Claremont McKenna asks for two supplemental essays, each 150-250 words, on top of your Common App personal statement. The first is a classic "Why CMC" question framed around the college's mission of preparing students for leadership in business, government, and the professions. The second, tied to CMC's Open Academy (freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, constructive dialogue), asks you to describe a time you changed your mind or changed someone else's.
CMC is test-optional through Fall 2027 entry, so for many applicants these short essays do heavy lifting. The core challenge is compression: 250 words is barely a page, and both prompts want a real story plus genuine reflection. Vague enthusiasm and recycled "why this college" lines get flagged fast here.
01Mission fit, stated plainly. CMC names its mission in the prompt itself: leadership in business, government, and the professions. Essays that connect your actual interests to that practical, real-world orientation land better than ones praising the weather or the Claremont Colleges consortium in the abstract.
02Intellectual humility. The second prompt is unusual. Most schools want to know what you believe. CMC wants to know whether you can change your mind, sit with a different view, and describe the mechanics of that shift honestly. They reward students who are coachable, not certain.
03Specificity over polish. With only 250 words, a single concrete detail (a class, a professor's research, a debate at the dinner table) does more than three sentences of praise. CMC readers can tell instantly when a Why-essay was copy-pasted from another application.
04Engagement, not avoidance. CMC's Open Academy is built around hard conversations across difference. The school wants students who lean into disagreement productively, so essays that show you listening and adjusting beat essays that show you winning an argument.
2 prompts for CMC, each broken down with annotated examples.
Why CMC150-250 words
CMC's mission is to prepare students for thoughtful and productive lives and responsible leadership in business, government, and the professions. With this mission in mind, please explain why you want to attend Claremont McKenna College.
Open Academy: Changing Your Mind150-250 words
A critical part of fulfilling our mission is living out the commitments of CMC's Open Academy: Freedom of Expression, Viewpoint Diversity, and Constructive Dialogue. We want to learn more about your commitment to listening and learning from others with different viewpoints, perspectives, and life experiences from your own. Describe a time when engaging with someone about a specific topic resulted in you changing your attitude, belief, or behavior, or you changed the belief or behavior of someone else. What was the change that occurred for you, and what facilitated that change? What did you learn from that experience, and how has it informed how you engage with others?