The University of California application is the California-specific application for the nine UC schools: UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Merced, UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego. The UC Application is similar to the Common Application, but it is an entirely different system, requires some different information, and has its own deadline: November 30th.
While the application is for each of the nine schools, you do need to submit it individually to the UC schools you are interested in. The schools vary in specialty and selectivity, so you’ll need to think carefully about where is right for you. For example, UC Riverside has an acceptance rate of over 50%, but the UC Berkeley acceptance rate is closer to 15%. Despite this difference, all of the UC schools share a list of strict academic requirements for all applicants. A few highlights are a course distribution that includes two years of language and three years of math, the ACT or SAT with writing, and a minimum GPA of 3.0 for California residents or 3.4 for non-residents.
For many, the strict rules are worth meeting. UC schools are renowned for the quality of education they provide, and 58% of California undergrads pay no tuition.
Much of the UC application is similar to the Common App. They need to know your birthday, the courses you’re taking, etc. However, instead of a central Common App essay and then school-specific prompts, the UC application has a set of “Personal Insight” questions. The Personal Insight questions consist of eight prompts, of which you need to select four to respond to in up to 350 words.
You must pick the best questions for you — not just the easiest or the most obvious — so we have broken them down below to help you out.
Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts over time.
We see a lot of students skip over this prompt because they see the word “leadership” and don’t realize that it applies to them. The UC schools aren’t just looking for lacrosse captains writing about winning games or debate team leaders expounding on their persuasiveness. Yes, those are leadership roles that can influence others, but they aren’t the only leadership roles, and they certainly aren’t the ones we are the most interested in. So, before you write this prompt off, consider the ways you have been a leader outside of structured activities or hierarchical systems.
Have you had a job where you have to work with others? Have you been part of a group project without a designated leader, but where you were in charge of a crucial piece of the whole? What is your role in your family? If you expand your view of what ‘leadership’ entails, you will almost certainly discover that you are a leader and that you do have something to write about here if the question ends up resonating with you.
If you do decide to go forward with it, we tend to err towards writing about resolution and contribution over the more ambiguous ‘positive influence.’ This is because it is easy to sound self-important or self-obsessed when you write about how much you’ve changed other people’s lives. Focus on interpersonal engagement and teamwork, how you’ve operated as a piece of a system — not a control-freak trying to direct the system — and keep your perspective focused. Smaller and more ‘zoomed in’ responses will show who you are without running the risk of sounding inflated.
Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side.
We love this option for any applicant because it is begging you to answer it in a creative form. It seems silly, after all, to write a normal-looking answer to a question about how you express yourself creatively. Think about how your favorite books or short stories are written — maybe you can bring some of that style into your own work. Whether it’s dialogue, vivid imagery, or a perspective that is different from the typical first-person, this prompt offers you a chance to try out a writing muscle that won’t show up anywhere else on your application.
Before you nod along and move on to the next prompt because you “aren’t creative,” you are. We’ve found that the best answers to this prompt come from students who wouldn’t identify themselves as artists if asked on the street. So try your hand at it and show your creative side by writing creatively about a way that you keep your mind and body moving in new directions.
What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time?
This is another fun prompt, but this time it is because it opens up an opportunity to incorporate humor into your application. Writing comedy is hard and best used in a venue other than a college application, but anyone can find ways to incorporate humor into their application. We tend to prefer dry wit over dad jokes, so lighten this supplement up by illuminating a small talent, even something that may seem innocuous, but that does have significant benefits. The smaller and more specific the talent or skill, the better it will land.
Critically, you don’t need to have won awards or been recognized for your talent or skill. If you have been, great, but even then, you should be zooming in. If you are an Olympic archer, you should focus on one piece of archery: breathing, steadiness, or patience, not on the activity as a whole. This will help you keep the supplement humble. It needs to be able the talent, not a list of awards.
For many people, or even most, the talent will and should be award-less. Writing about how your sisters come to you when they need a necklace detangled because you won’t get frustrated when it takes a few tries is a perfect way of writing about patience — and it could be even more compelling and human than the archery bit.
Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.
This is a great prompt because it lets you, the applicant, pull your education outside of the walls of your classrooms. An answer to this prompt doesn’t have to take place in school — and probably shouldn’t. It could be an internship, a job, or something that surprised you in your life, but you figured out how to run with it.
If you don’t pick the following prompt that guides you to write about a challenge, you could also use this prompt to address an issue or discrepancy with the academic side of your application that is related to how you learn, accessibility, or a significant life event.
Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement?
You should probably not pick this prompt if you are set on doing the previous prompt about an educational opportunity. They are both good prompts, but they have too much potential for overlap to necessitate answering both.
If you do select this prompt, it should be because you have genuinely had to face a significant challenge. This is not the place for horror stories, but it is a space in which to explain something that doesn’t fit elsewhere in the application. Avoiding telling a horror story does not mean you can’t address tough subjects or events. Instead, it means that you need to address them in a way that is aimed at honest storytelling instead of shock-value.
Answers to this prompt should never be trivial, so please skip over this prompt if you have to dig for an answer.
Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom.
If you read this prompt and your brain starts whirring, run with it. This is a wonderful place to showcase your passion and enthusiasm for a subject, and preferably one that you would like to pursue in college. Don’t simply focus on your intended major, though (ex. biology). Instead, you need to yet again zoom in on a specific piece of a broader area. Maybe you intend to study biology because you want to go into the study of deep-sea vents and the unique life forms that manage to thrive in extraordinary pressure and heat, and that are serving as guides on how to survive a warming planet. Maybe you are fascinated by fairy tales and the role that they have played throughout history. Whatever it is, any answer to this prompt needs to have palpable levels of passion.
What have you done to make your school or your community a better place?
This prompt may sound like an easy-A. It’s a chance to write about volunteering and giving back, yay! That makes you sound good, yay! Wrong. For the majority of students, this prompt is better skipped over. Why? Because you should only answer this prompt if you have been engaged in a local initiative that is long-term. You could write about creating a network of monthly trash cleanups that bring high school students together with residents of a local retirement community, but you cannot write about attending, or even organizing, one trash cleanup. See the difference?
We know it can be confusing because we typically ask students to look small, and here we are saying that whatever you write about needs to be more substantial — but we have our reasons.
Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do you believe makes you stand out as a strong candidate for admissions to the University of California?
This is not quite a ‘do-whatever-you-want’ prompt, but it’s close. The biggest difference is that you need to frame whatever you write within — surprise, surprise — the context of the prompt. If there is something you know you want to be able to squeeze into your application that you haven’t been able to fit in, this prompt can be a great place to put it. However, you need to make sure that it doesn’t feel like whatever you write about is being smashed in here because it’s the only place you could find to fit it. If you don’t have anything that pops to mind, don’t stress! There are seven other prompts to pick four from, so simply skip it.
If you’re applying to schools that are off of the Common App and are feeling overwhelmed, drop us a line. We make the college application process more efficient and less stressful.