Last Updated on August 25, 2026
Quick answer: Brown requires four supplemental essays for 2026-27: two of 150 to 250 words and two of 100 to 150. Brown now publishes all four on its own admissions site. [1] Apply by November 1 for Early Decision or January 5 for Regular Decision. [2] Brown requires SAT or ACT scores, and PLME and Brown|RISD applicants complete additional program essays. [3]
Brown has not yet posted its 2026-27 supplemental essay questions. The prompts below are from the most recent cycle. Confirm them on Brown’s admissions site before you draft.
Brown’s Early Decision round closes November 1 at 11:59 p.m. in your local time, and Regular Decision closes January 5 at the same hour, both through the Common Application.
Brown is a research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and one of the most selective schools in the country. A member of the Ivy League, Brown is known for its innovation, creativity, and intellectual curiosity fostered in all the scholars that form its student body. Brown reads tens of thousands of applications each year, and the supplement is the part of the file you control completely.
Applications are reviewed carefully, and supplemental essays are no exception. The essays are your one chance to speak directly to an Admissions Officer, so use them to say something only you could write. Here is how to approach each Brown question, prompt by prompt.
Brown Supplemental Essays
The Brown supplemental essays comprise four required prompts for all students. Applicants for the Program in Liberal Medical Education and the Brown/RISD dual degree are required to write additional essays on their interest in the respective programs. Since these questions are all required, you’ve got to bring your A-game to each of your essays. Let’s look at the prompts below and explore how you could approach them.
Essay Questions for First-Year and Transfer Applicants
Brown requires four essays of every first-year and transfer applicant for the 2026-27 cycle. That is one more than last year, and the word limits have moved: two essays run 150 to 250 words and two run 100 to 150. [1]
1. “There is something distinctive about Brown students. It is a blend of intellectual curiosity, creativity, and humility. A commitment to collaboration. An openness to new ideas and perspectives. A desire to make the world better. And it is resilience: the ability to recover and thrive after experiencing difficulties.” From President Christina Paxson’s 2025 Convocation Address. How will you use these characteristics or others to shape your approach to the Open Curriculum? (150-250 words)
This replaces the older Open Curriculum question, and the difference matters. The old version asked what you want to study. This one asks how you will behave, and then attaches that behaviour to a specific piece of Brown’s design.
Do not try to claim all six qualities in the quotation. Pick one, or bring your own, and show it operating. Humility is the easiest to assert and the hardest to demonstrate: it looks like changing your mind in public, or handing a project to someone who could do it better. Resilience is not a story about a setback; it is a story about what you did differently afterwards.
Then answer the actual question, which is about the Open Curriculum. Brown gives you no distribution requirements, which means every course you take is a decision you had to defend to yourself. Name the courses or the pairing you would build and say what the freedom would cost you as well as what it would buy. A reader who has seen this essay a thousand times is looking for evidence you understand that an absence of requirements is a burden, not a holiday.
2. Students entering Brown often find that making their home on College Hill naturally invites reflection on where they came from. Share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you, and what unique contributions this might allow you to make to the Brown community. (150-250 words)
The wording is unchanged from last cycle, but the ceiling has dropped from 250 to a 150 to 250 band, so the same material has to arrive faster.
The question has two halves and students routinely answer only the first. “Inspired or challenged” is the setup; “what unique contributions this might allow you to make” is the payoff. If your essay ends at the moment of reflection, it is not finished.
Keep the scope small. An aspect of growing up is a kitchen, a commute, a language spoken at home, a job you took at fifteen, a sibling you looked after. It is not your whole background. One well-observed detail will do more than a summary of your circumstances, and it leaves you room for the contribution half.
3. If you could teach a class on any one thing, whether academic or otherwise, what would it be? (100-150 words)
This was a short answer last cycle and is now one of the four required essays, with a slightly larger allowance. Treat the extra space as room for a syllabus, not for a preamble.
At 150 words you cannot explain why you love the subject and also describe the class. Skip the love. Name the class, then show what a session looks like: what students would read or do, what they would argue about, what they would get wrong first. The teaching choices are the essay.
Non-academic subjects work well here and are underused. A class on reading a bus timetable, on losing gracefully, on how to tell when a recipe is lying to you. What Brown is testing is whether you can take something you know well and organise it for someone who does not.
4. Brown students care deeply about their work and the world around them. Students find contentment, satisfaction, and meaning in daily interactions and major discoveries. Whether big or small, mundane or spectacular, tell us about something that brings you joy. (100-150 words)
Same prompt as last cycle, but the limit has come down from 200-250 words to 100-150. If you have a draft from an earlier version of this question, it is now roughly twice as long as Brown will accept.
The prompt says “mundane or spectacular” and means it. The mundane answers tend to be better, because they are harder to fake. Joy that is really an achievement in disguise reads as an achievement in disguise.
At this length, one moment beats a category. Not “I love cooking” but the specific twenty minutes when the kitchen is quiet and the onions are doing what onions do. Let the reader be there, and stop.
Essay Questions for PLME Applicants
The Program in Liberal Medical Education has been restructured for this cycle. Where PLME previously asked for a 500-word motivation essay plus a 250-word choice question, it now asks three essays of 250 words each, in addition to the essays required of all first-year applicants. [1]
1. Why medicine? (250 words)
Two words, and a trap. Almost every answer arrives at the same three places: a relative who was ill, a hospital volunteer shift, a science class that clicked. None of those is disqualifying, but none of them is an answer either, because the question is not what exposed you to medicine. It is why you chose it over everything else that would have satisfied the same impulse.
If you want to help people, so does public health, so does teaching, so does policy. Say what medicine specifically does that the alternatives do not, and say it in terms of something you have seen rather than something you assume.
2. Why PLME? (250 words)
PLME is an eight-year commitment made at seventeen, and this question is where the committee checks whether you understand what you are committing to. The programme’s distinctive feature is that it removes the pressure of medical school admissions so you can study something other than pre-medical coursework for four years. If your answer would work equally well for any BS/MD programme, it is not answering this question.
Be concrete about what you would do with the freedom. Name the concentration you would pursue at Brown that has nothing to do with medicine, and say how it would make you a different doctor. That is the argument PLME is built on.
3. Tell us something about yourself, beyond your interest in medicine, that you think will make you a great doctor. (250 words)
The instruction “beyond your interest in medicine” is the whole question. Anything clinical is off the table. So is anything that resolves into “I am hardworking and I care about people”.
Think about what the job actually requires that nobody lists: delivering bad news, working with people you find difficult, being wrong quickly and out loud, staying calm while someone else is not. Where in your life have you already done one of those? Waiting tables, coaching a younger sibling, interpreting for a parent, refereeing games. Show the skill in a setting that has nothing to do with a hospital, and let the reader make the connection.
Essay Questions for Brown | RISD Dual Degree Applicants
One additional essay, in addition to the essays required of all first-year applicants. Brown has reworded it for this cycle and the capstone-project framing from the previous version is gone. [1]
The Brown | RISD Dual Degree Program draws on the complementary strengths of Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to provide students with the opportunity to explore and engage with diverse spheres of academic and creative inquiry. Considering your understanding of the academic programs at Brown and RISD, describe how and why the specific blend of RISD’s experimental, immersive art and design program and Brown’s wide-ranging courses and curricula could constitute an optimal undergraduate education for you. Reflect on how you might integrate or synthesize content, approaches, and methods from these two distinct learning experiences. Additionally, how might you contribute to the Dual Degree community and its commitment to interdisciplinary work? (650 word limit)
At 650 words this is the longest thing you will write for Brown, and it asks three separate questions. Budget the space before you draft: why this blend, how you would integrate the two, and what you would give the Dual Degree community.
The word doing the most work is “synthesize”. Readers see many essays that describe two interests sitting side by side, one at Brown and one at RISD. That is not integration, and five years is a long time to spend proving you could have done both separately. Name a question that needs both, and be specific enough that a reader could picture the work: a studio practice that depends on a body of research, a research interest that only becomes legible when it is built.
The third part is the one most applicants rush. The Dual Degree cohort is small, and it functions because its members bring things back to each other. Say what you would bring back.
A note on Brown’s own numbers
Brown’s how-to-apply page says four essays are required of all first-year and transfer applicants, and lists four. The preambles to the PLME and Brown | RISD sections on that same page still say “in addition to the three essays required of all first-year applicants”. The lists themselves are consistent; only those two lead-in sentences are stale. Work from the list of four. [1]
Additional Tips for Writing the Brown Supplemental Essays
Now that we’ve gone through the prompts, here are a few tips to keep in mind as you brainstorm your Brown supplemental essays:
- Emphasize community: Remember, Brown is interested in students who are determined to make a difference in their communities and the world. Community comes up constantly in the prompts and for a reason. You must be a community leader and willing to work with others. Admissions Officers don’t always expect that impact to be on a huge scale, and they know you’re still in high school. If you’ve made even a small change in your local community, that’s also something interesting you can focus on.
- Avoid repetition: With all of these questions asking you about your interests and favorite topics and activities, it can be easy to want to talk about the same thing over and over again. Avoid that at all costs. Each of the Brown supplemental essays is meant to add new information about you to your application. And the topic of your essay doesn’t have to stay true to the theme of your application. Brown appreciates multifaceted individuals, so don’t hesitate to write about something the reader might not have guessed about you!
- Connect your answers to Brown: A lot of students apply to Brown because of the Ivy League status or ranking. If you’re actually interested in Brown, the supplemental essays can assist you in proving to Admissions Officers that you know what you’re talking about. Go through social media pages and the Brown website to jot down what you like, and in your responses, show the reader that you’re as good of a fit for the school as the school is for you. Be as specific to Brown as possible, weaving in your knowledge of the school to exemplify that you’re making a well-informed decision.
Students apply by the thousands each year at Brown. Many of them are high-performing, competitive applicants among their peers. Even among the top percentile of students, admissions rates at Brown are low. Applicants have to give a reader something specific to remember. From extracurriculars to supplemental essays, every aspect of an application is reviewed holistically. So, when answering Brown’s supplemental questions, it’s important to answer honestly, authentically, and in a way that makes you a compelling candidate for admission.
Distinguish yourself from the crowd and reflect on the accomplishments that have led to your desire to study at Brown. Take the time to mention your greatest influences and demonstrate to Admissions Officers how you are prepared to make a difference at Brown and your career beyond.
If you are working through more than one school this autumn, our guides to every school’s supplemental essays cover the rest of the list.
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