Michigan Supplemental Essays 2026-27: Prompts and Examples

What Michigan Is Looking For

Michigan says it evaluates your essays as part of its holistic review, and that they are your chance to distinguish yourself in your own voice. Its essay page points to a few things it wants to see:

• Leaders and citizens: Michigan says it is focused on developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future. The first essay asks how you are prepared to contribute to that.

• Your own voice: Michigan says your application should reflect your own ideas, experiences, and authentic voice, and that essays should tell your story in your words.

• Interest in your specific school: Michigan’s advice for the second essay points to faculty, courses, and research opportunities, programs you took part in that are affiliated with the university or your school, and an upper-level program if you are applying for preferred admission.

You don’t need to echo “challenge the present and enrich the future” back at the reader. A specific story shows the value, and a quoted slogan only shows you read the page.

Michigan asks two required essays from every applicant: one of 100 to 300 words and one of 100 to 550 words. The second is about the specific college or school you are applying to, so settle on your unit before you draft. Some schools and programs at Michigan, such as Ross, Stamps, and the arts schools, have asked for extra materials like portfolios or auditions on their own pages. Those are not on Michigan’s Common App essay page, so check your school’s admissions page for this year’s requirements.

Michigan allows AI tools for brainstorming, outlining, proofreading, or organizing information, and asks that you not copy and paste AI-generated text. Admissions readers see thousands of essays, and a specific, personal one is the easiest kind to recognize.

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Required Essays

1. Leaders and Citizens

“At the University of Michigan, we are focused on developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future. In your essay, share with us how you are prepared to contribute to these goals. This could include the people, places, experiences, or aspirations that have shaped your journey and future plans.” (100 to 300 words)

What to do

• Pick one or two focused moments. Choose a moment where you took initiative and something changed. A specific action and its result beats a summary of everything you have done.

• Cover the citizen half too. The prompt says leaders and citizens. Show who benefited from what you did and how you plan to keep contributing on campus, not just that you led.

• Use the prompt’s open list. People, places, experiences, and aspirations all count. Choose the one that explains your journey, then connect it to what you will do next at Michigan.

What to avoid

• Don’t write a resume in paragraph form. President of this, captain of that. With only 300 words, a list of titles leaves no room for the one moment that shows who you are.

• Don’t make world-changing claims. Big statements about changing the world with nothing real underneath them read as inflated. Keep it to what you have done and what it led to.

• Don’t retell your Common App essay. The reader already has your main essay. Use this one for a different moment and a different side of you.

Example: The first procedure I wrote was four lines on an index card: ask, sit, count, wait. I wrote it the day a classmate froze in the hallway before a chemistry exam and six of us stood around her saying “you’re fine,” which made it worse. I knew the feeling from the inside. For two years I had hidden my own panic before debate rounds by pretending to reread my notes.

The card said what to do, in order. Ask if she wants company. Sit down at her level. Count breaths out loud, four in and six out. Wait without fixing anything. I tried it on myself first, then on friends, then I asked our school counselor, Ms. Alvarez, to read it. She cut one step and added a line about when to bring in an adult.

By spring the card was a one-page handout, and I ran three twenty-minute sessions in homeroom for forty-one students. A sophomore told me later that she used it in a parking lot to help her brother. That is the part I keep thinking about, because I wasn’t in the room when it worked.

At Michigan I want to get involved with the Wolverine Support Network, where trained students lead peer support groups. I would bring the habit the card taught me: write down what works, in order, test it on yourself first, and hand it to someone who can make it better.

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2. College or School Fit

“Describe the unique qualities that attract you to the specific undergraduate college or school (including preferred admission and dual degree programs) to which you are applying at the University of Michigan. How would that curriculum support your interests?” (100 to 550 words)

What to do

• Anchor to the exact unit. Write about the specific college or school you are applying to (LSA, Engineering, Ross, Nursing, and so on), including preferred admission or a dual degree if it applies. The prompt asks about that unit, not Michigan overall.

• Name the curriculum, not just courses. Name specific courses, sequences, labs, studios, or project teams, and say how each supports something you already care about. The prompt asks how the curriculum would support your interests.

• Start with your interest. Open with a question or project you already have, then show how the curriculum extends it. Curriculum first reads like a brochure.

What to avoid

• Don’t write a generic Why Michigan essay. Ann Arbor, football, school spirit, and rankings answer a different question. This prompt is about your college or school and its curriculum.

• Don’t list courses with no thread. Five course codes in a row show you read the catalog, not why those courses matter to you. Connect each one to the same interest.

• Don’t write about the wrong unit. Describing LSA features in an Engineering application, or the reverse, signals the essay was recycled. Check the program and course names against your school’s own pages.

Example (LSA, Program in the Environment): I run my school’s newspaper, and the story that changed how I read it was about our soccer field. After every storm the field floods, and the school said the drainage was fine. I interviewed the facilities manager, an engineer who is also a parent, and two neighbors whose basements fill with the same water. All of them were certain, and I could not tell which of them was right. I did not know what runoff does to soil, what a drainage report was claiming, or how to check the numbers. I wrote the story carefully, and I knew it was thin.

That is why I am applying to LSA for the Environment major. It starts with the science and then asks who lives with the answer. I would take General Ecology at the University of Michigan Biological Station, because I want to learn to read a landscape in the field before I write about one. From there I would choose the Environmental Social Science specialization, since my reporting kept ending at the question of who pays when a system fails. The analytics requirement matters as much to me as the ecology: I want to leave able to check a number instead of quoting it. And the senior capstone is where I could turn a question like the flooded field into a full study instead of an 800-word article.

I would bring the habit I already have, which is asking the person most affected by a problem what they see, into every class project and research group I join.

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Example (Ross School of Business, BBA): When Egypt devalued the pound, my uncle’s phone-accessory shop in Cairo repriced twice in one week. Customers who had browsed for months arrived all at once to buy chargers they did not need yet. My uncle raised prices before his supplier did, then lowered them when his regular customers stopped coming. Nobody in that shop had read an economics book, and everyone was reacting to the same number differently.

I want to understand the gap between what a currency does and what people do next, and Ross is built to let me test that. REAL, the Ross Experiences in Action-Based Learning, is the part of the BBA I keep returning to. The Maize and Blue Fund would let me help manage a student-run fund and watch how investors respond when a market moves. Capstone MAP would have me consult for a real business on a strategic problem, and I would look for a company that imports, because that is the problem I know. Ross says about half of BBA classes take place at other schools on campus, so I would build the economics foundation in LSA alongside the business core. And the Global Semester Exchange would let me spend a term at a partner business school in a country where currency swings shape everyday pricing.

I do not know yet whether I will end up in finance or running a business like my uncle’s. Ross lets me find out by doing both.

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Example (College of Engineering, Industrial and Operations Engineering): Last winter I built a model of our cafeteria line to settle an argument with my friends, and the model was wrong in a useful way. I had assumed students arrive evenly through lunch. They do not. Eighty arrive in the first four minutes, and the wait I had predicted at ninety seconds was closer to nine minutes. I had a clean equation and a bad assumption, and the equation had no way to tell me.

I counted arrivals with a stopwatch and a tally sheet, rebuilt the model from the real numbers, and the cafeteria added a second register. I did not feel clever. I felt lucky that I had caught my own mistake before anyone built something on it.

Industrial and Operations Engineering looks like the department built around that moment. Introduction to Markov Processes (IOE 316) and Queueing Systems (IOE 416) are where I would learn the math behind waiting lines, and Discrete-Event Simulation (IOE 474) is where I could test an assumption before a cafeteria has to live with it. Then Practicum in Production and Service Systems (IOE 424), a team project on an externally sponsored design problem, would give me a real system with real arrivals, where the first thing I would do is count them.

Within the College of Engineering, IOE would let me keep asking the question that started this: what did I assume, and who would notice if I was wrong?

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