The University of California schools are widely regarded as some of the best public universities in the nation. Its ten universities are UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC Riverside, UC Merced, and UC San Francisco. With the exception of UC San Francisco, which is only a graduate and professional school, all campuses offer both undergraduate and graduate degrees.
The UC system has more than 280,000 students and more than 200,000 faculty and staff, which makes it the largest employer in the state of California! Living up to this reputation, most of the UC schools are big and have over 20,000 undergraduate students. While each school is unique and has its own personality, the University of California schools offer many of the same benefits. As part of the UC system, they’re all well-regarded, selective, research-oriented colleges. They’re generally strong in STEM, the humanities, and the social sciences. Also, UC students tend to be diverse, coming from a variety of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.
How UC schools evaluate high school students
Its size and reputation can also mean gaining admissions to the top UC schools, such as UC Berkeley and UCLA, can be very competitive. Individual undergraduate admissions evaluation for UC schools is a holistic process that attempts to look beyond just grades and test scores. The selection process takes into account 13 different factors that are used to evaluate an applicant’s academic achievements in light of the opportunities available to them as well as their “demonstrated capacity to contribute to the intellectual life at the University of California.”
Personal Insight Questions
One crucial aspect of making this evaluation is the UC’s Personal Insight Questions or PIQs. Unlike the over 900 US colleges which use the Common Application (or Common App) portal for undergraduate admissions, the UC schools utilize their own proprietary application. Each undergraduate Freshman applicant is required to answer four out of the eight given PIQ prompts. Each response is limited to a maximum of 350 words.
For the 2022 – 2023 application cycle, the eight prompts can be found on the UC admissions website, here.
Answering the first PIQ
One way of answering these PIQs is by using a narrative approach. Let’s take a closer look at how you might answer question one with a narrative approach:
Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts over time.
Before jumping into your first draft, you should first reflect on your past experiences as a student, brainstorm possible ideas you could share and then generate an activities list. Write down your list and rank each experience in order of relevance to this prompt. From your completed list, identify one or more activities that might align with PIQ 1, a leadership experience where you made a positive impact on others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts. If you are unable to generate ideas that fit with this prompt, consider selecting a different PIQ. Luckily, there are seven more to choose from.
Remember, leadership is flexible. This might be a leading role during a volunteer experience, or a part-time job tutoring a younger student. Perhaps it was organizing a fundraising event for a school club or having to take on big responsibilities in your family. Be sure that the leadership experience you are selecting has a corresponding positive impact or was instrumental in teaching you something, be it a skill, a lesson, or a value.
Outline your experience
Now that you’ve identified your leadership experience, it’s time to build an outline. This will help you generate a narrative for your experience. First, consider the challenge you faced, or in other words, what was the problem you solved? Next, outline what you did about this problem. This is directly related to the impact you had. And lastly, describe what it is you learned from this experience, the skills or values you gained, and how you applied what you learned. The end result of this should be a clear narrative of your experience.
The next step is to begin your first draft. You will want to devote 1/3 of your essay to each of these three outlined sections. Spend time setting the stakes of your challenge in the first section. Make sure your reader can understand the important elements of the context.
While volunteering at my city’s social affairs shelter in my junior year, I realized that beyond basic food and shelter, many unhoused people lacked resources like internet access, which people often take for granted. To address this, I organized the shelter’s first-ever computer donation program.
In your second section, where you describe what you did, be sure to use action verbs to show how you were proactive in this experience and not passive.
I organized the other volunteers and created a viable event plan…
In your third section, talking about what you learned gives you an opportunity to take this answer beyond just the experience you’re describing. You can use this section to talk about how you have or will apply what you learned elsewhere in your life. You might also describe how you will bring these learned values, lessons, and skills to the UC schools.
Through this experience, I learned that compassion can take many different forms. I hope to bring the values this experience has taught me to whichever UC learning community I join this fall.
Read, edit and repeat
Once you have a first draft, be sure to reread and edit your answer. Here is one of our past blogs which shares some good tips on editing your own work.
Keep in mind that the UC system calls these essays Personal Insight Questions, so the objective should be to demonstrate information about what makes you. It is good to select anecdotes and topics that demonstrate your leadership abilities but also help you stand out from other applicants.
Now that you’ve finished your first PIQ, get ready to answer three more! Stay tuned for more blogs to come which address different common admissions essay topics.