Notre Dame Supplemental Essays 2025-26 — Prompts and Tips
August 26, 2025
The University of Notre Dame is a famed Catholic institution located outside the city of South Bend, Indiana. It is a dream college for many brilliant high school students around the globe, across all faiths. For the Class of 2029, the acceptance rate fell to 9%, roughly one-third the figure seen back in the late 1980s. This begs the question—if most of the 35,000 applicants to Notre Dame are academically qualified, how does the school decide which 3,400 to accept? While the answer to that question is, of course, multifaceted, one of the answers is that you need to take advantage of the Notre Dame supplemental essays.
Want to learn more about how to create a strong application to the University of Notre Dame? In addition to our blog entitled: How to Get Into Notre Dame: Admissions Data and Strategies, head to College Transitions Gateway for all our best free tools and resources, including an admissions calculator for 170+ institutions, college planning guides & templates, and example essays from accepted students.
Your mission is to write compelling, standout compositions that showcase your exceptional writing ability and reveal more about who you are as an individual. There are several parts to Notre Dame’s writing supplement and you must answer a total of five prompts—two short answer (150 words or fewer) and three very short answer (100 words or fewer). Below are Notre Dame’s supplemental prompts for the 2024-25 admissions cycle along with tips about how to address each one.
Notre Dame Supplemental Essays 2025-26
Briefly share what draws you to the area(s) of study you listed. (100 words)
Note: You can choose up to three areas.
First, consider your academic area of choice, and then, identify interests and experiences that relate to it. What fascinates you about your chosen area(s) of study? Are there certain topics (encountered in or outside of school) that pique your curiosity? What confuses, surprises, or makes you want to learn more? The reader should finish this essay with a clear sense of your current academic motivations and passions.
Everyone has different priorities when considering their higher education options and building their college or university list. Tell us about your “non-negotiable” factor(s) when searching for your future college home. (150 words)
If you choose to answer this question, know that you’ll need to think very deeply about your answer. Admissions officers are going to receive scores of responses about aesthetically pleasing campuses and top-ranked sports teams. As such, dig deep into what your non-negotiable factors are, and think about which ones will be genuinely satisfied by attending Notre Dame. The strongest responses here will likely speak to some aspect of Notre Dame’s academic structure, social community, or general ethos. Ideally, the answer will communicate something important about how your academic and extracurricular priorities are a great fit for what Notre Dame has to offer.
Please choose three questions from the options below. Your response to each short-answer question should be between 50-100 words.
In this section, you’ll respond to three of five possible prompts. No option is inherently better than another. Instead, choose the prompts that resonate most with your personal experience, beliefs, or values.
1) How does faith influence the decisions you make?
Notre Dame is a Catholic university, and religion will be part of your education and experience. If you do consider yourself to be a religious, spiritual, and/or faithful person, how does that inform the way you move through life and make decisions?
If you’re not a religious or spiritual person and do not feel that faith has any impact on your decisions, you’ll likely want to avoid answering this one.
2) What is distinctive about your personal experiences and development (eg, family support, culture, disability, personal background, community, etc)? Why are these experiences important to you and how will you enrich the Notre Dame community?
Some students may have a powerful and deeply personal story to tell about their racial/ethnic identity, sexual/gender identity, family background, cultural background, or religious identity, among others; others may feel that there isn’t anything particularly compelling about their own identity in any one of those categories. Alternatively, you could also talk about your place in an affinity group, such as Dungeons & Dragons, anime, volleyball, chess, painting, film, or any other interest one can fathom that is a core, essential, can’t-imagine-life-without-it component of your identity. If so, this essay will likely be a perfect fit for you.
Although this prompt’s open floor plan may feel daunting, a good tactic is to first consider what has already been communicated within your Common App personal statement and activities list. What important aspect(s) of yourself have not been shared (or sufficiently discussed)? The admissions officer reading your essay is hoping to connect with you through your written words, so—within your essay’s reflection—be open, humble, thoughtful, inquisitive, emotionally honest, mature, and/or insightful about what you learned, how you grew, and how you hope to impact the Notre Dame community as a result.
3) Notre Dame’s undergraduate experience is characterized by a collective sense of care for every person. How do you foster service to others in your community?
To truly understand where Notre Dame is coming from with this question, one needs to look no further than the school’s own mission statement: “Notre Dame wants to educate and inspire its students to be moral citizens within their communities and the larger world, to use their talents to the best of their ability, and to develop the generous sensibilities needed to relieve injustice, oppression, and poverty in all of their manifestations.”
If you have been involved in some type of charitable/community service endeavor throughout your high school years, this is a great opportunity to speak about that venture in more detail. Looking forward, how might you continue the work you’ve been doing? You can also connect your aspirations in this realm to specific service opportunities that are available at Notre Dame.
4) What compliment are you most proud of receiving, and why does it mean so much to you?
If you choose to write this essay, strive to be as humble as possible. The compliment you received should simply be a conduit for you to discuss the significance of one of your values, a quality you’ve developed, or a lesson learned.
For example, perhaps the compliment you’ll be writing about is when your principal pulled you aside to tell you that the Diversity Night you organized was one of the most seamless events he had ever seen. Avoid reiterating how great the event was and how everyone had a wonderful time. Instead, reflect on why this compliment was so meaningful. Is it because you were worried about how other students would react to the event? Or because it took you & your leadership team major blood, sweat, and tears to pull it off? Alternatively, are you hopeful that the success of the event will improve inclusivity at your school?
5) What would you fight for?
Out of everything on this Earth, what makes you tick? What keeps you up at night? What issue could you talk about or debate for hours? If you could address one problem in the world, large or small, what would it be? What values do you hold most dear? If you are answering at least one of these questions, you are on the right track with this essay. All the better if you have a truly dynamic and personal story to tell in this realm.
At its core, this essay is a chance to illustrate that you are a mature leader who follows their conscience. After all, this kind of young person would be a welcome addition to the Notre Dame community.
How important are the essays at the University of Notre Dame?
There are a whopping nine factors that this school ranks as being “very important” to their admissions process: rigor of secondary school record, class rank, GPA, recommendations, extracurricular activities, talent/ability, character/personal qualities, volunteer experience, and…drumroll, please…essays.
Without question, the essays play a sizable role in the admissions process at Notre Dame. They can help the committee decide who to admit when choosing between similarly credentialed (GPA, test scores, etc.) applicants.
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