How I Help You Build the Best UC Application
I am a UC application expert — and have been for most of my adult life. In addition to being a graduate of UCLA myself, both my older and younger sons attended the University of California, UCLA and UC Berkeley, respectively, and, since 1982, I have helped hundreds of students apply to the UC system, including my own sons, who were both selected to receive the Regents' Scholarship, the most distinguished merit scholarship awarded by the University of California.
I have literally "grown up" (developed professionally) alongside the UC application, following every shift in admission requirements and studying every iteration of the essay prompts and activities/awards format. Each time a change has been announced, I have devoted myself to understanding its genesis and learning how to address it. I know the UC application inside and out — every question, every possible issue. It is like an old friend.
For several years now, the UC application has required four essays: a student must choose four "Personal Insight Questions" from the eight provided. Instead of the two rather open-ended prompts once required, a total of 1000 words, a student must now respond to four much more specific prompts about various aspects of their life, 350 words each. The change at first was jarring; I had grown used to the two old prompts: how to approach them, how to divide the word count. After recovering from the initial shock, however, I quickly set about studying the new prompts, one by one — a process that lasted for days, weeks actually. I wanted to thoroughly understand each question, so I would be able to help my students respond to it, directly and fully. After my first admissions cycle with the Personal Insight Questions, they had become my new best friends.
The process of filling out the UC application is at once straightforward and nuanced. For example, the UC application strips all formatting from the essays (straightforward), so it is important to know that quotation marks should be used for titles that are generally italicized (nuanced). An em dash with a single space on either side in an essay must be counted as a "word" (also nuanced). There is a drop-down menu in the Academic History section for entering courses taken at a California high school in grades 9 through 12 (straightforward), but a full year of Geometry must be manually entered if taken in 7th or 8th grade — or the student will be deemed ineligible for the University of California (nuanced).
Despite all the twists and turns involved in completing it — an adventure of sorts, the UC application provides an exceptional opportunity for a student to reveal who they are: their background and culture, what drives them, who and what they are devoted to, and what they plan to do next. In addition to the wide variety of essay prompts from which student can choose — to best highlight their strengths and unique qualities, the UC application now features a restructured Activities & Awards section (as of a few years ago) that allows a student to describe up to 20 activities and awards in great detail. Editing a student's UC activities and awards descriptions is now almost like editing an essay: it is crucial to show the student's commitment and influence with artful language and punctuation.
Each year, I look forward to helping my students with their UC applications, an exciting journey of self-reflection and validation. We always work on the UC application first, as it is so comprehensive: completing the UC application first provides a great sense of accomplishment early in the college application process — and a tremendous amount of material for all the other applications that follow. No matter how it changes in the years to come, the UC application will always be like an old friend, one I cannot wait to see again.