College Interest Essays for Fall 2021 First-Year Applicants
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: Why are you drawn to studying the major you have selected? Please discuss how your interests and related experiences have influenced your choice. Specifically, how will an education from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and Cornell University help you achieve your academic goals?
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning: What is your "thing"? What energizes you or engages you so deeply that you lose track of time? Everyone has different passions, obsessions, quirks, inspirations. What are yours?
College of Arts and Sciences: Students in Arts and Sciences embrace the opportunity to delve into multifaceted academic interests, embodying in 21st century terms Ezra Cornell’s “any person…any study” founding vision. Tell us about the areas of study you are excited to explore, and specifically why you wish to pursue them in our College.
Cornell SC Johnson College of Business: What kind of a business student are you? The Cornell SC Johnson College of Business offers two distinct business programs, the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and the School of Hotel Administration. Please describe how your interests and ambitions can be met through one or both of the Schools within the College.
College of Engineering: Tell us about what excites you most about Cornell Engineering and/or studying engineering at Cornell University. How do you see yourself becoming a part of the Cornell Engineering community?
College of Human Ecology: How has your decision to apply to the College of Human Ecology been influenced by your related experiences? How will your choice of major impact your goals and plans for the future?
School of Industrial and Labor Relations: Using your personal, academic, or volunteer/work experiences, describe the topics or issues that you care about and why they are important to you. Your response should show us that your interests align with the ILR School.
I’ll be writing about how to answer the prompts for the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering, since this will apply to 97% of readers.
The really interesting thing about Cornell as an Ivy League is its enormous size and the number of schools within the college. As you can see, there are seven different colleges, each of which have their own majors and their own professors. You can also transfer between colleges after you’re accepted, but you would probably want to do so in the first two years of your college.
We’ll start with analyzing this one, before going to the engineering one in the next blog post.
College of Arts and Sciences: Students in Arts and Sciences embrace the opportunity to delve into multifaceted academic interests, embodying in 21st century terms Ezra Cornell’s “any person…any study” founding vision. Tell us about the areas of study you are excited to explore, and specifically why you wish to pursue them in our College.
I’ll highlight the important phrases in the prompt –
“delve into multifaceted academic interests”
“’any person…any study’” founding vision”
“areas of study you are excited to explore”
“specifically why you wish to pursue them in our College”
So the reason why I highlighted the important phrases above is because it is important to note a couple of things about this prompt – 1) they love the opportunity for students to explore “multifaceted” interests, 2) they use “areas of study” as plural, and 3) they ask “specifically why” you want to pursue those interests in the college.
In other words, the job of the writer here is threefold: first, you should establish your several academic interests and how they connect with one another; second, you should explain how you’ve developed these interests and what you’ve done to further explore them inside or outside the classroom; and third, you should explain all the resources available at Cornell that you hope to take advantage of.
Here’s a good format to explain what I’m talking about
First section of the essay –
Explain the two or three different interests you have, and explain how they interconnect into a specific academic field that you’re passionate about and that you find fascinating. Also explain why you find that specific field interesting, especially since it combines the academic interests that you’ve found interesting so far. Explain how you can benefit from examining that field from even more perspectives, such as psychology, business, medicine, law, etc.
For instance –
“In my high school, my favorite courses were AP Biology and Calculus. I really enjoyed the problem-solving involved in calculus, specifically learning the holistic story of how several of my previous mathematics courses made more sense through the derivations and complex tools that we learned in that class. I also enjoyed AP Biology, specifically how much of the human body is understood on a microscopic scale, and how those structures build up to a larger scale.
Since those two classes, I’ve done a lot more research into genomics, a field that is rapidly advancing especially with powerful techniques and tools that arose after the advent of the Human Genomics Project. I’ve also been interested in the more nuanced philosophical implications of genomics research, something that I’ve learned about through my high school debate club.”
I just wrote that right now in a few minutes, but notice how it effectively sets up what my interests are, why I’m interested in those fields, and the further steps that I’ve taken to examine those interests. If I wanted to take this further, I would demonstrate what I’ve done to further explore these interests, which is what I’ll do in the next section
Second section of the essay –
Explain what you’ve done to become more interested in the field, and explain the lingering questions that you’d like to answer in the future. Also explain how you understand that the field is very multifaceted, one that is evolving and one that can benefit from several different perspectives.
For instance –
“because of my interests, I did a summer internship at X program in which I conducted Y project. From this project, I learned two important lessons about the field that I’m interested in. I also learned that research might be / might not be my primary field of interest … and I would also like to apply my talents in this field as well.
Third section of the essay –
Explain all the ways that Cornell specifically would be a great school for you to explore those interests. Here you can mention specific professors, specific courses, and specific programs that you think would allow you to pursue those things. Try to explain what makes those unique, and also what makes those programs different from other schools that you might could also find similar resources. This is the part that it might be helpful to visit the school, talk to current students, and find other ways to learn more about the school. you can find more help on this topic by looking at another blog post “how to demonstrate interest in a college”.
For instance –
“I specifically find these courses – X, Y, and Z fascinating because they would give me the opportunities to examine my interests in a more multifaceted way. I also think that these summer programs and extracurriculars offered at Cornell would enable me to explore these issues in more depth, and realize the integrated ways that my field of interest interacts with other similar and related fields.”
That’s it for now! I hope this was very helpful, and as I keep writing more of these posts on how to write the answers to different prompts for college, please reach out if you would like to see a specific prompt from a college to be explained, and I can add that to my list!
Wish you all the best, and thank you so much for reading through.
Naman
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