Duke University 2020-21 Supplemental Essay Prompt Guide

Duke University 2020-2021 Application Essay Question Explanations

The Requirements: One required 200-word essay, one required 250-word essay, and two optional 250-word essays.
Supplemental Essay Type(s): Why, Community

Required:

Please share with us why you consider Duke a good match for you.  Is there something in particular about Duke’s academic or other offerings that attract you?  (200 words maximum)

Why Duke? You’ll have plenty of space to gush about Duke’s academic offerings in response to the next prompt, so we recommend saving your academic interests for later. Instead, this space is a wonderful opportunity for you to address your personal connection to Duke. Were you able to tour campus last year? What drew you in? What part of campus could you see yourself hanging out in? Where did you see yourself studying for exams? Admissions knows that Duke is a prestigious university with impressive alumni to boot, so make sure to personalize your answer. Instead of showering Duke with compliments, focus on how Duke has attracted your interest and how you hope an education at Duke will prepare you to accomplish your goals.

Optional:

Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had that would help us understand you better, perhaps a community you belong to or your family or cultural background, we encourage you to do so here. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke. (250 words maximum)

This is a classic Community Essay, through and through. Admissions Officers want to know what or who has made you into the person you are today. Where do you come from? What has shaped you as a person, and how has that made your perspective unique? What you focus on here can be reflective of larger cultural constructs or specific to you and only you. Admissions is looking to add diverse perspectives to the melting pot that is their student body. Is there anything you can teach your classmates about your hometown, traditions, culture, cuisine, orientation, identity, race, or ethnicity that they might not already know? Also consider why your particular background or experience will be useful in an academic setting. How will it help inspire and/or inform others? Were you raised in a Muslim family? Do you identify as genderqueer? Were you adopted as a child? What has influenced your identity? What do you believe and how will your worldview bring something of value to the community at Duke?

Duke’s commitment to diversity and inclusion includes sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. If you would like to share with us more about your identity, you can do so here, or use any previous essay prompt you feel is appropriate. (250 words maximum)

Duke was one of the first schools to embrace the subject of sexual orientation in their essay questions (see the community essay prompt), and this is yet another step in their overt attempt to recruit a truly diverse pool of applicants. The school wants you to know that they are embracing all sexual orientations, and if you are open to discussing your own history and identity, feel free to share your story. Note that this question will likely not be applicable to all students, so if you don’t have a related story to tell, this is one of the few “optional” supplemental essays that we would encourage you to skip.