Duke Supplemental Essays 2025-2026: Prompts, Expert Tips & Sample Answers

My impression of Duke is that it is a place of "interdisciplinary curiosity." It is a community that does not force students to choose between the sciences and the humanities but instead encourages them to find the intersection between them. This philosophy is exactly what I am looking for. My goal is to work in sustainable urban planning, a field that requires both the technical knowledge of an engineer and the social understanding of a public policy analyst.

At Duke, I will not have to choose. I am excited by the opportunity to major in Civil Engineering at the Pratt School while also pursuing the Policy, Journalism, and Media Studies certificate. I am particularly drawn to the Bass Connections program, where I hope to join a project team that combines engineering and social science to tackle real world problems. The "Smart Toilet and Grid-Scale Urban Sanitation" project is a perfect example of the kind of work I want to do.

Beyond academics, I am drawn to the sense of community I have heard about from current students. I want to contribute to that spirit by joining the Duke Smart Home club, where I can collaborate with other students to design and build a more sustainable future.

Growing up, I was the unofficial translator for my family’s small restaurant. My parents, who immigrated from Vietnam, spoke the language of food, but not the language of health codes, supply chain logistics, or marketing. From the age of twelve, I was the bridge between their culinary vision and the American business world. I translated health department regulations, negotiated with suppliers, and even designed our first takeout menu.

This experience taught me to be more than just bilingual. It taught me to be bicultural. I learned to navigate the subtle differences in communication styles, expectations, and values between two different worlds. I became adept at listening not just to what was said, but to what was meant.

At Duke, I want to bring this skill of cultural translation to the campus community. I am excited by the prospect of joining organizations like the Duke International Association, where I can help create a welcoming environment for students from all backgrounds. My experience has taught me that a vibrant community is not just about having diverse voices in the room. It is about making sure everyone has the tools and the confidence to be understood.

My grandfather and I build a ship in a bottle every summer. He is a man of precision and patience, following the instructions to the letter. I, on the other hand, am an improviser. Last summer, as we were building a model of a Spanish galleon, I suggested we add a kraken made of clay to the scene. He was horrified. "It is not historically accurate," he said, tapping the instruction booklet. I argued that it would make the scene more dramatic and interesting.

Our disagreement was not about the ship, but about two different ways of approaching a project: tradition versus creativity. For days, we debated. I showed him sketches of my kraken, and he showed me historical diagrams of the galleon. We did not yell. We simply presented our evidence.

In the end, we reached a compromise. We built the ship exactly as the instructions dictated, but we added a single, small tentacle peeking out from behind a wave. It was a nod to my creativity that did not compromise his commitment to accuracy. That experience taught me that disagreement does not have to be a battle to be won. It can be a collaboration that leads to a more interesting solution.

The last thing I was truly excited about was a typo in a 14th century manuscript. While working on a research project for my history class, I was looking at a digitized version of a medieval text and noticed something strange. The scribe had written the Latin word "milites," meaning soldiers, but had then scraped it away and replaced it with "homines," meaning men.

It was a tiny change, but it sent me down a rabbit hole of intellectual discovery. Why would a scribe make that specific correction? Was it a simple mistake, or was it a deliberate choice reflecting a changing worldview? I spent the next week researching the social context of the manuscript, learning about the shifting definitions of class and warfare in the late Middle Ages. I discovered that the change from "soldiers" to "men" might have been a subtle political statement, an attempt to humanize the subjects of the text.

That small typo was a keyhole into a lost world of thought. It was a reminder that history is not just a collection of facts, but a living document full of human choices, arguments, and passions. That moment of discovery, of finding a whole world in a single word, is what I live for.

I would absolutely use AI to help me analyze the thousands of images of distant galaxies captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. An AI model could be trained to identify patterns, classify galaxy types, and flag anomalies that a human eye might miss. In this context, AI is a powerful tool for data processing. It can handle a scale of information that is beyond human capacity, freeing up researchers to focus on the more creative work of interpretation and hypothesis. My thinking here is shaped by a belief in efficiency and augmentation. AI should be used to do what humans cannot do well, which is process massive datasets without fatigue or bias.

However, I would never use AI to write a letter of condolence to a friend who had lost a loved one. While an AI could certainly generate a grammatically correct and even eloquent message, it would lack the one thing that matters most in that situation: genuine human empathy. A letter of condolence is not about producing a perfect product. It is about the act of reaching out, of sharing in another person's grief. My thinking here is shaped by a belief in the irreplaceable value of human connection. AI can simulate emotion, but it cannot feel it. For tasks that require empathy, sincerity, and a shared human experience, there is no substitute for the human heart.