queens college essay questions

CUNY Queens College

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CUNY Queens College’s 2023-24 Essay Prompts

Select-a-prompt essay.

You may submit one of three essay topics as part of your freshman application to Queens College:

Tell us something meaningful about yourself that is not reflected in your application. You may choose to speak about your interests, aspirations and/or background.

It is often said that the road to success is paved with setbacks. Tell us about a time you faced a challenge or obstacle. What did you learn from it, and how did it contribute to your success?

Share an essay on any topic. You may use an essay that you have previously written or one that discusses a topic of your choice.

What will first-time readers think of your college essay?

MEET THE WINNERS OF THE QUEEN'S COMMONWEALTH ESSAY COMPETITION 2022

The Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition (QCEC) is the world's oldest international schools' writing contest, established by the Society in 1883. With thousands of young people taking part each year, it is an important way to recognise achievement, elevate youth voices and develop key skills through creative writing. 

Each year, entrants write on a theme that explores the Commonwealth's values, fostering an empathetic world view in the next generation of leaders and encouraging young people to consider new perspectives to the challenges that the world faces. Themes have included the environment, community, inclusion, the role of youth leadership, and gender equality. 

In the past decade alone, this high-profile competition has engaged approximately 140,000 young people, over 5,000 schools and thousands of volunteer judges across the Commonwealth. 

This year, the competition theme was 'Our Commonwealth', reflecting on our Patron Queen Elizabeth II's seven decades of service to the Commonwealth as an inspiring example of the steadfast commitment and important contribution we can all make to our societies.

We were thrilled to receive a record-breaking 26,322 entries to the QCEC from every Commonwealth region, with the winners and runners-up from New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and India. Find out more about this year's winners below and watch their reactions on discovering this significant achievement!

Sawooly Li 

Senior Winner 

Age 17, New Zealand 

Sawooly Li is a 12th grade student from Rangitoto College in New Zealand. Reading and writing have always been second nature for her—a way of expressing visions, thoughts, and emotions. She loves drawing inspiration and learning from other great writers and their works. Both reading and writing are things which Sawooly aspires to continue far, far, into the future.

Sawooly also has a love for maths and physics, and is heavily involved in such areas in her school, running clubs and participating in competitions. Fostering a strong sense of community, she also leads several in-school organisations, such as UN Youth and UNICEF. In the winters, Sawooly enjoys snowboarding in New Zealand’s beautiful mountains with friends and family.

Read Sawooly's winning entry, 'Willow Trees and Waterholes' .

Madeleine Wood

Junior Winner 

Age 14, Australia 

Madeleine is 14 years old and lives in Melbourne, Australia. She is in grade 8 at Camberwell Girls Grammar School.

She loves travelling, particularly through Europe, and enjoys visiting the museums, historical landmarks and cities in each country. It is from these experiences that she gained a love for ancient, medieval, and renaissance history.

She is also an avid reader, plays the violin and spends much of her time playing basketball or swimming.

Read her winning poem, 'Catalina' .

Amaal Fawzi

Senior Runner-up

Age 17, United Kingdom

Amaal Fawzi is a 17-year-old girl who was born in Egypt, raised in Lebanon, and now lives in East London. She has an Iraqi father and a British mother, and because of the education system in Lebanon, she has started university a year early! She studies English Literature with Creative Writing and has been writing poetry for many years, though she wouldn’t say she’s been writing poetry well for all of them.

Most of the poetry and prose she likes to write is concerned with culture and identity. Her years in Lebanon formed the majority of her character and cultural experiences, so learning to interact with that in the UK has been a very interesting season. It makes for a lot of writing material, and she’d say that the way she writes is always personal and drawn somehow from her own life.

Read Amaal's poem, 'Nursing Homes' . 

Maulika Pandey

Junior  Runner-up

Age 13, India

Maulika Pandey, is an 8th grade student from Aurum the Global School.

She has always enjoyed writing since she was a child as she feels writing gives her the power to express her feelings in a creative way. Maulika also enjoys sketching and playing the guitar. Basketball is her favourite sport.

She aspires to be a successful entrepreneur but will definitely continue writing in the future.

She is a dedicated advocate for anti-bullying and body positivity.

Read her entry titled, 'The Molai Forest' .

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College Readiness: How to Write a Great College Application Essay

As we continue our fall College Readiness series, Dr. P – Dominque Padurano, Ph.D, founder and president of Crimson Coaching – offers some tips on writing a great college application essay and why the essay matters so much. Dr. P writes: 

“For decades each fall, millions of high school seniors have written application essays in the hopes of earning admission into the universities of their dreams.  Recently, those essays have grown in importance. The Washington Post opined in 2017 that the number one myth in college admissions is that “essays don’t matter.” 

The global pandemic has made essays “matter” even more.  “Test-optional” admissions policies adopted in the wake of COVID-19 have rendered the essay even more “decisive” (to borrow The Post ’s term).  With one fewer data point to evaluate applicants, admissions officers must now rely more heavily on the personal statement.

These higher stakes often induce higher levels of anxiety into teenage writers. But it doesn’t have to be that way.  

Read Two or Three Successful College Application Essays

You can find examples of strong college application essays in several places.  Try “ 10 Successful Harvard Application Essays ” published annually by the student newspaper The Crimson , or Fiske Real College Essays That Work , published by the same folks responsible for the venerable Fiske Guide to Colleges .  Wherever you find them, keep in mind that these essays are finished products.  Those students revised their essays five, ten or twenty times before they became the polished gems that you’re reading.

As you peruse the essay, try to pinpoint what elements made it work.  Despite the variety of voices and forms, each effective essay conveys the author’s unique “personal brand.”  Rather than attempt to describe themselves with seventeen distinct adjectives, the author settled on one or two.  These adjectives form what I call the student’s “personal brand,” and they permeate all successful college application essays.

Identify Your Personal Brand

Before starting your own college essay, brainstorm as many adjectives as possible that describe YOU.  Go with your gut; a list of 5-10 adjectives is fine.  If you get really stuck, ask family and friends for words that best characterize you.

Group similar adjectives (e.g., “compassionate” and “empathetic”) into a single cluster.  Then, pick the one or two most important adjectives / clusters that are most important to you as a person and a student.  Write these adjectives – your own “personal brand” – on a post-it and stick the note above where you write.  This visual cue will help keep you on track, serving as a “North Star” toward which you write every time you open your laptop.

Writing a college application essay can be challenging: it’s a type of writing that most students have never done before.  With planning and the right guidance, however, this process becomes a joyful journey. Teens on the verge of adulthood can use the experience to make sense of their adolescence – and to look forward to the exciting college years that lie ahead!”

To read more tips on writing a college essay, visit Dr. P’s website . 

About the Author

Since 2014, Dr. P. has helped hundreds of students brainstorm, draft, and polish their college essays.  Her caring yet probing questions ensure that students craft personal statements that help them grow and learn, while appealing to admissions committees at the same time.  Dr. P.’s students have been admitted to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and dozens of other highly selective colleges and universities.  In addition, Dr. P. assists families to build lists of colleges to apply to that are, in the words of one student’s dad, both sensible and “inspiring.”    

Header Image  by  Seven Shooter  on  Unsplash

Inside Image by  Alex Conradt on Unsplash

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English Prize

Queens' College invites submissions for the English Prize 2021, which will be awarded to the best essay submitted by a Y ear 12 (Lower Sixth Form) student . The winner will receive a £500 prize ; depending on the strength of the field of submissions, honourable mentions may also be made.

Competition Guidelines & Questions 2021

Entries must be submitted no later than 5pm on Friday 15th April 2022 to  [email protected] .

• Please see competition guidelines  here
• The word limit is 2,500 words (including footnotes, references, illustration captions, and any other text)
• Each entry should be accompanied by a completed Cover Sheet
• Entries received after the deadline, submitted without a cover sheet or over the maximum word limit will not be considered

The winner and any honourable mention(s) will be notified by letter in May 2022 and will be invited to attend the Queens' College Open Day in July 2022.

Previous Winners

• 2015-16: Julianna Barker  (Ysgol Bro Pedr) ‘The Uses of Spectral Trees: Locke and Emily Brontë on Conveying Knowledge’
• 2016-17: Lottie McCrindell (Latymer School) ‘An Awkward Lyric’. Later graduated from Queens' with a First Class degree in English
• 2017-18: Lucy Thynne  (Lady Margaret School Fulham) 'A Hunger for Articulation: examining the encounter between the "tongue-tied" and "articulation" in poetry.' Runner up: Helena Atkin  (Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton) ‘Is poetic language its own language’.
• 2018-19: Mia Griso Dryer (The Latymer School) “Talking proper: language, liberation and oppression” (now studying at Queens') and Matilda S  (St Paul's Girls' School) “Bell hooks on female liberation from oppressive mind-body dualism: intimacy and language in women’s literature”

Queens' College Estelle Prize of £500 for Year 12 English students

The Estelle Prize

Queens' College invites submissions for the Estelle Prize for English 2024, which will be awarded to the best essay submitted by a Year 12 (Lower Sixth Form) student. The winner will receive a £500 prize; depending on the strength of the field of submissions, honourable mentions may also be made.

Entries must be submitted no later than 5pm on Friday 19 th July 2024 to [email protected] .

Entries are now open for 2024

Winners from the 2022 competition:.

1. Esme Gutch, Ilkley Grammar School, West Yorkshire, for her essay on “She knew it was poetry from the rhythm and ring of exaltation and melancholy in his voice”: An exploration of the pleasure and value of incomprehensibility in a selection of Woolf’s literary works and essays.

2. Jasmine Elworthy, Coopers’ Company and Coborn School, Upminster, for her essay on ‘The Female Epic: Form and Innovation in Aurora Leigh’.

Jasmine Elworthy

In my essay, I explored the meaning of incomprehensibility, how it can arise, and how it can give pleasure and value to the reader. I considered the form and language of ‘To the Lighthouse’,  in particular Mrs Ramsey’s relationship with words as they are spoken to her. I also used Woolf’s essays ‘A Room of One’s Own’, ‘On Being Ill’, and her diaries. The range of texts and forms enabled me to take a ‘cubist’ approach to the question of incomprehensibility which permeates Woolf’s works in many different forms: whether discussing incomprehensibility, intentionally using it, or writing in a style in which it arises. In my study of Mrs Ramsay, I came to understand that pleasure and value of the incomprehensible can be simultaneously universal and subjective: for her and the reader, words become more, or less, than words, and morph into an entity with texture, depth, and soul. In this way, they are like music, with articulation and rhythm. When the collection of words is incomprehensible, it is still possible to appreciate these words in a sequential order, placed in a position relative to other sounds in the sentence. Incomprehensibility is not synonymous with meaninglessness; it is a different, intensely sensational, and valuable perspective on meaning. I concluded that incomprehensibility does not detach from, but offers a more complex, charged, and beautiful sense of understanding – of oneself, through the way the individual interpretation is gathered, and of society, which is the sum of individual interpretations.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh , with its astonishing form and predominance of female characters, was unlike anything I had read before. I became convinced that, in making the strikingly independent Aurora narrator, Barrett Browning had necessitated the creation of a new form of epic poem. My essay applies Cixous’ concept of the écriture féminine to justify that Aurora Leigh, as a poem written by a woman about a woman with a strongly proto-feminist bent, was necessarily different from the traditional male-identified epic. While structurally in line with epic conventions, Aurora Leigh freely innovates by involving elements of the 19th Century woman’s novel and the lyric to create a form that is both intensely personal and uniquely accessible to a female audience. Aspects of novelistic polyphony are used to recreate the political discourse of the Victorian drawing room and to highlight the voices of the marginalised women who were excluded from said discourse. I conclude that, due to innovations in its form, Aurora Leigh was able to not only encapsulate the social and political climate of its time, but also to articulate faithfully female emotional, spiritual, and intellectual life, rendering it a profoundly modern and relevant text. 

Previous winners

2015-16: Julianna B  (Ysgol Bro Pedr) ‘The Uses of Spectral Trees: Locke and Emily Brontë on Conveying Knowledge’.

2016-17: Lottie McCrindell (Latymer School) ‘An Awkward Lyric’ . Later graduated from Queens' with a First Class degree in English.

2017-18: Lucy Thynne  (Lady Margaret School Fulham) 'A Hunger for Articulation: examining the encounter between the "tongue-tied" and "articulation" in poetry.'

Runner up: Helena A  (Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton) ‘Is poetic language its own language’.

2018-19: Mia Griso Dryer (The Latymer School) 'Talking proper: language, liberation and oppression' (now studying at Queens').

and Matilda Sidel  (St Paul's Girls' School) “Bell hooks on female liberation from oppressive mind-body dualism: intimacy and language in women’s literature”.

2021-2022: Esme G (Ilkley Grammar School) "She knew it was poetry from the rhythm and ring of exaltation and melancholy in his voice” : An exploration of the pleasure and value of incomprehensibility in a selection of Woolf’s literary works and essays.

and Jasmine E (Coopers’ Company and Coborn School) ‘The Female Epic: Form and Innovation in Aurora Leigh’.

Lottie M, prize winner 2016-17

Lucy T, prize winner 2018-19

Matilda Sidel

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Queens College Essays Samples For Students

13 samples of this type

WowEssays.com paper writer service proudly presents to you a free catalog of Queens College Essays meant to help struggling students deal with their writing challenges. In a practical sense, each Queens College Essay sample presented here may be a guidebook that walks you through the crucial phases of the writing procedure and showcases how to compose an academic work that hits the mark. Besides, if you need more visionary help, these examples could give you a nudge toward a fresh Queens College Essay topic or inspire a novice approach to a threadbare theme.

In case this is not enough to quench the thirst for effective writing help, you can request personalized assistance in the form of a model College Essay on Queens crafted by a pro writer from scratch and tailored to your specific instructions. Be it a simple 2-page paper or an in-depth, extended piece, our writers specialized in Queens and related topics will deliver it within the pre-set timeframe. Buy cheap essays or research papers now!

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Fall 2025 UGA Essay Questions

  david graves        may 22nd, 2024 in blog.

For First Year students applying to UGA for Fall 2025, we will keep the same longer personal essay (250-650 words) as before, using the essay prompts from the Common App . The shorter UGA specific essay (200-300 words suggested) topic will also remain the same as last year, with the following essay prompt:

“ The transition from middle to high school is a key time for students as they reach new levels of both academic and personal discovery. Please share a book (novel, non-fiction, etc.) that had a serious impact on you during this time. Please focus more on why this book made an impact on you and less on the plot/theme of the book itself (we are not looking for a book report).”

• FYI – We are not restricting you to the exact years of 8th-9th grades, but rather the general timeframe of the middle to high school transition, which can extend somewhat further than one year on each end. Feel free to use your discretion in your choice of the timeline focused on the shift to your high school years.

As always, we also share an essay from an enrolling First-Year student that we believe shows great writing skills:

As a middle-schooler on the brink of entering high school, I was like lost cattle entering a vast social and academic wilderness. In the center, a winding, sun-soaked desert path stretched far into the horizon, beckoning my gaze with its promise of adventure and discovery. Enter The Alchemist and its magnificent idea of the “Personal Legend”– a life goal so lofty that it made locating my locker on the first day of high school appear easy. Forget about the difficulty of making new hobbies or friends; the content from this novel sure played an essential role in determining my ideology related to pursuing my future.

The protagonist enthusiastically praised the significance of believing in one’s dreams, which led my younger self down the correct path. Generating profits after extensive hours of work through my business, navigating changes in learning after COVID-19, and confronting adversity due to my darker skin color all presented difficult periods where persistence and faith were important in progress. Although self-belief was a crucial aspect of pushing through difficult times, it also motivated me to be more confident. Taking risks, from soloing in my 8th-grade jazz band to giving my crush a cringeworthy love letter, changed my belief in embracing adversity.

Furthermore, the book’s emphasis on interacting with people from different backgrounds, cultures, and belief systems mirrors my journey into the real world. Whether developing a dancing board at a Purdue summer camp or a calculus Halloween graph, collaboration enforces the ability to work with others who may share different ideas. Diverse backgrounds boosted my understanding, tolerance, and empathy while increasing my engineering career readiness. Not only was The Alchemist a great book, but it enforced critical systems that I use until this day to succeed in life. The Alchemist played an essential role in instilling new concepts I needed as an adolescent. “And when you want something, all the universe conspires you to achieve it.” Thank you, Paulo Coelho.  – Josh W, Collins Hill HS.

• This essay gives us insight into the student’s feelings and thoughts, and he shares his ideas through descriptive word choice. This is an excellent essay, but please know that we are not expecting this level of writing from the applicant pool overall. This essay example is meant to show our applicant pool how to express themselves through examples, personal growth and emotion. When we are reviewing essays, we are looking more at the student’s voice coming through and less on technical writing skills.

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