the budget thinner than the manuals they studied. Innovation under constraint taught them grit and improvisation.
A teen moderating a global debate forum online, where threads collapsed into chaos until she built guidelines and learned how fragile — and how precious — consensus could be.
What matters isn’t the setting, but how you can trace a line from that community to the way you think and act now.
College- and School-Specific Prompts
Cornell asks for more than a generic “why.” Each school wants to see a mindset already in motion: curiosity that has proof behind it.
CALS (Agriculture & Life Sciences): A student fascinated by food security who crossbred tomato plants in a garage greenhouse, logged soil conditions, and tested yield. Cornell CALS isn’t just the next step; it’s the ecosystem where purpose-driven science meets policy.
Engineering: Someone in a rural town who mapped power outages with neighbors, then coded a simple model for energy load distribution. The lesson wasn’t just coding — it was designing under pressure with stakes attached. Cornell Engineering gives that mindset the lab it needs.
Arts & Sciences: A student who digitized her grandmother’s letters and overlaid them on census data to trace migration patterns. That mix of narrative and evidence is exactly what the College’s liberal arts framework invites.
Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP): A photographer who documented abandoned factories, then sketched them into mixed-use spaces. The creative process becomes a statement about urban renewal — and about why design matters.
Public Policy (Brooks): A student who spent weekends at a local housing nonprofit, following zoning board minutes and watching how policy translates into whether families keep their homes. Brooks is where that lived experience scales into systemic thinking.
Business (Dyson or Nolan): A teen who designed a cafeteria food-waste tracker, convincing peers to cut leftovers by a third. That blend of data, systems, and human behavior is the language of Cornell business.
Human Ecology: A student investigating the rise of childhood asthma in her city, connecting it to housing design, traffic corridors, and public health. CHE’s breadth makes those links actionable.
ILR: A warehouse worker over the summer who saw the gap between union contracts and daily practice. That eye for labor dynamics is what ILR wants: specific, lived, consequential.
Plenty of applicants will say they value community or curiosity. The essays that stand out show exactly how those values live in practice. As Adam Nguyen, our CEO and Founder, a Columbia graduate and former admissions reader, told Business Insider, admissions officers are looking for genuine emotion, careful introspection, and personal growth. Proof
At Ivy Link, we help students move from broad drafts to sharp, authentic essays — the kind that demonstrate intellectual vitality and lived perspective. Proof beats promise.
If Cornell is on your list, or if you’re building a multi-Ivy strategy, our team is here to guide you from first brainstorm to final polish.
