Guides / Supplemental

How to Write the Diversity / Identity Essay (With Examples)

Describe how an aspect of your identity, background, or perspective has shaped you, and what you would bring to our community.

This essay is not asking you to prove you're diverse enough. It's asking what you notice that other people walk right past, and what the room is missing when you're not in it.

What it’s really asking

On the surface this prompt sounds like a census form: pick a box, explain it. What it's really after is your angle of vision, the particular way your background trained you to see, question, or care about something. Admissions readers already have your demographic data. What they can't get anywhere else is the story of how some piece of your life shaped how you think and what you'd add to a dorm, a seminar, a lab table. "Identity" can be culture or religion, sure, but it can just as easily be the household role you play, the language you code-switch into, the thing you're the only one of in your zip code.

Finding your angle

A strong essay starts from a specific angle, not a broad topic. A few most applicants overlook:

Family tech support. You're the one who translates the world for your parents: the IRS letter, the doctor's portal, the lease. Write about the weird adult fluency you developed at fourteen and what it taught you about advocating for people who can't yet advocate for themselves.
The wrong-name moment. Every substitute teacher pauses at your name on the roll. Use that two-second hesitation as a doorway into a whole relationship with your name: who chose it, what it means, when you started introducing the easy version and why you stopped.
Two kitchens. The food you eat at home versus the lunch you packed (or hid) at school. Track a single dish across both worlds and what it taught you about what you'll defend and what you'll share.
The only one in the room. Not 'the only one of my race,' necessarily. The only kid who took the bus an hour each way. The only vegetarian at the hunting camp. The only one whose parent worked nights. Write about the specific muscle that being the outlier built in you.
Translating at the doctor. You've sat in waiting rooms turning medical English into your family's first language since middle school. The vocabulary you had to learn, the things no kid should have to say out loud, and the steadiness it gave you.
Code-switching playlist. The version of you at the dinner table, at debate practice, at your cousin's quinceanera. Use voice or slang or volume as your lens: how you move between selves, and why that's a skill, not a split.
The chore that was a worldview. Sorting recycling for a family that immigrated from somewhere with no recycling. Counting change at the family store. A small repeated task that quietly encoded a whole set of values you didn't notice until you left it.
Holiday on the off-calendar. Your most important day of the year isn't on the school calendar, so you've spent your life explaining why you're absent. Write about the holiday itself, but really about being a permanent gentle translator of your own culture.
What your hands know. A skill passed down that nobody at school has: gutting a fish, henna, fixing a carburetor, reading sheet music for an instrument no one's heard of. The inheritance lives in your hands, and it shaped how you learn everything else.
The accent you lost. You worked to flatten your accent (or your parents') to fit in, and you have complicated feelings about it now. The essay tracks that erosion and what you're choosing to keep or reclaim, which is identity as an active verb, not a given.

Questions to sit with

When you bring a friend home for the first time, what do you find yourself quietly explaining or bracing them for?
What is something your family does that you assumed everyone did, until a moment when you realized they didn't?
What word, food, song, or object would be hard for you to translate to someone outside your world, and why does it matter to you?
When have you been the only one of something in a room, and what did you start noticing that no one else seemed to?
What is a responsibility you carry at home that your classmates would be surprised to learn about?
Is there a part of your background you used to hide or downplay, and what changed?

How to open

Weak

Growing up in a multicultural household taught me the value of diversity and the importance of embracing where I come from.

Strong

I learned to say "deductible" before I learned to drive.

An annotated example

Annotated example: 'The Phone Calls' (original, ~175 words). Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay.

Tap a highlighted line to see the note →

I learned to say "deductible" before I learned to drive. ¹My mother's English is warm and full, but it stiffens on the phone with the insurance company, so the calls became mine. I was twelve, sitting at the kitchen counter with a yellow legal pad, asking a stranger to repeat the policy number slowly. For years I thought of this as a chore, the way other kids thought of dishes. Then last spring I called to dispute a charge for my mother, and the man on the line, hearing a teenager, softened and started to explain. I realized I had spent six years learning to make adults take me seriously. ²I am the bridge in my family, and bridges get walked on, but they also get you across. ³At your seminar table, I will be the student who asks the quiet question twice, and who notices when someone hasn't been heard yet. That, more than my transcript, is what I'm bringing.⁴

1Opens on one strange, specific detail instead of a thesis about identity. It makes the reader lean in and signals the real subject (premature adult fluency) without announcing it.
2This is the turn. The everyday task gets reframed into a transferable skill (self-advocacy, persistence) and the writer shows growth in how they understand their own story, not just what happened.
3A small, earned metaphor that holds both the cost and the value. It avoids self-pity and resists the neat-bow ending.
4Lands the 'what I'd add' beat concretely: a specific classroom behavior, not a vague promise of 'diversity.'

What the best essays do

Lead with a scene, not a label: Don't open by naming your category ('As a first-generation Vietnamese American...'). Open inside a moment that could only be yours: a specific kitchen, a specific phone call, a specific Tuesday. Let the reader infer the identity from the texture. The label can come later, smaller, once they already care.
Show the angle of vision, not just the background: The strongest versions answer a question the prompt only implies: because of this, what do you notice that others miss? Maybe being the family translator made you alert to who gets talked over. Connect your background to a specific way you see, question, or care. That's the part that's actually yours.
Answer the 'what would you add' half honestly: Many essays nail the background and forget the second half. Don't promise to 'bring diversity' in the abstract. Name a concrete behavior: the question you'll ask, the perspective you'll offer in a discussion, the thing you'll cook for your hallmates. Make it a verb, not an adjective.
Hold the cost and the gift together: The most moving identity essays don't sand off the hard parts or wallow in them. They sit in the both/and: this was heavy AND it made me capable; I lost this AND I'm reclaiming that. That honesty is what reads as mature rather than performed.

Mistakes to avoid

Don't write the 'diversity is beautiful' essay: Sentences like 'diversity makes the world a richer place' say nothing about you. The reader has heard it ten thousand times. Cut every generic statement about diversity as a concept and replace it with one true thing about your actual life.
Don't perform suffering for sympathy: You do not owe admissions your deepest trauma, and a hardship recited without reflection reads as a bid for pity. If you write about something painful, the essay should be about what you learned to do, see, or carry, not just what happened to you. You are the hero, not the victim, of your own paragraph.
Don't pick a 'box' you can't make specific: If you choose an aspect of identity but can only write about it in clichés, choose a different, smaller, truer one. A vivid essay about being the only night-shift parent's kid beats a vague one about a heritage you can't render in detail. Specific always wins.
Don't forget this is a supplement, not the Common App: Keep it tight and on-task for that school's word count. Don't recycle your main personal statement's topic. If your Common App essay already covers your identity deeply, pick a different facet here so the two essays widen the picture instead of repeating it.

Before you submit

Read your first line alone: does it drop the reader into a specific moment, or announce a theme?
Highlight every sentence that could appear in someone else's essay and rewrite or cut it.
Confirm you answered BOTH halves: how it shaped you AND what you'd concretely add.
Find your one weird, true, specific detail. If you can't, you need a better scene.
Check the tone: does the hard part come with growth, or does it just sit there asking for pity?
Verify the word count and that this topic doesn't duplicate your Common App essay.

Common questions

Do I have to write about race, religion, or culture?

No. 'Identity, background, or perspective' is deliberately wide. Being a caregiver, growing up rural, a disability, a family business, an unusual household role, a language you live between, being the first to do anything in your family: all fair game. Pick the facet you can render most vividly and truthfully, not the one that sounds most impressive.

My life feels pretty 'normal.' What do I even write about?

'Normal' usually means 'invisible to you,' not 'absent.' The thing you assume everyone does is exactly the material. Use the brainstorm questions, especially the one about what you explain to friends when they first come over. There's almost always a difference you've stopped noticing.

How personal is too personal?

Share what you can reflect on, not what's still an open wound. A good test: can you write about it with some steadiness and insight, or does it pull you under? If it's the latter, either choose another angle or focus on what you built afterward. You control how much you reveal.

How long should it be?

Follow the school's exact limit, which for this prompt is often 150 to 300 words, sometimes up to 650. Shorter prompts reward one tight scene plus one clear insight. Don't pad to hit a max, and don't cram three identities into 200 words. One facet, told well, beats a list.