How to Write the Hamilton College Essays 2024-2025

zishui_us

You might recognize Hamilton College for its namesake—Alexander Hamilton—but like the man who lent his name to the school, Hamilton College has so much to offer beyond just a powerful name. The combination of an excellent liberal arts education with the serene surroundings of upstate New York attracts thousands of applicants each year.

Hamilton has just one supplemental essay prompt this year, which is technically optional, but we strongly encourage you to respond to it. Hamilton has become much more selective in recent years, with its acceptance rate going from over 20% to under 12%, and this essay is a fantastic opportunity to set yourself apart in a competitive applicant pool by showing what you have to offer beyond the numbers.

Hamilton College Supplemental Essay Prompt

At Hamilton, we each bring different backgrounds and perspectives, and we teach one another about the world through our individual and shared experiences. In the spirit of Hamilton’s motto, Know Thyself, please reflect on your unique perspective and how Hamilton might shape it, as well as how your perspective will shape Hamilton. (350 words, optional)

zishui_us

For this prompt, Hamilton wants to know about an aspect of your background or personality that will influence how you will interact with the Hamilton community. This is your opportunity to communicate what makes you unique and how that will be an asset at Hamilton. It might help you to consult our guide to writing a diversity essay, even though this prompt isn’t exactly the same thing.

Since the word count is relatively short, students might be tempted to just focus on how Hamilton will shape their perspective and how their perspective will shape Hamilton, but we caution against this. Rather than writing a cookie cutter essay that says something like “Hamilton will teach me to be more open-minded toward new ideas…”, the focus of your essay should be on what your unique perspective is and how it came to be.

You might be asking yourself, what is my perspective? It can be anything—from values to beliefs to or from identity to traditions. Below are a few examples to get you thinking about the range of potential answers:

Working at your family’s restaurant makes you value hard work and accountability
Being a racial minority and facing discrimination has taught you to approach everyone with kindness
Growing up with multiple siblings made you highly competitive in a way that motivates you to reach your full potential
As an avid surfer, you strongly believe in trying to reduce climate change to help ocean life
Your passion for photography makes you appreciate the beauty found in the little details

The key thing to notice is that in each of those examples there is a perspective, but also a description of what influenced or brought about that perspective (e.g, a passion for photography led to the perspective that mundane little things can contain beauty). In order to get “full points,” so to speak, with the admissions officers, you need to show where your perspective came from. This is the deeper elaboration that turns a decent response into a really good one.

In order to fully elaborate on your perspective and show what influenced it, you should include an anecdote. Storytelling is the most engaging and effective way to convey such a point to your reader, and it makes the essay flow more smoothly.

Once you have a strong anecdote that shows your unique perspective, you can apply it to Hamilton. When talking about how Hamilton will shape your perspective, consider how your perspective might be challenged or supported. Will you be taking classes that question your perspective? Will you join a group of like-minded students who share your perspective?

Go beyond a basic answer like “At Hamilton I will experience new ideas from a range of diverse perspectives.” Include predictions on how your perspective will be shaped with specific examples:

“In the course Digital Technology and Social Transformations, I will not only find support for my belief that social media can bring about societal change, but I will also learn how to effectively harness the power that social media holds.”

You aren’t quite done yet. Along with discussing how Hamilton will shape you, you need to explain how your perspective can shape Hamilton. Now, you might not be influencing the campus as a whole, but you will have an impact on your classmates, the people in your dorm, and members of any organizations you join. Explain how you will share your perspective with any group you’ll interact with and how you anticipate that perspective affecting them.

For example, to continue with the example above, you might say something like “I’ve already started to do so at my high school, by setting up the inaugural school-wide March Madness tournament and running Twitter and Tik Tok accounts with updates on how each game could affect the standings. I look forward to bringing this tradition to my freshman floor as well, to give us one last bonding experience before we go our separate ways on campus at the end of the year.”

zishui_us

Essay Example

Prompt: Please take this opportunity to write about your interest in Hamilton and, particularly, why you believe it is a place where you can thrive. Be open. Be honest. Be brief. (250 words max)

To My Darling Hamilton,

A flower so lovely, a heart so tender, Hamilton, we’re so perfect together that I’ve resolved to spend the next phase of my life in your endearing bosom.

As an individual drawn towards medical research (and you, of course), I relish the privilege to expand on my medical interests in your Clintonian environment. I hope to work under Professor Vikranth Bejjanki in his unique research on using functional neuroimaging and computational modelling to discover novel ways of seeing the world. Hamilton, through your exhaustive courses like Cellular Neurobiology (357S) and your unique research opportunity with the Summer Science Research Fellowship, I’ll receive full-immersion experience that will help me achieve my aspiration of inventing a system that identifies and kills neurological tumors non-invasively.

I believe an individual must have a well-rounded education; you, my love, recognize this. Thus, while Professor Siobhan Robinson’s lectures would help shape my academic success, your Emerson Foundation Grant Program is crucial for enriching my curricular experience with solid out-of-class experiential knowledge.

Oh, I see myself rummaging the 100+ laboratories in Taylor Science Center in search of deeper knowledge after taking on LRGG-funded researches—avenues crucial for my development as a scientific maestro. Meanwhile, with my fellow Continentals, I’ll be able to impact lives by transferring my Hamilton-instilled knowledge to younger generations through your HAVOC and LGR volunteering programs.

Hamilton, your ‘light’ and ‘dark’ sides are the perfect vantage points for my well-rounded development. My darling, I can’t wait!

With love,

To-be-Continental Stephen.

What the Essay Did Well

Right off the bat, this essay gets points for the creative format. The idea of turning a basic “Why School?” essay into a love-letter to the college is so original and adds an extra level of charm to the essay. This doesn’t mean that you should write your essays as letters, but think of ways you can play with the traditional structure and it will really help your essay stand out.

On top of the creativity, this essay is jam-packed with opportunities and programs that are unique to Hamilton. This is the key in this type of essay. Your response should be highly-tailored to the specific school and explain how you will use each resource to achieve your future goals.

This student doesn’t just name-drop professors and classes, he connects them to himself. We know that he wants to work with Professor Bejjanki to study functional neuroimaging so he can see the world in a new light. He wants to take Cellular Neurobiology so he can develop the skills to one day invent a non-invasive tumor killer. We don’t just learn why he wants to go to Hamilton, we also learn what his aspirations are after college, which makes him seem more impressive than a student who just wants to take a biology class so they can get into medical school.

What Could Be Improved

There’s not much that this essay needs to improve upon, however one small suggestion would be to make sure it doesn’t get too lost in the love-letter metaphor. The essay had a good balance of creativity and practical response, but it did feel a little heavy-handed at the beginning and end. It’s important that if you do choose a non-traditional essay format you don’t overshadow the actual content of your essay and leave the admissions officers reading your essay feeling lost or confused.