How to Write the Brandeis University Supplemental Essays: Examples + Guide 2026/2027

Last Updated on 08/22/2026 by Ethan Sawyer

Brandeis University is a research institution with a long history of producing graduates focused on civil discourse, diversity, and intellectual integrity. It’s looking for that same curiosity and spirit in the supplemental essay (two if you’re an international student) that Brandeis asks you to write. 

Want to get a better sense of what Brandeis is looking for? You’ll find an extensive, by-the-numbers look at its offerings, from enrollment and tuition statistics to student life and financial aid information, on its Common Data Set. For deep insights into how this private research university envisions student success (and how it wants to grow and evolve), read its strategic priorities. Reading through this will give you a strong idea of Brandeis’ values.

This option shows how important it is for Brandeis to hear directly from international applicants on how they envision their exploration beyond campus. 

Before you get started writing, consider the two main parts of the prompt:

• Being an international student. Brandeis is committed to emboldening students to “change the world.” But it also gets that first you need to understand the world. What better way for Brandeis to foster that understanding than through building a diverse student body from all four corners of the earth? Then the pressing questions become: How might the international perspective you bring be more impactful on campus than that of another international student?  What will you bring to campus—not just as a student, but as a student with the heritage only you have? 
• “Into the world.” This is your chance to be specific about what topics and ideas you want to engage with, and how, focusing specifically on how you want to engage outside of the classroom.

How to brainstorm your essay:

• Start with something you’ve already been exploring in some way. The easiest way to build a strong essay here is to build on something that’s maybe already in your activities list but lacks story and context for the deeper “why” driving you. And help us to see how Brandeis and its location help you to pursue this issue/idea/curiosity.
• Name a real place. “How would you pursue it” is a logistics question, and it’s the half some students might skip or get abstract with. Brandeis gives you plenty to point at: the student-run Waltham Group programs, a Justice Brandeis Semester, a particular lab, a particular organization in Waltham or Boston. One real name—like a program or nonprofit two miles from campus—does more work than half a dozen sentences about “hands-on learning opportunities.”
• Let the international part live in the “why”. Notice that the prompt itself never says the word “international.” So you probably don’t want to open with a paragraph about your heritage. If you include it, let your context be the reason the question matters to you at all—the thing you noticed at home that you can’t stop asking about. 

A couple of things to probably skip

• The sentence about how much you admire Brandeis’s commitment to social justice. Readers have seen that one a few thousand times, and it tells them nothing about you.
• Any topic you could pursue just as well from anywhere. If your answer would work at forty other schools, it isn’t answering this prompt.

Here’s an (anonymized by request, and adapted for this new prompt) example essay with analysis:

Example essay

My grandmother started calling me by my mother’s name the summer I turned fifteen. In Korea we call it chimae, and the word carries enough shame that families go quiet around it. We told relatives she was tired.

I want to understand what’s happening in her brain—and what happens in the room around it.

At Brandeis I’d join Companions to Elders through the Waltham Group and help staff the monthly Memory Café: ninety minutes of coffee and conversation with people whose memories are leaving, and the people who care for them.

Then I’d carry the questions back to Professor Gutchess’s Aging, Culture and Cognition Lab, which studies how culture shapes what people remember, which is exactly what I can’t stop wondering about: does chimae look different in a family trained to hide it?

A lab can answer that in data. Waltham can answer it in one woman’s living room, on a Tuesday afternoon, in whatever she still has. I don’t expect to fix anything. But I want to learn how much of a person stays when the memory doesn’t.

Tips and analysis

• Show a personal link. The hook she gives us of her grandmother using the wrong name does a lot of nice work, pulling us into the story immediately, helping us understand some stakes, and setting a clear path forward thematically.
• The “how” is concrete. Companions to Elders, the monthly Memory Café, a named lab—all real and reachable from campus. A reader can tell she did her homework on Brandeis, which is part of what this prompt is testing.
• Her Korean context does actual work. Chimae and the family silence around it aren’t set dressing. They generate questions for paragraph four. That’s a nice use of heritage as a lens.
• She doesn’t promise to cure anything. “I don’t expect to fix anything” is a seventeen-year-old thinking out loud, not a mission statement, and it makes everything before it more believable.

Want advice on dozens of other supplemental essays?
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Special thanks to Ameer for writing this blog post.

Ameer is a freelance writer who specializes in writing about college admissions and career development. Prior to freelancing, Ameer worked for three years as a college admissions consultant at a Hong Kong-based education center, helping local high school students prepare and apply for top colleges and universities in the US. He has a B.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Chicago and an M.A. in Spanish Linguistics from UCLA. When he’s not working, Ameer loves traveling, weight lifting, writing, reading, and learning foreign languages. He currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand. 

Top values: Growth / Diversity / Empathy