Featured Supplemental Essay Prompt For Pratt Institute Applicants:

Write about a piece of work (visual art, musical performance, piece of writing, architecture, or design) that has influenced you and describe the impact it has had on your perspective OR write about a part of your work and the impact of creating the work has had on you. 500 Word Maximum.

Successful Supplemental Essay Example From Our Accepted Alumni Student:

Mom guided Dad and me into a stucco house with chipping paint, the first house on the left as you walk into the only road that runs through Faiões in Portugal. Faiões is a village set between a cliff and this road, tiny stucco houses and crumbling stone walls for only a few square kilometers.

I was a wiry seventh grader. Growing up in America, I had never seen anything like this building before. It was a three-room, bare house with wide-plank wooden floors. It was my mom’s now-abandoned childhood home.

We returned to my grandmother’s house that night. I took out my phone to draft tiny digital sketches of the house. We wandered into the nearby city-like Chaves that week, and I began to spot some of the features I recognized from my architecture books.

I had loved architecture since before I could start forming memories. Mom tells me that when we had to write “What we wanted to be when we grew up” on a poster in kindergarten, I botched the spelling of “Architect.”

As we wandered the cobblestone streets of Chaves, mom tells me, I pointed to cathedrals and bridges and shouted out their styles. “That’s Baroque! That’s Gothic! That’s Moorish!” I saw my new favorite castle, Palácio Nacional da Pena. Beautiful landscaping, ponds with waterfalls, and a stone stairway led up to the most exotic and colorful castle I had ever seen.

I sketched on my phone all the while. This experience was one of my first in rendering forms that had endured for centuries. It made me reflect on experimentation with geometric forms of buildings that occurred long ago in my family history. I wanted to know how creators think, conceptualize, and adapt as time goes on.

Back in the United States two years later, I helped put together a much more complex map than the ones I had sketched on my cell phone. I was assisting [Mentor] in compiling information for her documentary [Documentary Title]. The goal of the project was to map well-known NYC architectural landmarks created by female architects and engineers who went uncredited for so many years. The job allowed me to discover new architects, new firms, and new ideas. I became interested in morphology and decided to relentlessly pursue a path of study that would allow me to become an architect with a deeper understanding of the forms of structures and the space created within it, how it protects from the elements, and its longevity over time.

In creating the documentary, [Mentor] also helped me to become part of an important movement. So many people walk past the Empire State Building, the Seagram Building, the Brooklyn Bridge every single day. Individuals often appreciate the building, but not the people who design them–and especially, not all of the people who dreamt them up.

Maybe my name will be known–maybe not. I’ll keep drawing and designing and dreaming, regardless of who may ever stroll past something I dream up.