Yale 'You Are Teaching a Yale Course. What Is It Called?' Short Answer Guide

The Yale "Teach a Course" Prompt, Verbatim

Yale's application includes a set of short takes capped at 200 characters each — not words, characters. One of them reads: "You are teaching a Yale course. What is it called?"

That's roughly a sentence and a half. Most applicants underestimate how much signal this tiny prompt carries. It is arguably the single most distinctive question in the Ivy League application season, and Yale admissions officers have been explicit in interviews that they read it closely. In 200 characters, you are telling them what your intellectual obsession actually is, how you'd frame it to other students, and whether you can make an idea sound interesting in almost no space at all.

A closely related Yale short take reads: "If you could teach any college course, write a book, or create an original piece of art of any kind, what would it be?" (also 200 characters). This guide covers both, because the strongest approach is nearly identical.

Why This Prompt Is Harder Than It Looks

200 characters is about 35 words. It is shorter than most tweets. Students treat that as permission to write something breezy and casual, which is exactly the wrong move. Yale is using the constraint to force compression, the same way a good headline forces the writer to compress a whole argument into a single line. The prompt rewards precision, not cleverness.

The most common failure mode is writing a course title that sounds like a joke, or a title that sounds like an existing class you took. "History of Me," "The Physics of Fun," or "Intro to Politics" all fail for the same reason: they're empty containers. They don't tell Yale anything about what you'd actually teach or why it would matter.

A good Yale course title tells an admissions reader the shape of the argument you'd spend a semester making. It is not a label. It is a thesis.

What Yale Admissions Is Screening For

Yale admissions officers read thousands of these each year. The patterns they look for are consistent:

Does the title reveal a real intellectual obsession? Not a random clever phrase. Something the applicant genuinely thinks about when no one is assigning it.
Is there an argument hidden inside the title? The best course names imply a specific claim about the world. A student who would title their course "Why Cities Get the Transit They Deserve" is telling Yale they have a thesis. A student who would title their course "Urban Planning" is telling Yale nothing.
Does the title sit at the edge of what a real Yale course could be? Not a class that already exists in the catalog, not a class so broad it could be anywhere, but a class that a small subset of Yale professors could imagine teaching. That specificity is what signals genuine research into Yale's intellectual culture.
Is there voice? Yale short takes reward a writer who sounds like a real person with a point of view. Bland, academic-sounding titles are worse than titles that have a slight edge to them.

The Anatomy of a Course Title That Works

Strong Yale course titles tend to have two parts: a main title that contains a compressed argument, and sometimes a colon and a sharper subtitle. Both parts should do real work. Compare:

Weak: "Introduction to Climate Policy"
Better: "Carbon Pricing in the Real World"
Stronger: "Carbon Pricing in the Real World: Why the Economics Keeps Winning and the Politics Keeps Losing"

The last version tells the admissions reader the student has been thinking specifically about the gap between the economic literature on carbon pricing and the political record of actually implementing it. That's a whole worldview compressed into a title. It's also unmistakably Yale-flavored — the kind of course you could imagine being cross-listed between economics, environmental studies, and political science, which mirrors how Yale actually organizes its academic offerings.

Here are more examples of the move, from different fields:

"The Grammar of Rivers: How Watersheds Shape the Sentences We Write About Them" — a course about nature writing with a specific claim embedded in the title.
"Failure Modes: Engineering Disasters as Literature" — a bridge between engineering and literary analysis that would make sense only at a school with a strong humanities culture.
"The Last Fifty Years Were Weird: A History of Economic Stability in the Developed World" — a course with a point of view about recent history.
"Translating Silence: What Literary Translators Do When the Original Refuses to Move" — a course that would only make sense if taught by someone who actually translates.

Notice what none of these do: they don't try to be funny, they don't pose as obviously hypothetical, and they don't describe the applicant's own identity. They describe an actual course with an actual argument.

How to Generate a Strong Course Title in an Hour

If you're stuck, the fastest way to a good course title is this exercise:

Write down the three things you've been genuinely obsessed with in the past year. Not things you wrote about on your application. Things you actually think about when no one is watching. A specific historical period, a specific scientific puzzle, a specific argument you've been having with yourself.
For each one, write down the specific claim you'd want to make about it. Not "this topic is interesting." A real claim: "X is always Y for reasons that most people miss." A real claim is a sentence that someone could disagree with.
Turn the claim into a course title. The claim becomes either the subtitle or the embedded argument. The main title should hint at the claim without fully stating it.
Cut until the whole thing fits in 200 characters. If you can't get under the limit, the claim is too broad. Narrow it.

This exercise forces the title to come from a real intellectual commitment, which is the only reliable way to produce something that doesn't read as generic.

Common Mistakes on the Yale Course Title Question

Making a joke. Jokes almost always fail here, even when they'd land in conversation. 200 characters is not enough space to set up humor. The joke reads as an absence of content.
Picking a topic that is obviously the most "impressive" option. Admissions readers can tell when a student picked quantum field theory to seem smart versus when a student picked it because they are actually obsessed with quantum field theory. Go with obsession.
Using a title that exactly mirrors a real Yale course. This signals that you read the catalog but didn't think beyond it.
Using the space to describe yourself. "My Life, In Three Acts" is not a course title; it's autobiography. Yale has other prompts for autobiography.
Overloading the title with clauses. A title that needs four commas and a semicolon is a title that hasn't found its compressed form.
Restating a topic you've already used in another response. If your Why Yale essay already discussed your interest in climate policy, your course title should be about something else. Yale wants to see the full range of your intellectual life.

The Other "Teach, Write, or Create" Prompt

Yale also asks: "If you could teach any college course, write a book, or create an original piece of art of any kind, what would it be?" This is also 200 characters. The same principles apply, with one addition: the three options (course, book, art) are not equivalent. Picking one signals something about how you think.

Applicants who pick "course" tend to be signaling that they want to be in dialogue — they want to frame an argument for others to engage with. Applicants who pick "book" tend to be signaling that they want to work something out in private and then present it. Applicants who pick "art" tend to be signaling that they want to use a different medium to hold an idea that prose can't quite hold. Any of the three can work. What matters is that the choice feels natural to the applicant.

A student who is genuinely obsessed with poetry and picks "course" when they should have picked "art" reads as slightly off. A student who picks the medium that matches their actual intellectual habits reads as coherent.

What a Strong Answer to This Prompt Signals About the Whole Application

Among all of Yale's short takes, the course title question is the one admissions readers remember most often. A great course title travels through the committee meeting. It becomes something the committee can reference when they talk about the applicant — a shorthand for what kind of mind the student has.

For that reason, the course title short take is disproportionately useful relative to its length. A generic title costs you almost nothing directly, but it leaves you without the thing admissions officers would use to remember you. A precise title can make you memorable in a room full of strong applicants.

How This Prompt Fits With the Rest of the Yale Supplement

Yale's full supplement includes the 125-word Why Yale essay, the 125-word "why these academic areas" essay, several short takes, and two longer 400-word reflections. They are read together.

The course title should connect to — but not duplicate — your other responses. If your Why Yale essay is about your interest in philosophy of mind, your course title might be about a specific sub-question within that field that the Why essay didn't have room to name. If your longer community essay is about your family's relationship to a particular city, your course title might be about something intellectually unrelated, which reveals range.

Before submitting, run your full Yale supplement through our AI essay review tool to check whether your short takes and longer essays work together. For Yale's longer reflection essays, see our Yale community essay guide. For the patterns Yale shares with other Ivies, read our Ivy League essay analysis. And if you're still working on the Common App personal statement that Yale will read alongside all of these, our Common App guide walks through how the personal statement should set up the short answers.