What Queen's rewards
Queen's is in Kingston, Ontario, and you apply through OUAC, the Ontario Universities' Application Centre, not the US Common App. If you live outside Ontario, including in the US or anywhere else abroad, you use the OUAC "105" application. There is no single Queen's essay that every applicant writes. Instead, what you write depends entirely on your program, and Queen's tells you exactly what to submit through a personalized To-Do List on your SOLUS student portal after you apply.
For most first-year programs (Arts and Science, Engineering, and similar), the written piece is the Personal Statement of Experience (PSE), completed on SOLUS, where you list your top activities and reflect on them in short, capped text fields. For Commerce (Smith), Bachelor of Health Sciences, and Nursing, you instead complete a mandatory Supplementary Application on the Kira Talent platform: one timed written response (335-word limit, 10 minutes) and one recorded video response (2 minutes to prepare, 2 minutes to deliver). The core challenge for international and American applicants is that this is short, reflective, and experience-based writing, not the long personal narrative you may have drafted for US schools. You usually cannot reuse a Common App essay here.
01Reflection over narration. The Queen's rubric rewards what you *learned* and how an experience shaped you going forward, not a dramatic retelling. The strongest responses name a specific moment, then spend most of their words on the takeaway and how it changed your behavior or thinking.
02Initiative, adaptability, persistence. Queen's explicitly assesses how you handle setbacks, solve problems, and adapt. They want evidence that you took action and stuck with something hard, not that you held an impressive title. A small, real example with a clear decision beats a prestigious-sounding role with no detail.
03Specific experiences, not a resume. The PSE and supplementary written response are built around concrete activities and jobs (paid or unpaid), including ordinary ones like household responsibilities, part-time work, or community roles. Queen's values these equally. Choose experiences you can describe vividly, not the ones that sound the most prestigious on paper.
04Self-awareness and authenticity. Readers (often two of them) look for genuine self-awareness about your impact and contribution. Queen's requires the writing to be in your own words without professional assistance. A modest, honest insight reads as more mature than an inflated one.
Essay prompts for 2026-2027
4 prompts for Queen's, each broken down with annotated examples.
PSE activities listApprox. 30 words / 200 characters with spaces per field
List your top activities and jobs (paid or unpaid), including the positions held, in short capped fields.
PSE reflectionApprox. 500 words / up to 3,400 characters with spaces (program dependent; some fields cap at 2,000 characters)
Draw on your listed experiences and explain how your attributes are consistent with what Queen's is looking for, using full sentences.
Supplementary written response (Commerce / Health Sciences / Nursing)335-word limit, 10 minutes to write
Respond to a randomly assigned prompt (often about a significant challenge you faced and how you handled it) in a timed written response on Kira Talent.
Supplementary video response (Commerce / Health Sciences / Nursing)2 minutes prep, 2 minutes delivery, recorded live
Record a spoken answer to a randomly assigned prompt: 2 minutes to prepare, 2 minutes to deliver, no script visible on camera.