How to Write the Penn State Supplemental Essays: Examples + Guide 2026/2027

Last Updated on 09/18/2026 by Ethan Sawyer

Known for its legendary school spirit, top-tier athletic program, and student body the size of a small city, Pennsylvania State University is chock-full of personality and opportunity. Because it’s such a large school with a vast array of resources ( 632 athletic scholarships alone!), it’s good to have a clear sense of what you want going into your college experience. Whether you’re delving into meteorology (one of Penn State’s strongest academic programs) or yelling your heart out at football games, there’s something for you if you want it and look for it. The tips and examples below will help you get started.

Want to get an even better sense of what Penn State is looking for before brainstorming? 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 public university envisions student success (and how it wants to grow and evolve), read through its most recent self-study report-a simple way to get a strong idea of what Penn State values.

In this section, it is required for you to share how you have spent or will spend the time between your high school graduation and your anticipated enrollment at Penn State. This may include, but is not limited to, college or university coursework, certification programs, English language preparation, employment, or other significant experiences. Note: In the Colleges & Universities section of your Common App profile, you must also list any attempted, in-progress, or planned coursework taken after high school graduation.

Many students, for various reasons, choose or are forced to take off time after graduating high school and before going to college. If this applies to you, you shouldn’t feel that this makes you any less of a great candidate for Penn State-or any college for that matter! In fact, taking time off can help you reflect more on yourself and your experiences in a meaningful way. With this prompt, Penn State is offering you an opportunity to discuss what this time off has been like and what you’ve taken from it. At a basic level, it can also help you explain any gaps in your transcript or family/financial situations that may be important to consider in the application process. Don’t feel pressured to use all 500 words here. Instead, think of it as yet another opportunity to reflect on your path since high school, what you’ve learned from it, and how the  experiences you’ve gained will enrich the contributions you add to your college campus.

Here’s an example that wasn’t originally written for this prompt but could work with some small tweaks:

Example:

My dad is the master of turning life into a game. 

Who can squish their face in the funniest shape for the camera? Don’t tell mom. Who can find the weirdest snack in the supermarket? Ready, go!

But when my dad got sick the summer after my senior year of high school, the game was up.

Instead of running around at top speed with “salad-flavored Doritos,” I helped my dad rest after chemotherapy. It was impossible to go to college during this time of crisis, so I took the year off to support my family. Many days, my dad and I would talk. Our new game was one of curiosity. 

How do you feel? Who are you?

That spring, my dad beat cancer. Although that year was hard, it was defined by a clearer understanding of my relationships to others. I was profoundly affected by the new bond I shared with my father. My fascination with connectedness in times of crisis led me to take an online course in advanced psychology and design an independent research project on psychotherapy. 

My dad and I still turn pretty much everything into a game, but we also show up for each other in newly meaningful ways. My year away from school taught me the importance of reciprocity and responsibility, no matter the game you’re playing. (222 words)

Tips + Analysis

1. Keep the question in focus. Remember, the key here is to convey when you missed school and why. Even though this essay follows a narrative arc, it doesn’t lose sight of the question being asked. The author is clear about why she took a gap year: because she had to take care of her dad while he battled cancer. As you write your essay, make sure you’re thinking back to the main question and checking that you’re answering the key components.

2. Highlight specific details. Many people take off school for similar reasons (personal tragedy, study abroad opportunities, internship, financial burden, etc.). Although these reasons are valid, you’ll want to use the space to explain specifically what this year off meant to you and which values you developed or strengthened. This author uses specific details to show the kinds of games they play, but she’s also careful to focus on specific values she gained: especially connectedness and reciprocity. Details make the essay memorable; values help give the reader a sense of how you’ll contribute to Penn State.

3. Demonstrate growth. Just because you weren’t in school doesn’t mean you weren’t learning. In this essay, the author does a great job of showing us how she truly connected to her father and her culture while also fostering a growing love for psychology/psychotherapy. When you write, make sure to highlight how your experience away from school helped you develop academically or personally (or better yet, both!). Giving specific examples of how you grew is also really important. Talk about classes you took on your own, trips you went on, jobs you worked, or projects you started. Penn State wants to see that you maximized your time, even if you weren’t at school.

With these tips and examples in mind, you’re ready to start writing!

How to write each Essay Prompt for the Schreyer Honors College

Schreyer is a separate application from the Penn State undergraduate application. Students submit both, plus two letters of recommendation and their STARS (Self-Reported Transcript and Academic Record System) record. A meaningful number of students find this out late (which is a pretty big bummer), so plan well ahead.

Test scores aren’t used. Schreyer says so directly. Rigor and course load are described as the most important academic information they review. 

Applications are read by a Selection Committee, randomly assigned, rated through a norming process, and “anonymized as much as possible.” A lot of colleges don’t publish that amount of detail about their application process. You’ll want to be sure your ten pieces both work as a set, and individually.

Schreyer’s four stated values—and notice that one of them shows up by name in a prompt:

• Inclusive Community—“Learning together with an intellectual curiosity that recognizes the whole person, discovers common ground, fosters trust and celebrates diversity.”
• Courageous Discovery—“Supporting the risk-taking required for the advancement of knowledge and scholarly achievement.”
• Global Intention—“Recognizing individual responsibilities and opportunities in our communities and an interconnected world.”
• Empowered Growth—“Meeting Schreyer Scholars, faculty, staff and alumni where they are, and partnering in service to their aspirations.”

Note the phrasing on Empowered Growth. It describes what the college does, not what a student does. The prompt then asks students to answer it from their own side. 

Schreyer asks for one 800-word essay and nine 200-word short answers. That’s about 2,600 words, which is more writing than most supplements ask for.

To plan that out, look at how much the prompts potentially overlap. A lot of students meaningful leadership experience is also service-oriented, for example.

So be sure to spend time brainstorming what you’ll talk about where to avoid redundancy before you dive into drafting.

And to that end, we’d recommend working through the CEG Values Exercise. List the six to ten values you most want Schreyer to see, then assign each one a home.

How to Write the Schreyer Honors College Prompt #1:

Identify an important global or local issue that you believe does not receive sufficient attention. Why is this issue often overlooked or under-addressed? Analyze possible paths forward and propose a realistic strategy to raise awareness and advance solutions. Finally, evaluate your proposal’s potential to create meaningful change, considering its feasibility, limitations, trade-offs, implementation challenges, and possible unintended consequences. (800 words)

That’s… a lot. Be sure to notice that you have four separate tasks here:

1. Identify an issue that doesn’t get sufficient attention.
2. Diagnose why it’s overlooked. (Not why it matters—why it’s ignored.)
3. Analyze possible paths forward, then propose one realistic strategy for raising awareness and advancing solutions.
4. Evaluate your own proposal—feasibility, limitations, trade-offs, implementation challenges, unintended consequences.

This isn’t a personal statement. It’s closer to a well-argued memo. Read the prompt again and notice that nothing in it asks explicitly about you—not your experiences, not your goals, not what you’ve overcome. 

You can still appear in the essay, and good ones will tend to show more about you, especially if there’s a personal connection in some way. But you don’t necessarily need much autobiography here.

Schreyer says reviewers are looking for a “well-reasoned, consistent, and persuasive response,” and will consider “how or why you take a specific approach to the question.” 

800 words is a lot of space. A rough possible split:

Section	Words
The issue, named concretely, and how you came to see it	~100
Why it’s under-addressed	~175
The range of possible responses, and why you’re choosing one	~150
Your proposed strategy, specific enough to picture	~200
Your honest evaluation of it	~175

Adjust as needed. Though keep in mind if your evaluation section is 60 words, you maybe haven’t answered the question.

Don’t pick something that actually gets plenty of attention. Climate change. Teen mental health. Ocean plastic. Food insecurity (in the abstract). These are all super serious issues we need to deal with. But they aren’t exactly neglected.

So one useful move is to go narrower. “Mental health” gets a pretty solid amount of attention. “There’s no adolescent psychiatrist within 90 miles of my county, and the waitlist at the one clinic is fourteen months”probably not so much. If you can also go one layer beneath a famous problem, you can maybe write about the piece nobody covers.

Here’s something that will make writing easier: the more specific your issue, the easier every single section after this one becomes. A narrow issue has a findable reason it’s ignored, a plausible intervention, and real limitations you can name. A broad one gives you nothing to hold onto.

Some questions to get you diving in:

• What’s a problem you’ve watched a specific person deal with—not read about, watched?
• What do people around you treat as normal that you find unacceptable?
• Where have you seen a system fail quietly, without anyone really being at fault?
• What’s the boring part of a famous problem?
• Where do you have access, information, or standing that most people don’t?
• What’s something you’ve actually argued about with someone who disagreed?

And since it’s easy to overlook, don’t forget about the unintended consequences part of the prompt. If you can name a real way your own good idea could backfire, you’re likely to stand out from students who don’t think about these complexities. Some questions to find one:

• If this works, who loses something?
• What would people start doing to game it?
• What does this pull attention or money away from?
• What happens after you graduate and leave?

Being able to say “here’s the strongest argument against my own proposal, and here’s why I still think it’s worth trying” is a great move in this essay.

How to Write the Schreyer Honors College Prompt #2: (200 words each)

• One of the Schreyer Honors College values is Empowered Growth. What values, beliefs or experiences have empowered you to grow intellectually and/or personally?
• If you were able to go anywhere in the world, outside of the country you currently reside in, where would you go and why?
• List your extracurricular activities over the last four years. This can include school and non-school activities. Please include any leadership roles you have had.
• Tell us about your most significant leadership experience and why leadership is important to you. This could include community roles, family contributions, research, clubs and organizations, etc. Describe challenges you’ve faced and successes you’ve had in these roles.
• List awards or other recognitions (if any) you have received in or outside of school over the last four years.
• Reflecting on the recognitions listed above, which one stands out as having an impact on your outlook and why?
• Tell us about a book or other media that has made you think about something in a new way.
• Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups, including shared geography, faith, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities or groups to which you belong and describe how it has influenced your life over the last four years.
• (Optional) Please use this space to share information you would like us to consider that has not been discussed elsewhere in your application.

Some overall guidance here:

Every one of these has a 200-word limit, including the two list questions. Schreyer also notes the short answers “may change without notice,” so check the live application before you start writing.

Four things that apply across all nine:

200 words is one tight paragraph, or two short ones. It’s not a ton of space. Probably enough for a scene and some reflection. Be wary of trying to fit so much in that you just produce 200 words of summary.

Answer in the first sentence. Sure, you can go with other options, but you won’t really go wrong with clarity here.

Two of these aren’t essays. The activities list and the awards list say “list.” Write them as lists. It’s totally fine.

Draft all nine before you polish any of them. It’s the only way to catch yourself telling the same story three times.

Specificity is your strength here. For the first bullet, for example, get specific about the source. A teacher who did one particular thing. A belief you can trace to the moment you changed your mind about something. A practice in your family nobody outside it would recognize. And notice the “and/or”—intellectual or personal is fine, and the personal answers tend to be less crowded.

Remember that “leadership” looks like a lot of things. Read that middle sentence of prompt 4 carefully, for example. “Community roles, family contributions, research, clubs and organizations” is Schreyer telling you a title isn’t required. Family contributions is listed second. If you run the household after school, translate for your parents, or help raise your siblings, you are being explicitly invited to write about that. A lot of students don’t believe this until someone says it out loud.

“Community” means a lot, too. Look at the list Schreyer gives you in the second to last bullet. “Cuisine” and “intellectual heritage” might seem like unusual inclusions, and they’re a signal that this is not a demographic question. If you’ve been assuming this prompt is asking about your race or ethnicity and you feel stuck, it isn’t. You can definitely write about those things. But don’t feel limited to those things.

In addition to the Values Exercise linked above, the BEABIES Exercise is built for these prompts.

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Special thanks for Julia for contributing to this post.

Julia published her first “book” on the elusive Pika in elementary school and has been writing fervently ever since. She’s thrilled to unite her quirky love of grammar and master’s in psychology to help students tell their most meaningful stories. Her favorite punctuation mark is the apostrophe because, in the words of Imagine Dragons, it’s “a symbol to remind you that there’s more to see.”

Top values: Collaboration | Family | Productivity

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