The University Of California (UC) Application Essays: Prompts 7-8

The UC Personal Insight questions are slightly different from most standard college application essay prompts. So if you’re just joining us, take a look at our first blog— DECODING THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA (UC) COLLEGE APPLICATION ESSAYS: GETTING STARTED, and try your hand at the Brainstorming exercise, before diving further into the UC application essay prompts.

For in depth explorations of the first six UC Personal Insight questions, check out our blogs:
DECODING THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA (UC) COLLEGE APPLICATION PROMPTS (1-3)
DECODING THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA (UC) COLLEGE APPLICATION PROMPTS (4-6)

Exploring the Personal Insight questions in detail

If you’ve had the time to go through our last couple of blogs, you should already be familiar with the 8 UC Personal Insight questions. Now let’s break down the last two UC application essay prompts alongside the guidance already available on the UC website.

• If you’re strapped for ideas, perhaps the guidance below will help spark some obscure source of inspiration. 
• Assess the guidance carefully. Can you apply this to develop any of your ideas?
• Mull over the key words and suggested guidance. Do you think you can approach the questions from a different angle? 
• Re-check your idea-prompt combinations. Perhaps an idea you developed for a particular question, could be better suited to answer a different one?
• As before, go through each of the prompts, and continue to update your Brainstorming tables. 
• Develop your incident/ anecdote column to now accommodate a bulleted essay blueprint—tentative introduction, body, and conclusion.

Prompt 7: What have you done to make your school or your community a better place?  

Things to consider:

Think of community as a term that can encompass a group, team or a place — like your high school, hometown or home. You can define community as you see fit, just make sure you talk about your role in that community. Was there a problem that you wanted to fix in your community? 
Why were you inspired to act? What did you learn from your effort? How did your actions benefit others, the wider community or both? Did you work alone or with others to initiate change in your community?

Approach:

How have you made a difference to the lives of people around you? The question doesn’t limit you to a single definition of community. So be bold!

1. Connect to the question:

• What does community mean to you?—Family, ethnicity, race, social class, religion, country, state, city, neighbourhood, and school?
• Focus your response – What problems did you address? What was the impact of your actions?

2. Show instead of tell:

• What motivated and inspired your efforts?—Don’t jump into the action, begin with a poignant anecdote like in this excerpt from a UC Application Essay

Example – Community:

• What connects this community/ issue to your personal narrative? For instance, when writing about his volunteering service at St Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, Neville Longbottom might begin with a heart wrenching anecdote—visiting his parents at the hospital following their disastrous injuries from the cruciatus curse. 
• Detail your efforts and the impact of your actions. Did you come upon something unexpected? Any challenges? Any epiphanies? What did you learn? 

3. Mind your tone:

• Write passionately about what matters to you. Be raw, introspective, and vulnerable—it humanizes your application. Don’t pick an issue/ community simply because it sounds serious and impactful. Check out this this excerpt from a UC Application Essay

Example – Community:

• Avoid clichés and platitudes. Don’t go into a philosophical rant regarding a suffering/ injustice. 
• Respect the scope and scale of your project. Your work may address a larger global issue, but limit your narrative to the purview of your (possibly local) efforts. 
• Look to the future. What happens to this project once you get into UC? Is it a one-time thing? Do you hand it off to others to continue? Will you do something similar at UC?

4. UC Personal Insight questions sometimes overlap:

• Prompt 2 – Creativity/ Problem Solving, and Prompt 5 – Challenge, may both be interpreted a lot like this one. 
• The problem you solved creatively, or the challenge you vanquished, may both be rooted in your community background. However, if the essays are distinct with no repetitions; you may attempt all three without hesitation. 

5. Think outside the box:

• Identity touchpoints also create communities—sports teams, dance or music communities, book clubs, MUN and debate clubs, a group united by a shared disability or a shared experience like cyberbullying, or toxic masculinity, etc. For instance, this excerpt from a UC Application Essay does just that

Example – Community

6. Versatility:

• If you’ve already written essays responding to Coalition prompts 1 (Character), 2 (Contribution) or Common Application prompts 1 (Background), 3 (Challenged a Belief), 4 (Problem Solving); can you adapt ideas from them to fit the UC Community question? 

OR

• Do you want to develop a version of this essay that you can later expand and adapt to fit these aforementioned prompts?

Prompt 8: 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?

Things to consider:  

If there’s anything you want us to know about you, but didn’t find a question or place in the application to tell us, now’s your chance. What have you not shared with us that will highlight a skill, talent, challenge or opportunity that you think will help us know you better?

Approach:

Attempting this prompt is a little like digging into a box of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans—a high risk, high reward situation, not for the faint hearted. 

1. Connect to the question:

• This prompt has two parts—What hasn’t already been shared in your application? How does this strengthen your UC application? Ensure that your response addresses both.

2. Show instead of tell & Mind your tone :

• Do you have a multicultural/ biracial/ mixed-faith background? Did that create any unique challenges that fostered niche interests in sociocultural, ethnic, or theological studies?
• Perhaps your parents are in the army or are diplomats, posted across the world. Did you switch schools a lot accompanying them? Or did not having both parents at home affect you differently? Did this help you develop any unique skills that improve your UC candidature? 
• Do you have special interests like archaeology, folklore, film, or music, that you intend to explore at UC? Are you drawn to the liberal arts curriculum because you have multidisciplinary interests that you’re unable to pursue elsewhere?
• If you’re choosing to answer this prompt, justify why this topic is important to you—be descriptive, emphatic, and passionate.

3. Versatility:

• This open-ended question lends itself to a plethora of narratives—Why College/ Why Major responses, adapted Coalition and Common Application essay responses, and so much more. 
• So, this question might be a time saver if you already have a good essay written, that you can adapt to strengthen your candidature for the UCs. However, exercise caution. Attempt this question ONLY if the ideas here don’t fit any of the other UC prompts, AND if this truly bolsters your candidature.

The Essay Blueprints

If you’ve been working on your Brainstorming table and essay blueprints through the last week, it should now look something like what our friend Harry Potter turned in:

Which UC Personal Insight questions should you choose?

The UC website reminds students that all UC application essay prompts are given equal consideration in the application process. There’s so right or wrong way to answer these questions. The guidance simply encourages students select prompts most relevant to their personal experiences, that best reflect their individual circumstances. But how do you make this all-important choice? That’s where our Strategy Exercise comes in.
The purpose of this activity is to rate your essay blueprints against the UC Personal Insight questions. The four essay blueprints with the best ratings are the ones you can proceed to  develop into complete essay drafts. 
To begin rating, ask yourself the following questions:

• Insert a new column to the left of the Profile Focus column to track your ratings.
• If any questions spark new ideas or different insights, add it to your table before rating.
• What are my *Can’t Miss* ideas for the UC application?
• Prioritize key strengths—quantifiable accomplishments, personal values, or unique perspectives. 
• Mark your top four/five *Can’t Miss* choices.
• Does my idea have narrative merit?
• Inspect your stories—flesh them out with a few more bullets like an essay blueprint for better perspective.
• How effective is your anecdotal hook? Can you think of a better incident to illustrate this?
• Does my idea qualify as a personal insight? Is there too much focus on actions, accomplishments and impact; and not enough on personal growth, insight, and motivations? 
• Is the scope of your essay idea too broad to cover in 350 words? Fine tune it.
• Mark your top four/five *Best Narrative* choices.
• How versatile are my essay ideas?
• Have you already written any common application/coalition essays, other Why-Major essays, or even old high school essays that can be adapted to the UC Personal Insight questions? 
• If you’re planning to apply to other colleges, can you reuse any of these ideas to write essays for those applications?
• If you’re adapting an older essay to fit these prompts, or planning to reuse any of these ideas for future essays, mark them with a Versatility tag, because Time = Money!

Here’s Potter’s final tally for reference: The highlighted cells are his top four choices for the UC application.

The final choice boils down to your priorities:

• The essay blueprints marked with the maximum *Can’t Miss* and *Best Narrative* tags, are the ideas that you’re most confident about developing.
• The Versatility tag is a harmless shortcut. Prioritize it if you’re on a time crunch.  

Finally, look at the big picture:

• How do your four responses work as a cohesive whole? 
• Do they represent different facets of your personality?
• Together, are they an accurate representation of your candidature to the UCs? 
• Settle on the final four ONLY if you’re satisfied with these responses. 
• Race to the Finish!

After you’ve made it through the Brainstorming and Strategizing Exercises, you’re ready to START WRITING!
*Mischief Managed*