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How to Write the Virginia Tech Essays 2023-2024

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, more commonly known as Virginia Tech, is a public land-grant university located in Blacksburg Virginia. It is one of 6 U.S. senior military colleges. With over 200 undergraduate and graduate programs and over 30,000 students, Virginia Tech is the largest university in Virginia.

Since Virginia Tech is a fairly selective school, writing strong essays is essential to standing out as an applicant. At first glance, completing these essays might seem like no easy task. However, we at CollegeVine are here to provide guidance on how to approach Virginia Tech’s supplements!

Read these Virginia Tech essay examples to inspire your own writing.

Virginia Tech Supplemental Essay Prompts

All applicants.

Prompt 1: Virginia Tech’s motto is “Ut Prosim” which means ‘That I May Serve’. Share how you contribute to a community that is important to you. How long have you been involved? What have you learned and how would you like to share that with others at Virginia Tech? (120 words)

Prompt 2: Virginia Tech’s Principles of Community supports access and inclusion by affirming the dignity and value of every person, respecting differences, promoting mutual understanding and open expression, and strives to eliminate bias and discrimination. Reflect on a time when you were not able or allowed to express a different or diverse position or opinion (or you witnessed another person or group experience the same situation)? How did you respond or wish you would have responded? Did your viewpoint change in any way after this experience? (120 words)

Prompt 3: Share a time when you were most proud of yourself either as a role model or when you displayed your leadership. What specific skills did you contribute to the experience? How did others rely on you for guidance? What did you learn about yourself during this time? (120 words)

Prompt 4: Describe a goal that you have set and the steps you will take to achieve it. What made you set this goal for yourself? What is your timeline to achieve this goal? Who do you seek encouragement or guidance from as you work on this goal? (120 words)

Virginia Tech’s motto is “Ut Prosim” which means ‘That I May Serve’. Share how you contribute to a community that is important to you. How long have you been involved? What have you learned and how would you like to share that with others at Virginia Tech? (120 words)

The point of this prompt is to see how you have been an active member of a particular community so admissions officers can get a sense of your passions and how you will embrace the Virginia Tech community. With a word count of only 120 words, there is little room to be too verbose or detailed. However, 120 words is still enough room to fully answer the prompt and give the necessary details asked.

When brainstorming for this prompt, you want to consider the extracurricular activities and community service activities that have been the most meaningful for you. For instance, if you volunteered at the local hospital for 3 years, you might discuss how through the interactions you had with sick patients you were able to brighten their day and seize moments in your own life because you never know when something terrible might happen. Maybe water polo was your favorite activity you participated in in high school because you were able to combine swimming with your competitive side, and now in your senior season you get to share your love for the sport when you help coach the freshmen.

Next, you want to demonstrate how your involvement in this specific community has shaped your development. A great way to do this is to show who you were (through thoughts, feelings, emotions, or physicalities) before you joined this community, and who you are now as a result. An example of this might be a student who joined the track and field team because they didn’t want the pressure and responsibility they would have on a traditional sports team. Through bus rides to meets, team dinners, and daily practices, this student became more comfortable with their teammates and relied on them both on and off the track. Now, this student’s favorite event is the relay because they work with their teammates, and nothing beats the feeling of hearing their teammates cheer them on.

This final piece is where you will convince admissions officers you are the right fit for the campus community. There is not “one right answer,” as this is highly personal to each individual. The way to approach this is to be as specific as possible about what you want to do on campus. Make sure however, that you can back up whatever you say with the rest of your application. You do not have to try and find some unique program that you think would make you stand out if it’s not something that connects to the community you were previously a part of.

For example, if you really enjoyed writing for your high school newspaper, then you could mention how you want to continue that passion by applying for a position on The Collegiate Times, the university’s newspaper focused on covering campus news, features, sports and opinions. Whatever it is that you want to continue doing in college, try to find the corresponding club or organization within Virginia Tech that you would join. Once again, this will help tie your individual goals with that of the university and show that you really spent time looking into them. Having more information about Virginia Tech will not only help you solidify your own reasons for applying, but it will also show the admissions team that the school is a good fit for you.

Virginia Tech’s Principles of Community supports access and inclusion by affirming the dignity and value of every person, respecting differences, promoting mutual understanding and open expression, and strives to eliminate bias and discrimination. Reflect on a time when you were not able or allowed to express a different or diverse position or opinion (or you witnessed another person or group experience the same situation)? How did you respond or wish you would have responded? Did your viewpoint change in any way after this experience? (120 words)

This essay presents a fantastic opportunity to showcase both how you navigate difficult situations and respect others’ opinions. At its core, it’s an essay about your growth as a person either by gaining your own voice, helping others speak up, or reflecting on how you could’ve done more.

For some, this may be a difficult prompt to brainstorm as we may want to block out the tough moments in life, but for others, this could be a deeply-provoking prompt that stirs up emotion. This may be especially pertinent for members of religious, ethnic or minority groups who have had their voices quelled. Alternatively, you could be a passive observer of a similar situation, or involved in school club or friend feuds.

Write down a list of possible topics, and don’t worry too much about the context of the discussion so much as its content and impact. In any case, you should aim to anecdotally share this experience, but keep in mind that the word limit is very limited at 120 words, so ensure that a majority of your response is spent answering how you responded to the situation and what you learned.

Also, determining whether an issue is “important” or not can be a subjective matter. Your essay doesn’t necessarily need to be about weighty topics such as being ignored as a woman in an entirely male Model UN cabinet meeting or your school canceling your club’s planned walk-out for the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, it is more than reasonable to write about “smaller” situations (local issues can be especially promising). For example, maybe you weren’t allowed to speak at the local town hall meeting because no one took you seriously as a non-adult, or maybe your friend group ostracized someone after they discovered she had different political beliefs.

By virtue of Virginia Tech including this prompt, you want to emphasize how you include new perspectives into your life, strive to eliminate bias and discrimination, and respect differences.

After creating your list, scan your potential topic ideas. Pay special attention to the second half of the prompt and consider how you responded to the situation. Which experience was the most transformative? Emotional? Unique? Which do you remember the most clearly and why? Once you’ve narrowed down your options into a few viable ones, pick the one that you feel will make it easiest to craft a compelling story especially considering the limited word count.

When starting this essay, include just enough to set the scene. Don’t dwell on exposition, irrelevant details of the conversation, or negative emotions surrounding the event for too long. Who was there? Whose voice was the loudest in the room? What was the power dynamic? Introduce each viewpoint as succinctly as possible while still preserving important details, keeping in mind the strict word count.

Really dive into how your thinking was shifted or augmented by your experience or even what broader lessons you may have learned after understanding the issue at hand. What did you do during or after the event took place? Did you research the topic more deeply or take other action?

For example, maybe you weren’t taken seriously as the only non-adult at a local town hall meeting, and you weren’t able to share your proposal. At first, you felt dejected, but after speaking with others who felt similarly frustrated, you formed a student-group subcommittee that provided strength in numbers, allowing you to raise points to the committee in unison. As a result, you led the proposal for the construction of safe road-side pathways and sidewalks for students walking home after school to prevent accidents from occuring in your downtown and local inner neighborhood roads.

By the end of the essay, your reader should feel that you know how to stand up for yourself or others and are able to create positive change as a result.

Share a time when you were most proud of yourself either as a role model or when you displayed your leadership. What specific skills did you contribute to the experience? How did others rely on you for guidance? What did you learn about yourself during this time? (120 words)

At first glance, this prompt seems quite broad, as you have the choice between discussing one of several options: influencing others, leadership, resolving a dispute, or contributing to group goals. However, while these may seem different, each of these is centered around the idea of leadership. With that being said, you want to describe a situation in which you took an active role, as this will highlight your leadership and problem-solving abilities. Since this prompt is similar to the first prompt, you should choose a new topic.

An example of this could be if you were a member of the Robotics Team. Perhaps prior to competition, you and your group faced various obstacles that delayed or prevented the design from being properly executed. Maybe you proposed an improvement and work division system that allowed you and your team to work more efficiently, later allowing you to win the competition. An example similar to this one would be an excellent way to showcase your leadership and problem-solving abilities.

You could discuss your role in a group project and how you and your team worked together to execute your goals, but this is quite cliche. Instead, you want to consider a scenario with a little more weight; while your school project may have seemed important at the moment, it usually isn’t accompanied with any larger implications. However, you could spin this trivial moment to talk about how you had to assume one of the hardest responsibilities of a leader, which is confronting team members who don’t pull their weight. By discussing your thought process and how you learned how to skillfully get your point across without offending your group member, you can turn an insignificant group project into a huge turning point in your development.

As long as the focus of this essay is on you—specifically your skills and character traits—this essay will accomplish its goal of proving to admissions officers you are capable of being a leader. Make sure you include the circumstances that required you to step up, you highlight two or three skills you demonstrated by describing your actions and thought process in the situation, and you finish by articulating how this experience helped you grow as a leader.

Describe a goal that you have set and the steps you will take to achieve it. What made you set this goal for yourself? What is your timeline to achieve this goal? Who do you seek encouragement or guidance from as you work on this goal? (120 words)

For this essay, your goal could be from any aspect of your life. You could choose an academic goal, a career goal, or a more personal goal. Here, you want to describe why this goal is important to you by describing the motivations you have for setting this goal.

For instance, if your goal is to become a heart surgeon, you could outline your plan to study biological sciences, volunteer at the local hospital to interact with patients, and eventually shadow a physician to obtain a more direct perspective. Perhaps you are a member of the pre medical society at your school and turned to your advisor for help on achieving this goal. The most important part of your essay is why you want to be a heart surgeon, so you need to include that somewhere in your essay. For example, you might start your essay by describing how your grandma had a heart attack when you were younger and you idolized the surgeons who were saving her life. The why is the most important part of your essay, so revealing it through an anecdote is a great way to explain your why, while also including an emotional connection.

Your goal, however, does not have to be as long term as a career goal. For example, your goal could be learning to cook authentic dishes from your family’s culture. Perhaps you always witnessed your parents in the kitchen, following recipes passed down from generation to generation, and this motivated you to continue the tradition so you can feel closer to your heritage.

Overall, with all these essays, you want to give the admissions committee a glimpse into your individuality. Although all these essays are short, a short, meaningful paragraph can give the reader the insight needed to gauge your personality, values, and goals. Remember, make these essays personal! We hope this guide has allowed you to approach Virginia Tech’s application with the utmost confidence. Happy writing!

Where to Get Your Virginia Tech Essays Edited

Do you want feedback on your Virginia Tech essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

How Many Paragraphs in an Essay?

As a rule, you’ll write your essay in three main parts. First, you’ll introduce your topic to your reader. Next, you will have body text in which you discuss the topic in more detail, and finally, you’ll have a conclusion that tells your reader what you were able to see after looking into the facts or thinking through the topic.

In its simplest form, an essay can consist of three paragraphs with one paragraph being devoted to each section. Proponents of the five paragraph essay say that the body text should consist of three paragraphs, but in reality, it’s fine to write more or fewer paragraphs in this section.

Guessing How Many Paragraphs Before You Begin

This is a rule of thumb, which means it won’t always work quite that way, but it’s handy all the same. In academic work, your paragraphs are likely to be a bit longer than most of the ones you see in this blog post. On average, there are usually 100 to 200 words in a paragraph . So if you’d like a guesstimate, you can assume that a 1,000-word essay will have between five and ten paragraphs.

What Points Do You Have to Cover?

Another, less limiting and more accurate way to work out how many paragraphs you need to cover your topic is to look at the main points you have to cover in the body text. A paragraph contains all the ideas that support or explain a single concept.

When you are planning your essay, you will think of or research the main elements that are needed in the body text. It would be safe to assume you need at least one paragraph for each of these. Of course, if there is a lot of information to cover in order to explore each area, you may need more.

For example, if you are writing an essay on childhood development and exposure to technology, you will want to look into the physical, psychological and cognitive developmental effects of tech on kids. When you research this topic, you will find that there are contrasting points of view and researchers have identified several physical, developmental, and psychological effects of technology use in children.

Assuming five psychological effects have been identified, you can assume you’ll need to write five paragraphs if you are going to write a relatively in-depth essay. But if both those who say technology is bad for kids and those who say it can be good have done a great deal of work on the sub-topic, you might want to make that ten paragraphs so that you can cover both sides of the argument and look into how earlier authors reached their conclusions.

Of course, if you have been set a relatively short word limit , you may not be able to go in-depth at all, in which case a paragraph for each of the main sub-topics (psychology, physical development, and cognitive development) will likely be adequate.

Essay Content Is More Important Than the Number of Paragraphs

Ultimately, your essay will be evaluated on the information you present, not on the number of paragraphs in the essay. Early in your academic life, teachers and lecturers may give you both a structure for your essay and a guideline on how long each part of the essay should be. I have seen essay instructions say how many marks are allocated for each section, and my trick is to take the total word count and allocate a percentage of words to each section based on the percentage of marks you can get for it. After all, if the teacher is allocating 80 marks for content in total and you can see 50% of the mark relates to a certain part of the essay, then 50% of your essay’s words should be devoted to that section.

Sometimes, you’ll just be given a topic and told to air your opinion. This gives you more freedom, but it’s a tad more difficult. The research will show you how many angles you should look at, and it’ll help you to find information that both supports and contradicts your point of view. To make a strong argument, you need to look at both supporting and contradictory information.

To avoid getting tangled up in one aspect of the discussion, you’ll have to decide how long it should be. If it’s the most important aspect informing your conclusion, you can spend a little more time (and words) on that particular point. It could run into several paragraphs rather than just one or two.

Always Remember the Purpose of Paragraphs

Paragraphs structure information into sub-topics, and they make your work easier to read and understand thanks to the structure they provide. With careful advance planning, you’ll be able to work out more or less how many paragraphs you need to complete your essay.

How many paragraphs is…

For those looking for a general rule-of-thumb, below are some estimates on the number of paragraphs there would be in an essay of different lengths based on an average length of 150 words per paragraph. Of course, the number of paragraphs for your essay will depend on many different factors. You can use the following information for a general reference, but don’t take these numbers as literal. .

Basic Essay Word to Paragraphs Conversions

A 100 word essay is 3 paragraph. (minimum for an essay)
A 200 word essay is 3 paragraphs. (minimum for an essay)
A 250 word essay is 3 paragraphs. (minimum for an essay)
A 300 word essay is 3 paragraphs. (minimum for an essay)
A 400 word essay is 3 paragraphs. (minimum for an essay)
A 500 word essay is 3 to 4 paragraphs.
A 600 word essay is 4 paragraphs.
A 700 word essay is 4 to 5 paragraphs.
A 750 word essay is 5 paragraphs.
A 800 word essay is 5 to 6 paragraphs.
A 900 word essay is 6 paragraphs.
A 1,000 word essay is 6 to 7 paragraphs.
A 1,250 word essay is 8 to 9 paragraphs.
A 1,500 word essay is 10 paragraphs.
A 1,750 word essay is 11 to 12 paragraphs.
A 2,000 word essay is 13 to 14 paragraphs.
A 2,500 word essay is 16 to 17 paragraphs.
A 3,000 word essay is 20 paragraphs.
A 4,000 word essay is 26 to 27 paragraphs.
A 5,000 word essay is 33 to 34 paragraphs.
A 6,000 word essay is 40 paragraphs.
A 7,000 word essay is 46 to 37 paragraphs.
A 7,500 word essay is 50 paragraphs.
A 8,000 word essay is 53 to 54 paragraphs.
A 9,000 word essay is 60 paragraphs.
A 10,000 word essay is 66 to 67 paragraphs.

I don’t understand, How can a 100, 200, 300 and 400 word essay all have 3 paragraphs if a paragraph is 100 to 200 words long? A 100 word essay should be 1 paragraph or 1/2 a paragraph, not 3 paragraphs. Can someone explain this too me?

A sentence is an idea. A paragraph is a group of ideas that relate to one another. That’s the most important point. The second most important one is remembering that your text consists of introduction, body, conclusion with at LEAST one paragraph for each. While teachers like 100 to 200 word paragraphs, you can’t always apply that. Call it a guideline rather than a rule!

the general rule is that 3 paragraphs are minimum for an essay. So, no matter how short your essay is, you should still need 3 paragraphs. If you are really for some reason writing a 100 word essay, then you should have one short sentence for both your introduction and conclusion.

I was always taught an essay has five paragraphs by my teachers. Did they lie to me? If an essay only needs three paragraphs, why would my teachers tell me that they should have five?

I think the five paragraphs for an essay is more of a rule-of-thumb number that is easy to teach students when they are first learning to write. Your teacher was just trying to make sure you understood how to write, not give you a rule you had to always obey.

I think five paragraphs is a good number to shoot for when writing, but it isn’t a hard-fast rule you need to hit every time. Each essay is different and require more or less paragraphs depending on the information you need to provide in the writing.

yes and no.. i would say a good on as 4 paragraph. Intro, 2 body P, and a conclusion.

My teachers always taught by eight paragraph essays, but five-paragraph essays normally lie precedent to the more advanced or larger essays.

I was taught essays should be 7 paragraphs long, not 5. My teacher said 3 central paragraphs never gives enough detail to the topic, so we should write 5. It makes sense to me and that is how I’ve always done it.

What you’re taught is often a general rule to shoot for, not a rule set in concrete. That’s the case with this. Your teacher felt that 7 paragraphs was a good number for the essays you wrote for her, but it doesn’t always have to be that way. it’s a general rule, not a concrete one.

How many sentences if we don’t know how many sentences we need to write?

The average paragraph contains 5-6 sentences. If you’re feeling a little extra, paragraphs can be 7-10 sentences.

It also depends on whether or not you are bringing outside information into the paragraph as well. Using quotes makes a paragraph longer than not doing so.

I think the length of a paper depends mainly on the instructions given by the instructor. Secondly, I would decide a paper length on the basis of the grading rubric.

I already knew an essay has three paragraphs

Inilividual project: follow all steps and develop a paragraph of your choice and write all expository essay with not less than 500 words of the povoloped paragraph?

On average for a five-paragraph essay, I write around 1,000-1300 words. For an eight paragraph essay, I write around 2,000-2,600 words on the document. Keep in mind your quotes too, you should have one quote per paragraph (expected) or two (recommended). It really is up to the person though, I have a buddy who writes considerably less than I do, but is able to get his point across. It is really up to the person.

Student A: Sir, do we have to write a long essay?

How will I determine my word count for 1300 to 1500 maximum words in the academic writing?