Sarah Lawrence / Essays / Prompt 1
Sarah Lawrence: Optional supplement (choose 1 of 4)
250-500 words (optional). Choose one of four options.
We know that there may be elements of who you are as a person and student that you may not feel are conveyed fully in the other sections of this application. If you wish to showcase a little more about your particular interest in Sarah Lawrence College, please select one of the prompts below and write your essay in the text box. Option A: Sarah Lawrence students are often described as hyphenates: filmmaker-sociologist-historian, environmentalist-photographer, psychologist-novelist, economist-poet. In 250-500 words, tell us about seemingly disparate interests you have brought together, or hope to bring together at Sarah Lawrence. Option B: Students at Sarah Lawrence are asked to design their own research questions directly with faculty, and then answer them through intensive semester-long projects that frequently inspire a blend of intellectual rigor and creativity. In 250-500 words, tell us about a text, problem or topic you would love to explore over a semester or a year, and what you would hope to achieve through that work. Option C: Liberal arts and sciences colleges have a long and robust history of providing the educational foundation for the careers of influential politicians, financiers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, CEOs, and more. Many of them cite their liberal arts degree as foundational and transformative for how they took on challenges in the world and for shaping their lives after college. How do you see your upcoming college studies leading to your future career (or careers)? Option D: In today's rapidly changing world, many social, political, and ethical issues spark intense debate and demand nuanced understanding. Choose a contemporary issue that you find both challenging and urgent, whether it relates to identity, justice, artificial intelligence, environment, or another area, and critically explore your perspective on it. How have your previous experiences, background, and/or values shaped your viewpoint? How do you envision engaging with this issue during your college education and beyond?
What it’s really asking
Sarah Lawrence offers one optional essay and lets you pick from four prompts. Option A (hyphenates) asks how you combine seemingly unrelated interests. Option B asks about a text, problem, or topic you would chase in a semester-long, faculty-guided research project, and what you would hope to achieve. Option C asks how your future college studies connect to a possible career or careers. Option D asks you to take a contemporary issue you find urgent, explain how your experiences shaped your view of it, and describe how you would keep engaging with it at Sarah Lawrence and beyond. You only answer one, so choose the prompt that reveals the most interesting version of how you think.
Why they ask it
The college is unusually candid that this essay exists so you can show 'a little more' of who you are as a person and student. Because Sarah Lawrence teaches through seminars, conference projects, and self-designed study, the real question under every option is the same: are you a curious, self-directed thinker who would thrive without a rigid syllabus telling you what to care about? They are reading for intellectual personality and genuine fit, not credentials.
Three ways in
Option A: find the hinge
Name two interests that seem to have nothing to do with each other, then find the surprising point that joins them, ideally through one concrete project or moment where they collided.
Option B: chase one real question
Pick a single text, dataset, object, or unanswered question that genuinely nags at you, and describe the investigation you would run, including what would count as a satisfying answer.
Option D: start from lived experience
Choose an issue you have actually lived near, not just read about, and walk the reader through how a specific experience complicated your view rather than confirming it.
✕ Weak opening
“Ever since I was little, I have been passionate about both science and the arts, and Sarah Lawrence is the perfect place to pursue my many interests.”
✓ Strong opening
“My chemistry notes are full of stage directions. I kept writing 'enter the electron, stage left' in the margins until my teacher asked if I was studying bonds or blocking.”
I started making maps because I was bad at directions. My grandmother told the same three stories about our town in Pennsylvania, and every time the details moved: the flood was 1972, then 1936; the mill stood by the creek, then across the road. 1So I drew her town. Not the real one, which a satellite already knows, but the one she carries: a map where the mill appears twice because she could never agree with herself, where the creek is labeled with the year my grandfather drowned a litter of barn cats and the year she forgave him for it.2This is where my two interests collide. I am a cartographer, the kind who loves projections and the honest lie that every flat map tells about a round world. I am also a folklorist, a word I only learned junior year but had apparently been practicing since I was nine, collecting the versions people give instead of the facts. 3For a long time I thought these were opposites. Maps want to be true. Stories want to be told well. But the most interesting maps are the ones that admit they are arguments: the 1855 cholera map that won by leaving things out, the medieval charts that drew sea monsters exactly where sailors stopped coming back.4A monster on a map is not a mistake. It is folklore drawn to scale.5At Sarah Lawrence, I want to keep being both at once. I would love a conference project that pairs GIS coursework with oral history, mapping a single block of Yonkers through whoever still remembers it, then overlaying the deed records to watch where memory and paperwork disagree. The disagreements are the data. 6I do not want to resolve whether my grandmother's mill stood by the creek or across the road. I want to build something honest enough to hold both answers, with a legend in the corner explaining that the territory was always a little bit a story, and the story was always a little bit a place. That is the seam I want to work in, and Sarah Lawrence is one of the few places that would let me call it a single subject.7
- 1Opens with a concrete, slightly self-deprecating fact instead of a thesis. The shifting details set up the real subject (unreliable memory) without announcing it.
- 2The pivot from literal cartography to emotional cartography is the whole essay. The cat detail is specific and morally complicated, which keeps it from sentimentality.
- 3Names both halves of the hyphenate explicitly, which the prompt rewards, while showing they grew from one root rather than being stapled together.
- 4Brings in real intellectual reference points (the Snow cholera map, mappae mundi) that prove range without name-dropping or showing off.
- 5A short, quotable line that crystallizes the synthesis. Earning a sentence this clean is what 'thinking on the page' looks like.
- 6Connects specifically to Sarah Lawrence's conference system and self-designed projects, and proposes concrete interdisciplinary work rather than vague enthusiasm.
- 7Returns to the grandmother to close the loop, then restates the hyphenate as one subject, directly echoing the prompt's framing and the school's interdisciplinary ethos.
The German word Backpfeifengesicht means a face that is begging to be slapped. There is no English equivalent, and I have spent two years quietly furious that there isn't, because I have met that face and had no word to hand it.1The topic I would love to spend a semester on is untranslatability: the words a language keeps for itself, and what their absence reveals about the people who never needed them.2It sounds like a party trick, the list of charming foreign words that circulates online every December. But I want to take it seriously, which means treating each gap as evidence. 3Why does Portuguese need saudade, a longing for something that may never have existed, when English speakers manage with vaguer homesickness? Why does Japanese have a word for buying books you will never read? A missing word is not a hole. It is a decision a whole culture made, repeated by millions of mouths until it hardened into common sense.4Over a semester, I would want to build a small comparative study: pick six so-called untranslatable words from six languages, trace each one back through dictionaries and old letters to find when it first appears, and interview at least two native speakers per word about whether the textbook definition matches the thing they actually feel. 5I expect the interviews to wreck my tidy definitions, and I am counting on it.6What I hope to achieve is not a finished theory. It is a defensible argument about one narrow claim: that the words a language refuses to translate are the load-bearing walls of how its speakers feel, and that learning them is closer to emotional archaeology than to memorizing flashcards. 7I would also, finally, get to defend Backpfeifengesicht in writing, with citations, which is the most Sarah Lawrence sentence I have ever written. I want a place where designing the question is half the assignment, and where a semester on one stubborn idea counts as an education rather than a detour.8
- 1A funny, specific hook with a real word. Humor signals voice, and the 'quietly furious' admission makes the curiosity feel personal rather than academic.
- 2States the research topic cleanly and early, as the prompt asks, framing it as a question about culture rather than vocabulary.
- 3Anticipates the obvious objection (this is a listicle) and refuses it, which demonstrates the intellectual rigor the prompt and school value.
- 4Two precise examples plus a sharp claim. The metaphor of a word 'hardening into common sense' is original thinking on the page, not a borrowed phrase.
- 5Lays out a concrete, doable methodology with sources and fieldwork, which shows the applicant can design a real project, exactly what Sarah Lawrence's conference model demands.
- 6A short line admitting the hypothesis might break. Welcoming disconfirmation is a mature research instinct and reads as genuine, not performed.
- 7Scales ambition honestly to a semester, naming a 'narrow claim' rather than overpromising, and the 'load-bearing walls' image ties the whole essay together.
- 8Closes by circling back to the opening word and naming Sarah Lawrence's self-directed model directly, fusing wit with a sincere statement of fit.
Stuck? Start here
- What two interests of mine seem unrelated to everyone else, and what is the one moment they secretly connected for me?
- What is a question I have looked up on my own, for no class and no grade, more than once?
- Which issue or idea have I actually changed my mind about, and what specific experience caused the change?
Before you submit
- Did I answer only one prompt, and is it the one that shows the most interesting version of my thinking?
- Is there at least one concrete moment, text, or project on the page, rather than a list of abstract passions?
- Does the ending connect to how Sarah Lawrence actually works (conferences, self-designed study) without just praising the college?
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