McMaster Arts & Science Supplementary Application: 5 Questions

McMaster’s Arts & Science program takes about sixty students a year and admits on a written supplementary application: five questions, 1,500 characters each, no generative AI. The questions are published in advance. Here they are, with what each one is really asking and a worked answer.

By the AcceptMe team 8 min read Updated

The format

  • Part A: five questions, each with a 1,500-character limit including spaces and punctuation, completed online with your MacID. Plain text only: no bold, italics, indents or special characters.
  • Part B: an equity and facilitated-admissions section, which you can skip if it doesn’t apply.
  • Independence. All five answers must be your own, and the program states that using generative AI is an academic integrity violation.
  • No identifying information in your answers; the program asks that you keep your name and school out of them.
Deadline. February 1, 11:59 PM EST in the most recent cycle. Confirm the Fall 2027 date and the current questions on the Arts & Science supplementary application page.

The five questions, and what each is asking

  1. What excites you about the opportunity to pursue an interdisciplinary degree in the Arts & Science program at McMaster?The fit question. Interdisciplinary is the word doing the work. Name two fields you can’t choose between and a real question that sits across them. Then something specific about how the program is built that makes it the place to ask it.
  2. Please describe a particularly meaningful learning experience you have had (in school or elsewhere).Not your best grade. A moment when you understood something differently afterwards. “Elsewhere” is an invitation; take it if you have the story.
  3. What book, play, film, or other piece of media has had a significant impact on you over the last year or two?Recent, and one. The reader wants to see how you engage with something, not what you chose. A specific scene and what it did to your thinking beats a summary of the whole work.
  4. Tell us one way you spend time outside of school and explain why that activity is important to you.One. The “why” is the answer, and the best whys are a little unexpected.
  5. Tell us more about yourself and, in particular, please tell us something you’re exceptionally curious to explore, learn, or experience in the coming years.The open one. Pick a curiosity you can be concrete about, and say what you have already done to chase it. Curiosity with no action reads as a wish.

A worked answer

Sample answer to question 3, about 1,450 characters

The piece of media is a forty-minute documentary about a lighthouse keeper in Newfoundland that I watched last winter because I thought it would be relaxing. It wasn’t. About halfway through, the keeper explains that the light hasn’t actually been needed for twenty years, since every ship has GPS, and that he keeps it running anyway because the fishermen say they feel better seeing it. The filmmaker asks if that’s a good enough reason to fund it. He says he doesn’t know. That question has followed me around since. I’d always thought of usefulness as something you could measure, and I’d been dismissive of things that were kept for how they made people feel. The lighthouse made that harder to hold. I started noticing how much of what I value works the same way: the school library that’s mostly empty, my grandmother’s handwritten recipes when the same ones are online. I don’t think the answer is that feelings always win. But I no longer think “nobody needs it” ends the argument, and I’ve started asking what a thing does for the people who see it, not only for the people who use it. I still don’t know whether the lighthouse should be funded. I’m more interested in the question than I was in most of the answers I used to have.

A specific scene. What it changed in the writer’s thinking, with two concrete examples. An honest unresolved ending. That is what “significant impact” looks like on the page, and it is also exactly what an interdisciplinary program is checking for: someone comfortable holding a question open.

Writing to 1,500 characters

About 230 words. No introduction, no conclusion that repeats the opening, no restating the question. Draft long in a plain text editor with a character count, then cut to the limit. The Health Sciences guide covers the same limit and the same discipline; many applicants write both.

Mistakes specific to Arts & Science

  • Answering question 1 with the program’s own brochure language. “Interdisciplinary” and “well-rounded” are the words every applicant uses. Name the actual question you want to ask.
  • Choosing the impressive book over the true one. Readers can tell, and the question asks for impact on you, not literary standing.
  • Five answers that are secretly one. Each question is a different side of you. If your curiosity, your activity and your meaningful experience are all the same thing, redistribute.
  • Formatting. Line breaks and special characters can break the form. Plain paragraphs.
  • Any use of generative AI, including to “polish.” It is named as an integrity violation and the essays are read by people who know what it sounds like.

Where to go from here

The Ontario supplementary applications hub puts this application next to every other one you may be writing in the same fortnight, and the AI policy guide explains why “just polishing” with a chatbot is the risk McMaster names. If you want a second reader who will not write for you, AcceptMe’s essay coach reads each 1,500-character answer against its question and pins notes to your sentences: what works, what to tighten, what to fix. The words stay yours, which on an application that bans generative AI is the whole point. Two reviews are free.

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