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Colgate  /  Essays  /  Prompt 1

Colgate: The Diversity Essay

250 words or less

On Colgate's campus, students engage with individuals from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, races, ethnicities, religions, and perspectives during the course of their educational and social experiences. In 250 words or less, please share the benefits you see in engaging with a diverse body of students, faculty, and staff as part of your Colgate experience.
What it’s really asking

Colgate wants to know that you can grow from people unlike you, and that you'll actively seek that out on a small, residential campus. They want a real moment of engagement across difference, plus a believable sense of what you'd do with that at Colgate specifically. This prompt is officially optional, but strong applicants answer it.

Why they ask it

Colgate is small and rural. You will eat, study, and live alongside the same people for four years, with nowhere to retreat into anonymity. They are screening for students who treat difference as something to learn from rather than tolerate, and who will make the community better by being in it.

Three ways in
A conversation that moved you

A specific exchange or friendship that genuinely changed your mind about something, and what you carried away from it.

A perspective you bring

A community you belong to that gave you a viewpoint most classmates won't share, and what you'd offer Colgate because of it.

Being the outsider

A time you were the one who didn't fit the room, and what that taught you about listening before speaking.

✕  Weak opening

“Diversity is one of the most important values in today's society, and I have always believed in being open-minded toward everyone.”

✓  Strong opening

“For two summers I bussed tables next to Marisol, who left school at fourteen and could read a dining room faster than any manager I've met.”

✦ Annotated example · The deli counter. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
For three summers I worked the deli counter at my uncle's grocery, where the line never sorted itself by who agreed with whom. 1Mr. Abara, who fled Nigeria in the eighties, ordered the same quarter-pound of turkey as Donna, who taught me which veterans got their coffee free. I learned to listen sideways, while slicing, while ringing up, because that was the only way anyone told me anything true. What changed me was not that these people were different from me. It was that they were different from each other, and still shared a sidewalk and a Tuesday. 2I used to think understanding someone meant finding where we overlapped. Behind that counter I started to believe the opposite: that I understood people best at the exact points where we did not agree, and I stayed anyway. 3Colgate's residential scale is what draws me here specifically. I do not want a campus where I can choose my whole world. I want one small enough that the person beside me in a thirteen-person seminar, or across the dish line, keeps being someone I did not pick. 4I am good at the staying part now. I would like four years of practice at the harder part, which is letting people I disagree with change my mind.
  1. 1Opens with a concrete job and a quiet thesis: difference is unavoidable, not theoretical. No flattery about Colgate, which the school explicitly rewards.
  2. 2Reframes diversity past the cliche of self plus others. The insight (difference within a community, not just from the applicant) is genuinely engaged thinking across difference.
  3. 3States a real intellectual shift in the applicant's beliefs, which reads as honest rather than performed tolerance.
  4. 4Names a specific Colgate feature (small residential campus, tiny seminars) and ties it directly to the lesson, not generic praise.
Stuck? Start here
  • When did someone whose background differs from mine actually change my mind, and what exactly changed?
  • What perspective do I bring that most Colgate students probably won't, and where did it come from?
  • On a campus this small, who would I want to end up in long arguments with, and why?
Before you submit
  • Is there one specific person, conversation, or community at the center, not a list of categories?
  • Does the essay name a concrete benefit I'd seek at Colgate, not just praise diversity in general?
  • Have I avoided sounding like I'm performing a virtue rather than telling the truth?

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