word limit uc essays

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• You will have 8 questions to choose from. You must respond to only 4 of the 8 questions.
• Each response is limited to a maximum of 350 words.
• Which questions you choose to answer is entirely up to you. However, you should select questions that are most relevant to your experience and that best reflect your individual circumstances.

Keep in mind

• All questions are equal. All are given equal consideration in the application review process, which means there is no advantage or disadvantage to choosing certain questions over others.
• There is no right or wrong way to answer these questions. It’s about getting to know your personality, background, interests and achievements in your own unique voice.  
• Use the additional comments field if there are issues you'd like to address that you didn't have the opportunity to discuss elsewhere on the application. This shouldn't be an essay, but rather a place to note unusual circumstances or anything that might be unclear in other parts of the application. 

Questions & guidance

Remember, the personal insight questions are just that—personal. Which means you should use our guidance for each question just as a suggestion in case you need help. The important thing is expressing who you are, what matters to you and what you want to share with UC. 

1. Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts over time. Things to consider: A leadership role can mean more than just a title. It can mean being a mentor to others, acting as the person in charge of a specific task, or taking the lead role in organizing an event or project. Think about what you accomplished and what you learned from the experience. What were your responsibilities?

Did you lead a team? How did your experience change your perspective on leading others? Did you help to resolve an important dispute at your school, church, in your community or an organization? And your leadership role doesn't necessarily have to be limited to school activities. For example, do you help out or take care of your family? 2. 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. Things to consider: What does creativity mean to you? Do you have a creative skill that is important to you? What have you been able to do with that skill? If you used creativity to solve a problem, what was your solution? What are the steps you took to solve the problem?

How does your creativity influence your decisions inside or outside the classroom? Does your creativity relate to your major or a future career? 3. What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time? Things to consider: If there is a talent or skill that you're proud of, this is the time to share it.You don't necessarily have to be recognized or have received awards for your talent (although if you did and you want to talk about it, feel free to do so). Why is this talent or skill meaningful to you?

Does the talent come naturally or have you worked hard to develop this skill or talent? Does your talent or skill allow you opportunities in or outside the classroom? If so, what are they and how do they fit into your schedule? 4. Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced. Things to consider: An educational opportunity can be anything that has added value to your educational experience and better prepared you for college. For example, participation in an honors or academic enrichment program, or enrollment in an academy that's geared toward an occupation or a major, or taking advanced courses that interest you; just to name a few.

If you choose to write about educational barriers you've faced, how did you overcome or strive to overcome them? What personal characteristics or skills did you call on to overcome this challenge? How did overcoming this barrier help shape who you are today? 5. 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? Things to consider: A challenge could be personal, or something you have faced in your community or school. Why was the challenge significant to you? This is a good opportunity to talk about any obstacles you've faced and what you've learned from the experience. Did you have support from someone else or did you handle it alone?

If you're currently working your way through a challenge, what are you doing now, and does that affect different aspects of your life? For example, ask yourself, How has my life changed at home, at my school, with my friends or with my family? 6. Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom. Things to consider:  Many students have a passion for one specific academic subject area, something that they just can't get enough of. If that applies to you, what have you done to further that interest? Discuss how your interest in the subject developed and describe any experience you have had inside and outside the classroom such as volunteer work, internships, employment, summer programs, participation in student organizations and/or clubs and what you have gained from your involvement.

Has your interest in the subject influenced you in choosing a major and/or future career? Have you been able to pursue coursework at a higher level in this subject (honors, AP, IB, college or university work)? Are you inspired to pursue this subject further at UC, and how might you do that?

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? 8. Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do you believe makes you 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?

From your point of view, what do you feel makes you an excellent choice for UC? Don't be afraid to brag a little.

Writing tips

Start early..

Give yourself plenty of time for preparation, careful composition and revisions.

Write persuasively.

Making a list of accomplishments, activities, awards or work will lessen the impact of your words. Expand on a topic by using specific, concrete examples to support the points you want to make.

Use “I” statements.

Talk about yourself so that we can get to know your personality, talents, accomplishments and potential for success on a UC campus. Use “I” and “my” statements in your responses.

Proofread and edit.

Although you will not be evaluated on grammar, spelling or sentence structure, you should proofread your work and make sure your writing is clear. Grammatical and spelling errors can be distracting to the reader and get in the way of what you’re trying to communicate.

Solicit feedback.

Your answers should reflect your own ideas and be written by you alone, but others — family, teachers and friends can offer valuable suggestions. Ask advice of whomever you like, but do not plagiarize from sources in print or online and do not use anyone's words, published or unpublished, but your own.

Copy and paste.

Once you are satisfied with your answers, save them in plain text (ASCII) and paste them into the space provided in the application. Proofread once more to make sure no odd characters or line breaks have appeared.

This is one of many pieces of information we consider in reviewing your application. Your responses can only add value to the application. An admission decision will not be based on this section alone.

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How to Write the University of California Essays 2024-2025

The University of California (UC) school system is the most prestigious state university system in the United States and includes nine undergraduate universities: UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, UC Riverside, UC Merced, and UC Irvine.

The University of California system has its own application portal, as well as its own deadline of November 30th—a full month before the Common Application is due. All nine universities use one application, so it is easy to apply to multiple UCs at the same time. 

The application requires you to answer four of eight personal insight questions, with a 350-word limit on each prompt. This may seem daunting at first, but we provide this guide to make the prompts more approachable and to help you effectively tackle them! 

University of California Application Essay Prompts

Note: There is only one application for all the UC schools, so your responses will be sent to every University of California school that you apply to. You should avoid making essays school-specific (unless you are applying to only one school).

You might want to start by deciding which four of the eight prompts you plan on answering. The eight prompts are:

1. Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes, or contributed to group efforts over time.

2. 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., 3. what would you say is your greatest talent or skill how have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time, 4. describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced., 5. 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, 6. think about an academic subject that inspires you. describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom., 7. what have you done to make your school or your community a better place, 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.

As you begin selecting prompts, keep the purpose of college essays at the forefront of your mind. College essays are the place to humanize yourself and transform your test scores, GPA, and extracurriculars into a living, breathing human with values, ambitions, and a backstory. If a specific prompt will allow you to show a part of who you are that is not showcased in the rest of your application, start there. 

If nothing immediately jumps out at you, try dividing the prompts into three categories: “definites,” “possibilities,” and “avoids at all costs.” “Definites” will be prompts that quickly spark up a specific idea in you. “Possibilities” might elicit a few loose concepts, anecdotes, or structures. And “avoids” are prompts where you honestly cannot see yourself writing a convincing essay. Next, take your “definites” and “possibilities” and jot down your initial thoughts about them. Finally, look at all of your ideas together and decide which combination would produce the most well-rounded essay profile that shows who you are as an individual.

Of course, this is just one way to approach choosing prompts if you are stuck. Some students might prefer writing out a list of their values, identifying the most important ones in their life, then figuring out how to showcase those through the prompts. Other students select prompts based on what they are excited by or through freewriting on every prompt first. Do not feel constrained by any one method. Just remember:

• Do not rush into prompts at first glance (though trial writing can be very valuable!).
• Make sure that you consider potential ideas for many prompts before making final decisions, and ultimately write about the one with the most substance.
• The prompts you select should allow you to highlight what is most important to you.

Check out our video to learn more about how to write the UC essays!

The 8 UC Personal Insight Questions

“Leadership Experience” is often a subheading on student resumes, but that is not what admissions officers are asking about here. They are asking for you to tell them a specific story of a time when your leadership truly mattered. This could include discussing the policies you enacted as president of a school club or the social ties you helped establish as captain of a sports team, but this prompt also gives you the freedom to go past that.

Leaders are individuals with strong values, who mentor, inspire, correct, and assist those around them. If you don’t feel like you’ve ever been a leader, consider the following questions:

• Have you ever mentored anyone? Is there anyone younger than you who would not be the person they are today without you?
• Have you ever taken the initiative? When and why did it matter?
• Have you ever been fundamental to positive change in the world—whether it be on the small scale of positively impacting a family member’s life or on the large scale of trying to change the status of specific communities/identities in this world?
• Have you ever stood up for what’s right or what you believe in?

Leadership is a concept that can be stretched, bent, and played with, but at the end of the day, the central theme of your essay must be leadership. Keeping this in mind, after your first draft, it can be helpful to identify the definition of leadership that you are working with, to keep your essay cohesive. This definition doesn’t need to appear within the essay (though, if you take on a more reflective structure, it might). Some examples of this include “being a positive role model as leadership,” “encouraging others to take risks as leadership,” and “embracing my identities as leadership.”

Here are some examples of how a leadership essay might look:

• You’ve always loved learning and challenging yourself, but when you got to high school it was clear that only a certain type of student was recommended to take AP classes and you didn’t fit into that type. You presented a strong case to the school counselors that you were just as prepared for AP classes as anyone else, enrolled in your desired classes, and excelled. Since then, AP classes have become more diversified at your school and there has even been a new inclusion training introduced for your district’s school counselors. 
• When you were working as a camp counselor, the art teacher brought you two of your campers who were refusing to get along. To mediate the conflict, you spent long hours before bed talking to them individually, learning about their personal lives and family situation. By understanding where each camper came from, you were better equipped to help them reach a compromise and became a role model for both campers.
• As a member of your school’s Chinese organization, you were driven by your ethnic heritage to devote your lunch breaks to ensuring the smooth presentation of the Chinese culture show. You coordinated the performers, prepared refreshments, and collected tickets. You got through a great performance, even though a performer didn’t show and some of the food was delivered late. You weren’t on the leadership board or anything, but exhibited serious leadership, as both nights of the culture show sold out and hundreds of both Chinese and non-Chinese people were able to come together and celebrate your culture.

Like the last prompt, this prompt asks about a specific topic—creativity—but gives you wiggle room to expand your definition of that topic. By defining creativity as problem-solving, novel thinking, and artistic expression, this prompt basically says “get creative in how you define creativity!” 

Additionally, this broad conception of creativity lets you choose if you want to write about your personal life or your academic life. A robotics student could write about their love of baking on the weekends or their quick thinking during a technical interview. A dance student could write about their love of adapting choreography from famous ballets or their innovative solution to their dance team’s lack of funds for their showcase. You have space to do what you want!

That said, because this prompt is so open, it is important to establish a focus early on. Try thinking about what is missing from your application. If you are worried that your application makes you seem hyper-academic, use this prompt to show how you have fun. If you are worried that you might be appearing like one of those students who just gets good grades because they have a good memory, use this prompt to show off your problem-solving skills.

Also, keep in mind that you don’t have to describe any skill in creative pursuits as you answer this prompt. The prompt asks you how you express your “creative side,” alluding to creative instinct, not creative talent. You could write about how you use painting to let out your emotions—but your paintings aren’t very good. You could write about dancing in the shower to get excited for your day—but one time you slipped and fell and hurt your elbow. Experiences like these could make for a great reflective essay, where you explore the human drive towards creative expression and your acceptance that you personally don’t have to be creatively inclined to let out creative energy.

Some examples:

• A math student writing about a time they devised a non-textbook method to proving theorems 
• A creative writer describing how they close-read the ups-and-downs of classical music as an attempt to combat writers’ block and think of emotional trajectories for new stories
• An engineering student writing about cooking as a creative release where numbers don’t matter and intuition supersedes reason
• A psychology student writing about the limitations of quantitative data and describing a future approach to psychology that merges humanism and empiricism.

This is the kind of prompt where an answer either pops into your head or it doesn’t. The good news is that you can write a convincing essay either way. We all have great talents and skills—you just might have to dig a bit to identify the name of the talent/skill and figure out how to best describe it.

Some students have more obvious talents and skills than others. For example, if you are intending to be a college athlete, it makes sense to see your skill at your sport as your greatest talent or skill. Similarly, if you are being accepted into a highly-selective fine arts program, painting might feel like your greatest talent. These are completely reasonable to write about because, while obvious, they are also authentic! 

The key to writing a convincing essay about an obvious skill is to use that skill to explore your personality, values, motivations, and ambitions. Start by considering what first drew you to your specialization. Was there a specific person? Something your life was missing that painting, hockey, or film satisfied? Were you brought up playing your sport or doing your craft because your parents wanted you to and you had to learn to love it? Or choose to love it? What was that process like? What do these experiences say about you? Next, consider how your relationship with your talent has evolved. Have you doubted your devotion at times? Have you wondered if you are good enough? Why do you keep going? On the other hand, is your talent your solace? The stable element in your life? Why do you need that?

The key is to elucidate why this activity is worth putting all your time into, and how your personality strengths are exhibited through your relationship to the activity. 

Do not be put off by this prompt if you have not won any big awards or shown immense talent in something specific. All the prompt asks for is what you think is your greatest talent or skill. Some avenues of consideration for other students include:

• Think about aspects of your personality that might be considered a talent or skill. This might include being a peacemaker, being able to make people laugh during hard times, or having organization skills.
• Think about unique skills that you have developed through unique situations. These would be things like being really good at reading out loud because you spend summers with your grandfather who can no longer read, knowing traffic patterns because you volunteer as a crossing guard at the elementary school across the street that starts 45 minutes before the high school, or making really good pierogi because your babysitter as a child was Polish.
• Think about lessons you have learned through life experiences. A military baby might have a great skill for making new friends at new schools, a child of divorce might reflect on their ability to establish boundaries in what they are willing to communicate about with different people, and a student who has had to have multiple jobs in high school might be talented at multitasking and scheduling. 

Make sure to also address how you have developed and demonstrated your selected talent. Do you put in small amounts of practice every day, or strenuous hours for a couple of short periods each year? Did a specific period of your life lead to the development of your talent or are you still developing it daily? 

The purpose of college essays is to show your values and personality to admissions officers, which often includes exploring your past and how it informs your present and future. With a bit of creativity in how you define a “talent or skill,” this prompt can provide a great avenue for that exploration. 

This prompt offers you two potential paths—discussing an educational opportunity or barrier. It is important that you limit yourself to one of these paths of exploration to keep your essay focused and cohesive. 

Starting with the first option, you should think of an educational opportunity as anything that has added value to your educational experience and better prepared you for life and your career. Some examples could include:

• participation in an honors program
• enrollment in an academy geared toward your future profession
• a particularly enlightening conversation with a professional or teacher
• joining a cultural- or interest-based student coalition
• plenty of other opportunities

The phrasing “taken advantage of” implies the admissions committee’s desire for students who take the initiative. Admissions officers are more interested in students who sought out opportunities and who fought to engage with opportunities than students who were handed things. For example, a student who joined a career-advancement afterschool program in middle school could write about why they were initially interested in the program—perhaps they were struggling in a specific subject and didn’t want to fall behind because they had their sights set on getting into National Junior Honor Society, or their friend mentioned that the program facilitated internship opportunities and they thought they wanted to explore therapy as a potential career path.

On the other hand, if an opportunity was handed to you through family connections or a fortuitous introduction, explore what you did with that opportunity. For example, if a family member introduced you to an important producer because they knew you were interested in film, you could write about the notes you took during that meeting and how you have revisited the producer’s advice and used it since the meeting to find cheap equipment rentals and practice your craft.

If you choose to write about educational barriers you have faced, consider the personal characteristics and skills you called upon to overcome the challenge. How did the process of overcoming your educational barrier shape you as a person? What did you learn about yourself or the world? An added plus would be talking about passing it forward and helping those in your purview obtain the knowledge you did from your experiences.

Some examples of educational barriers could include:

• limited access to resources, materials, technology, or classes
• lacking educational role models
• struggles with deciding on a passion or career path
• financial struggles

One example of an interesting essay about educational barriers:

As a student at a school that did not offer any honors classes, you enrolled in online lectures to learn the subject you were passionate about — Human Geography. Afterward, you spoke to your school administrators about high-achieving students needing higher-level courses, and they agreed to talk to the local community college to start a pipeline for students like you.

Either way that you take this prompt, it can be used to position yourself as motivated and driven—exactly the type of student admissions officers are looking for!

This prompt is three-pronged. You must 1) identify a challenge 2) describe the steps you have taken to overcome the challenge and 3) connect the challenge to your academic achievement.

When approaching this prompt, it is best to consider these first and third aspects together so that you identify a challenge that connects to your academic life. If you simply pick any challenge you have experienced, when you get to the third part of the prompt, you may have to stretch your essay in ways that are unconvincing or feel inauthentic.

That said, remember that “academic achievement” reaches far beyond grades and exams. It can include things like:

• Deciding your career goals
• Balancing homework, jobs, and social/familial relationships
• Having enough time to devote to self-care
• Figuring out how you study/learn best
• Feeling comfortable asking for help when you need it

You should begin brainstorming challenges and hardships that you have experienced and overcome. These could include financial hardships, familial circumstances, personal illness, or learning disabilities. Challenges could also be less structural—things like feeling like you are living in a sibling’s shadow, struggles with body image, or insecurity. While it is important that your challenge was significant, it matters much more that you discuss your challenge with thoughtful reflection and maturity.

Some ways to take this prompt include:

• Writing about how overcoming a challenge taught you a skill that led to academic success — for example, a high-achieving student who struggles with anxiety was forced to take time off from school after an anxiety attack and learned the importance of giving oneself a break
• Writing about a challenge that temporarily hindered your academic success and reflecting on it — for example, a student who experienced a death in the family could have had a semester where they almost failed English because reading led to negative thought spirals instead of plot retention
• Writing about how a challenge humbled you and gave you a new perspective on your academics — for example, a student with a part-time job who helps support her family missed a shift because she was studying for a test and realized that she needed to ask her teachers for help and explain her home situation

As you describe the steps you have taken to overcome your selected challenge, you will want to include both tangible and intangible steps. This means that you will need to discuss your emotions, growth, and development, as well as what you learned through overcoming the challenge. Was your challenge easy to overcome or did it take a few tries? Do you feel you have fully overcome your challenge or is it a work in progress? If you have fully overcome the challenge, what do you do differently now? Or do you just see things differently now? If you were to experience the same challenge again, what would you have learned from before?

Here are some detailed examples:

• Your parents underwent a bitter, drawn-out divorce that deeply scarred you and your siblings, especially your little brother who was attending elementary school at the time. He was constantly distraught and melancholy and seemed to be falling further and further behind in his schoolwork. You took care of him, but at the cost of your grades plummeting. However, through this trial, you committed yourself to protecting your family at all costs. You focused on computer science in high school, hoping to major in it and save up enough money for his college tuition by the time he applies. Through this mission, your resolve strengthened and reflected in your more efficient and excellent performance in class later on.
• Your race was the most significant challenge you faced growing up. In school, teachers did not value your opinion nor did they believe in you, as evidenced by their preferential treatment of students of other races. To fight back against this discrimination, you talked to other students of the same race and established an association, pooling together resources and providing a supportive network of people to others in need of counseling regarding this issue.

The first step for approaching this prompt is fun and easy—think about an academic subject that inspires you. This part of the essay is about emotional resonance, so go with your gut and don’t overthink it. What is your favorite subject? What subject do you engage with in the media in your free time? What subject seeps into your conversations with friends and family on the weekends?

Keep in mind that high school subjects are often rather limited. The span of “academic subjects” at the university level is much less limited. Some examples of academic subjects include eighteenth-century literature, political diplomacy, astronomy, Italian film and television, botany, Jewish culture and history, mobile robotics, musical theater, race and class in urban environments, gender and sexuality, and much more.

Once you’ve decided what subject you are most interested in and inspired by, think about a tangible example of how you have furthered your interest in the subject. Some common ways students further their interests include:

• Reading about your interest
• Engaging with media (television, film, social media) about your interest
• Volunteering with organizations related to your interest
• Founding organizations related to your interest
• Reaching out to professionals with your academic interest
• Using your interest in interdisciplinary ways
• Research in your field of interest
• Internships in your field of interest

While you should include these kinds of tangible examples, do not forget to explain how your love for the subject drives the work you do, because, with an essay like this, the why can easily get lost in describing the what . Admissions officers need both.

A few examples:

• You found your US government class fascinatingly complex, so you decided to campaign for a Congressional candidate who was challenging the incumbent in your district. You canvassed in your local community, worked at the campaign headquarters, and gathered voter data whilst performing various administrative duties. Though the work was difficult, you enjoyed a sense of fulfillment that came from being part of history.
• Last year you fell in love with the play Suddenly Last Summer and decided to see what career paths were available for dramatic writing. You reached out to the contact on your local theater’s website, were invited to start attending their guest lecturer series, and introduced yourself to a lecturer one week who ended up helping you score a spot in a Young Dramatic Writers group downtown.
• The regenerative power of cells amazed you, so you decided to take AP Biology to learn more. Eventually, you mustered up the courage to email a cohort of biology professors at your local university. One professor responded, and agreed to let you assist his research for the next few months on the microorganism C. Elegans.
• You continued to develop apps and games even after AP Computer Science concluded for the year. Eventually, you became good enough to land an internship at a local startup due to your self-taught knowledge of various programming languages.

With regards to structure, you might try thinking about this essay in a past/present/future manner where you consider your past engagement with your interest and how it will affect your future at a UC school or as an adult in society. This essay could also become an anecdotal/narrative essay that centers around the story of you discovering your academic interest, or a reflective essay that dives deep into the details of why you are drawn to your particular academic subject.

Whatever way you take it, try to make your essay unique—either through your subject matter, your structure, or your writing style!

College essay prompts often engage with the word “community.” As an essay writer, it is important to recognize that your community can be as large, small, formal, or informal as you want it to be. Your school is obviously a community you belong to, but your local grocery store, the nearby pet adoption center you volunteer at, your apartment building, or an internet group can also be communities. Even larger social groups that you are a part of, like your country or your ethnicity, can be a community. 

The important part of your response here is not the community you identify with but rather the way you describe your role in that community. What do you bring to your community that is special? What would be missing without you?

Some responses could include describing how you serve as a role model in your community, how you advocate for change in your community, how you are a support system for other community members, or how you correct the community when it is veering away from its values and principles.

Here are some fleshed-out examples of how this essay could take shape, using the earlier referenced communities:

• A student writes about the local grocery store in his neighborhood. Each Sunday, he picks up his family’s groceries and then goes to the pharmacy in the back to get his grandmother’s medication. The pharmacist was a close friend of his grandmother’s when she was young, so the student routinely gives the pharmacist a detailed update about his grandmother’s life. The student recognizes the value in his serving as a link to connect these two individuals who, due to aging, cannot be together physically.
• An animal-loving student volunteers one Saturday each month at the pet adoption center in their city’s downtown district. They have always been an extremely compassionate person and view the young kittens as a community that deserves to be cared for. This caring instinct also contributes to their interactions with their peers and their desire to make large-scale positive social change in the world.

Your response to this prompt will be convincing if you discuss your underlying motives for the service you have done, and in turn, demonstrate the positive influence you have made. That said, do not be afraid to talk about your actions even if they did not produce a sweeping change; as long as the effort was genuine, change is change, no matter the scale. This essay is more about values and reflection than it is about the effects of your efforts.

Lastly, if you are discussing a specific service you did for your community, you might want to touch on what you learned through your service action or initiative, and how you will continue to learn in the future. Here are a few examples:

• Passionate about classical music, you created a club that taught classical and instrumental music at local elementary schools. You knew that the kids did not have access to such resources, so you wanted to broaden their exposure as a high school senior had done for you when you were in middle school. You encouraged these elementary schoolers to fiddle with the instruments and lobbied for a music program to be implemented at the school. Whether the proposal gets approved or not, the kids have now known something they might never have known otherwise.
• Working at your local library was mundane at times, but in the long run, you realized that you were facilitating the exchange of knowledge and protecting the intellectual property of eminent scholars. Over time, you found ways to liven up the spirit of the library by leading arts and crafts time and booking puppet shows for little kids whose parents were still at work. The deep relationships you forged with the kids eventually blossomed into a bond of mentorship and mutual respect.

Be authentic and humble in your response to this essay! Make sure it feels like you made your community a better place because community is a value of yours, not just so that you could write about it in a college essay.

This is the most open-ended any question can get. You have the freedom to write about anything you want! That said, make sure that, no matter what you do with this prompt, your focus can be summarized into two sentences that describe the uniqueness of your candidacy.

The process we recommend for responding to open-ended prompts with clarity involves the following steps:

1. On a blank piece of paper, jot down any and every idea — feelings, phrases, and keywords — that pop into your head after reading this prompt. Why are you unique?

2. Narrow your ideas down to one topic. The two examples we will use are a student writing about how her habit of pausing at least five seconds before she responds to someone else’s opinion is emblematic of her thoughtfulness and a student whose interest in researching the history of colonialism in the Caribbean is emblematic of their commitment to justice.

3. Outline the structure of your essay, and plan out content for an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

4. Before you start writing your essay, write one or two sentences that summarize how you would like the admissions officers to perceive you based on this essay. These sentences will not be in your final product, but will help you to maintain a focus. For our examples, this would be something like “Natalie’s habit of gathering her thoughts before responding to other people’s opinions allows her to avoid undesired complications and miscommunications in her social interactions. This has not only helped her maintain strong relationships with all the staff members of the clubs she leads, but will also help her navigate the social environments that she will face in the professional world.” A summary for the student writing about their interest in the history of colonialism could be “Jonathan has always been highly compassionate and sympathetic by nature. When they found out about the historical injustices of colonialism in the Caribbean through the book The Black Jacobins , they realized that compassion is what is missing from politics. Now, they are inspired to pursue a political science degree to ultimately have a political career guided by compassion.”

5. Finally, write an essay dedicated to constructing the image you devised in step 4. This can be achieved through a number of different structures! For example, Natalie could use an anecdote of a time when she spoke too soon and caused someone else pain, then could reflect on how she learned the lesson to take at least five seconds before responding and how that decision has affected her life. Jonathan could create an image of the future where they are enacting local policies based on compassion. It is important to keep in mind that you do not want to be repetitive, but you must stay on topic so that admissions officers do not get distracted and forget the image that you are attempting to convey.

As exemplified by the examples we provided, a good way to approach this prompt is to think of a quality, value, or personality trait of yours that is fundamental to who you are and appealing to admissions officers, then connect it to a specific activity, habit, pet peeve, anecdote, or another tangible example that you can use to ground your essay in reality. Use the tangible to describe the abstract, and convince admissions officers that you would be a valuable asset to their UC school!

Where to Get Your UC Essays Edited

With hundreds of thousands of applicants each year, many receiving top scores and grades, getting into top UC schools is no small feat. This is why excelling in the personal-insight questions is key to presenting yourself as a worthwhile candidate. Answering these prompts can be difficult, but ultimately very rewarding, and CollegeVine is committed to helping you along that journey. Check out these UC essay examples for more writing inspiration.

If you want to get your essays edited, we also have free peer essay review , where you can get feedback from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by editing other students’ essays.

You can also receive expert essay review by advisors who have helped students get into their dream schools. You can book a review with an expert to receive notes on your topic, grammar, and essay structure to make your essay stand out to admissions officers. Haven’t started writing your essay yet? Advisors on CollegeVine also offer  expert college counseling packages . You can purchase a package to get one-on-one guidance on any aspect of the college application process, including brainstorming and writing essays.

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

The Do’s and Don’ts of Answering UC Personal Insight Questions

• by Alexa Carter
• May 18, 2021

For many high school seniors, the college application process can be a scary one. The dreaded writing portion can be especially time-consuming. You have to describe yourself to an application reviewer and hope they get to know you aside from your test scores and course load. Some colleges require long essays; some don’t require them at all. The University of California requires you to respond to four out of eight Personal Insight Questions , and you have a maximum of 350 words for each.

Fear not, though: These are great opportunities to express yourself. The prompts let you describe different aspects of your life instead of feeling confined to writing one impersonal summary. When starting this part of the UC application, I learned a lot along the way.

Prepare in advance: DO!

A rule so simple that it seems obvious. I was in high school once, too, and as a college student, I hate to break it to you, but procrastination still creeps in. The UC application opens on August 1 every year and closes on November 30. That means you have about four months to work on your application. I’m not saying on Aug. 1 you should sit down and knock it all out. In fact, I started looking at my application at the end of October and submitted it in mid-November.

You’re given a large window of time for a reason. This is your college application we’re talking about, so it’s important to take the time to think and pre-plan what exactly you want to write about.

Choose questions based on what you think the reader will like: DON'T!

I'll admit I’m guilty of this one. When I first looked at the Personal Insight Questions I wrote down the four questions I thought would look really good on my application.

It wasn’t until I actually sat down to draft how I wanted to respond to each question that I noticed two were too similar in content. Later in this blog, you’ll see why it’s important to differentiate what you write about. But for the time being, I’ll simply say I went back to the list and picked a question that was a little out of my comfort zone. The new question I chose actually ended up being my favorite response. I felt better making that switch after learning that all of the personal insight questions are viewed equally. Reviewers are looking for thoughtful answers, not necessarily the right answer.

Relate your past experiences to the person you are today: DO!

There are two things to remember when explaining the growth you've experienced facing your challenges:

• If the event happened during your childhood it needs to have had a lasting impact on you.
• If the event happened recently, how have you grown since it happened?

If you're going to talk about a setback you faced — like the time you broke a bone in the second grade — it should describe its lasting impact on you . Either describe its lasting impact or choose another question or instance that aligns better with your current self.

In one of my responses, I wrote about how I fractured my elbow during my junior year and was out for half of the Varsity Tennis season. Through hard work, I was able to place second in the league tournament and made it to CIF with my doubles partner. This was relatively close to when I was applying, and the event had made an impact on my life.

Childhood stories and recent events are great instances where you can show growth. Make sure in either case you make strong connections between the event to how you’ve become the person you are today.

Repeat the same stories: DON'T!

Application reviewers only get 1,400 words to learn about you. This may seem like a lot, but fitting your life into four short responses can be tough. That’s why with so few words, it’s crucial you present diversity in the content. You can do this by picking questions very different from each other or mixing your accomplishments into other prompts. Whatever you choose to do, remember: diversifying is key.

Proofread your work and ask for edits: DO!

When writing my responses I thought they were great, needing not a single revision. I was wrong. When my IB English teacher offered to read my Personal Insight Questions, I thought, “Why not?” I brought her my printed responses and she started marking them up right away. 

At first, I was surprised. Did I really do that bad? When she read her suggestions to me, I agreed with every. single. One.

It’s easy to associate constructive criticism with a pejorative. Sometimes we forget others' suggestions help open our minds to things we don’t always think of on our own. That’s the great thing about being human. We all have our own perspectives. If we embrace it for what it is, we can make our work that much better.

DON’T spend your entire essay talking about an inspirational person

This one seems easy on the surface, but it's really hard to avoid once you get down to writing.

When any of us talk about the most inspirational person in our lives it's hard not to want to include all the context that makes them so great. Again, you only have 1,400 words to give reviewers a peek at what makes up your life, accomplishments, and background.

If you spend 25 percent of that time talking about someone else, it’s even harder for them to get to know you. Inspirational people are huge influences on who we are and it’s hard not to give them the credit they deserve. If you are going to reference them, do it briefly and pivot to how that person’s influence has made you who you are .

Yes, the college application process can be scary to start, but it can also be a fun exercise reconnecting with yourself. You get to share your accomplishments and personality through self-reflection. It might seem awkward sharing it all with a stranger, don’t get me wrong. Think of it more like a written highlights reel. If a friend was describing you to a stranger, what parts of your highlight reel would they want to share?

For information about Personal Insight Questions, check out these resources from the University of California’s website ,  this blog from UC Davis Undergraduate Admissions, and this webpage from UC Davis about Personal Insight Questions.

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UC Essay Examples for the Personal Insight Questions

Sample essays with explanations of their strengths and weaknesses

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Every applicant to one of the University of California campuses must write four short essays in response to the UC application's Personal Insight questions. The UC essay examples below reveal how two different students approached the prompts. Both essays are accompanied by an analysis of their strengths and weaknesses.

Features of a Winning UC Personal Insight Essay

The strongest UC essays present information that isn't available elsewhere in the application, and they paint the portrait of someone who will play a positive role in the campus community. Let your kindness, humor, talent, and creativity shine, but also make sure each of your four essays is substantive.

As you figure out your strategy for responding to the UC Personal Insight questions , keep in mind that it's not just the individual essays that matter, but also the full portrait of yourself that you create through the combination of all four essays. Ideally, each essay should present a different dimension of your personality, interests, and talents so that the admissions folks get to know you as a three-dimensional individual who has a lot to contribute to the campus community.

UC Sample Essay, Question #2

For one of her Personal Insight essays, Angie responded to question #2: 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.

Here is her essay:

I’m not great at drawing. Even after taking the required art classes in elementary and middle school, I don’t really see myself becoming a famous artist anytime soon. I’m most comfortable creating stick figures and notebook doodles. However, my lack of innate talent hasn’t kept me from using drawing communicate or entertain through cartoons.

Now, like I said, the artwork itself isn’t going to win any awards, but that’s only part of my creative process. I draw cartoons to make my friends laugh, to make my siblings feel better if they’re having a bad day, to poke fun at myself. I don’t make cartoons to show off my artistic ability; I make them because I think they’re fun to create, and (so far) other people enjoy them.

When I was about seven or eight, my sister got dumped by her boyfriend unexpectedly. She was feeling really down about it, and I was trying to think of something I could do that would cheer her up. So I drew a (pretty bad) likeness of her ex, made better by some rather unflattering details. It made my sister laugh, and I like to think I helped her through her break-up, even if only a little bit. Since then, I’ve drawn caricatures of my teachers, friends, and celebrities, ventured a little into political cartooning, and started a series about my interactions with my idiotic cat, Gingerale.

Cartooning is a way for me to be creative and express myself. Not only am I being artistic (and I use that term loosely), but I’m using my imagination to create scenarios and figure out how how to represent people and things. I’ve learned what people find funny, and what is not funny. I’ve come to realize that my drawing skills are not the important part of my cartooning. What is important is that I’m expressing myself, making others happy, and doing something small and silly, but also worthwhile.

Discussion of UC Sample Essay by Angie

Angie's essay comes in at 322 words, a little below the 350-word limit. 350 words is already a small space in which to tell a meaningful story, so don't be afraid to submit an essay that's close to the word limit (as long as your essay isn't wordy, repetitive, or lacking substance).

The essay does a good job showing the reader a dimension of Angie that probably isn't apparent anywhere else in her application. Her love of creating cartoons wouldn't appear in her academic record or list of extracurricular activities . Thus, it's a good choice for one of her Personal Insight essays (after all, it's providing new insight into her person). We learn that Angie isn't just a good student who is involved in some school activities. She also has a hobby she is passionate about. Crucially, Angie explains why cartooning is important to her.

The tone of Angie's essay is also a plus. She has not written a typical "look how great I am" essay. Instead, Angie clearly tells us that her artistic skills are rather weak. Her honesty is refreshing, and at the same time, the essay does convey much to admire about Angie: she is funny, self-deprecating, and caring. This latter point, in fact, is the true strength of the essay. By explaining that she enjoys this hobby because of the happiness it brings other people, Angie comes across as someone who is genuine, considerate, and kind.

Overall, the essay is quite strong. It is clearly written, uses an engaging style , and is free of any major grammatical errors . It presents a dimension of Angie's character that should appeal to the admissions staff who read her essay. If there is one weakness, it would be that the third paragraph focuses on Angie's early childhood. Colleges are much more interested in what you have done in recent years than your activities as a child. That said, the childhood information connects to Angie's current interests in clear, relevant ways, so it does not detract too much from the overall essay.

UC Sample Essay, Question #6

For one of his University of California Personal Insight essays, Terrance responded to option #6: Describe your favorite academic subject and explain how it has influenced you .

Here is his essay:

One of my strongest memories in elementary school is rehearsing for the annual “Learning on the Move” show. The fourth graders put on this show every year, each one focusing on something different. Our show was about food and making healthy choices. We could pick which group to be in: dancing, stage design, writing, or music. I chose music, not because I was interested in it the most, but because my best friend had picked it.

I remember the music director showing us a long row of various percussion instruments, and asking us what we thought different foods would sound like. This was not my first experience in playing an instrument, but I was a novice when it came to creating music, deciding what the music meant, and what its intent and meaning was. Granted, choosing a güiro to represent scrambled eggs was not Beethoven writing his Ninth Symphony, but it was a start.

In middle school, I joined the orchestra, taking up the cello. Freshmen year of high school, I auditioned for, and was accepted into, the regional youth symphony. More importantly, though, I took two semesters of Music Theory my sophomore year. I love playing music, but I’ve learned that I love writing it even more. Since my high school only offers Music Theory I and II, I attended a summer music camp with a program in theory and composition. I learned so much, and I’m looking forward to pursuing a major in Music Composition.

I find writing music is a way for me to express emotions and tell stories that are beyond language. Music is such a unifying force; it’s a way to communicate across languages and borders. Music has been such a large part of my life—from fourth grade and on—and studying music and music composition is a way for me to create something beautiful and share it with others.

Discussion of UC Sample Essay by Terrance

Like Angie's essay, Terrance's essay comes in at a little over 300 words. This length is perfectly appropriate assuming all of the words add substance to the narrative. When it comes to the features of a good application essay , Terrance does well and avoids common pitfalls.

For Terrance, the choice of question #6 makes sense—he fell in love with composing music, and he is entering college knowing what his major will be. If you are like many college applicants and have a wide range of interests and possible college majors, you may want to steer clear of this question.

Terrance's essay does a good job balancing humor with substance. The opening paragraph presents an entertaining vignette in which he chooses to study music based on nothing more than peer pressure. By paragraph three, we learn how that rather serendipitous introduction to music has led to something very meaningful. The final paragraph also establishes a pleasing tone with its emphasis on music as a "unifying force" and something that Terrance wants to share with others. He comes across as a passionate and generous person who will contribute to the campus community in a meaningful way.

A Final Word on Personal Insight Essays

Unlike the California State University system , the University of California schools have a holistic admissions process. The admissions officers are evaluating you as a whole person, not just as numerical data related to test scores and grades (although both are important). The Personal Insight questions are one of the primary ways the admissions officers get to know you, your personality, and your interests.

Think of each essay as an independent entity, as well as one piece of a four-essay application. Each essay should present an engaging narrative that reveals an important aspect of your life as well as explain why the topic you've chosen is important to you. When you consider all four essays in combination, they should work together to reveal the true breadth and depth of your character and interests.

• Tips for the 8 University of California Personal Insight Questions
• UC Personal Statement Prompt #1
• The Length Requirements for the Common Application Essay in 2020-21
• Addressing Diversity in a College Application Essay
• Common Application Essay Option 3 Tips: Challenging a Belief
• Should an Application Essay Be Single-Spaced or Double-Spaced?
• Tips for the Pre-2013 Personal Essay Options on the Common Application
• Common Application Essay Option 4—Gratitude
• Tips for an Admissions Essay on an Influential Person
• "Gym Class Hero" - a Common Application Essay Sample for Option #3
• Sample Common Application Essay for Option #5
• College Application Essay - The Job I Should Have Quit
• How to Write a Great College Application Essay Title
• Tips for Writing an Essay on an Event That Led to Personal Growth
• 2020-21 Common Application Essay Option 4—Solving a Problem
• 5 Tips for a College Admissions Essay on an Important Issue

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Last updated April 17, 2023

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Blog > UC Essays > How to Answer the UC Essay Prompts

How to Answer the UC Essay Prompts

Admissions officer reviewed by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University

Written by Alex McNeil, MA Admissions Consultant

Key Takeaway

Taken collectively, the University of California receives more college applications every year than any other set of institutions in the world.

As a proud Californian, I can't help but love the UCs. Where else do you find such a massive, well-funded, geographically dispersed system of top-quality public education?

California rules.

Ok, got that out of my system. Time to talk about how you can actually get into the UCs by mastering those devilish "personal interest questions," better known as the UC essays.

UC admission is an increasingly pitched battle

I know I just went off about how good the UCs are. But the reality is, they aren't what they used to be from at least two perspectives: cost and ease of admission.

Did you know that tuition at UC Berkeley in 1980 was $2,600 per year? Today the cost of attending is $19,000 and more than $50,000 yearly for out-of-state students.

Equally alarming is the shift in admission rates over that time. In 1980 only  9,000 students  applied to Berkeley. In 2021 more than 85,000 applied. Today the admission rate at Berkeley is just over 11%. These same trends have unfolded at the other UC campuses, as well.

So students who want to attend Berkeley, UCLA, or any of the UC schools will need to bring their A-Game.

That means, of course, killing it academically throughout high school. Test scores no longer matter for UC admission, as the UC collectively decided to throw out SAT and ACT scores in the evaluation process.

Indeed, UC admission comes down to a few factors: grades, recommendations, and essays.

I have no control over your grades or your recommendations (although I do talk about recommendations elsewhere). I hope, however, to have a positive influence on your UC essays.

That's what this post is dedicated to, anyway. This is a long post, so let me give you a quick roadmap.

First, we’ll go over the basics: what the UC essays are, what all they require of you, and how they’re evaluated.

Then we’ll move into talking about the three “rules” (read: strategies) that I encourage all students to follow to write the best UC essays possible.

Finally, I’ll go through each UC essay prompt in turn. I’ll break down what every single prompt is asking you to do and give you brainstorming and outlining exercises to get you started. I’ve also included UC essay examples for all eight prompts so you know what you should look for in your own.

Okay, ready? Let's get into it.

What are the UC Essays?

The UC essays are a set of 8 prompts from which applicants must select and answer four. These prompts provide you an opportunity to show UC admissions committees exactly who you are.

The UC website  introduces  these prompts in this slightly bizarre way: "Imagine UC was a person. If we met face-to-face, what would you want us to know about you?"

OK, don't love the idea of imagining a massive institutional system as a singular person, but there it is.

Instead of picturing the UCs as a person, try approaching your UC essays with a few institutional values in mind. Things like intellectual curiosity, community-mindedness, innovation, leadership, and altruism should underlie your essay writing.

Why? Because those are the values central to the University of California system. The University of California’s motto is, “ Let there be light ,” and the Office of the President sums up the University’s mission with these three phrases : We Teach. We do research. We provide public service.

Since you’re applying to join this institution, your essays are the perfect place to demonstrate that you belong there.

Now, back to the essays themselves.

UC Personal Insight Question Word Limit

Each of the four essays you select has a maximum word length of 350 words. That means that you’ll be writing a maximum of 1,400 words for your UC essays.

But don’t worry about perfectly meeting this word limit for every single essay. You should shoot to hit at least 275 words for each essay, though.

If you’re using a word processor, 275 words is just over half a page single-spaced or a full page double-spaced. If you’re on the upper end of the word limit, you should be about 3/4 page single-spaced or almost 1.5 pages double-spaced for every single essay.

As long as you’re within the word count, though, what matters most is the quality of your essays.

How Important are Personal Insight Questions?

As the UC explains, the UC Personal Insight Questions play an important role in UC admissions decisions.

The UC system emphasizes that all the prompts are evaluated equally; that is, no prompt is more or less valuable to answer than any of the others.

With that information in hand, you should feel comfortable choosing the four prompts that best suit your needs. Don’t worry about an admissions officer analyzing why you chose the prompts you chose. Just choose the ones that let you tell your story in the fullest and most strategic way possible.

Also be comforted by the fact that the UCs explicitly state that there isn’t a right or wrong way to answer each prompt. Now, some ways are definitely better than others (and we’ll get to that in a minute). But UC admissions officers won’t go into your essay with an already-established idea of what your essay should be about.

But just because you have some flexibility with the Personal Insight Questions doesn’t mean that you should just write whatever you want. They’re an extremely important part of the selection process, nearly equal to the importance of one's grades and academic performance.

Each individual UC campus gives different weight to the essays in the decision process. You can click through each campus to read more about that on the UC’s website . But no matter which campuses you’re applying to, your admissions officers will base their admission decision, at least in part, on your essays.

Phew! So as with any college essay, the stakes are high.

But what makes UC essays a bit challenging is the fact that they are completely different animals than the Common Application Essay or school-specific supplementals (if you want to read more about either of those, check out our Resource Hub). UC essays require a totally different approach to presenting your narrative.

Before we get into our strategies for approaching your UC essay narrative, it’s important to look more specifically at how the UCs evaluate your essays.

UC Points of Comprehensive Review

One of the reasons college essays are so hard to write is because it’s difficult to know what’s expected of you. You write your essays as well as you can, you submit them when you’re ready, and you hope for the best.

On the other side of the admissions portal is an admissions officer who you’ve likely never met. They don’t know you, so all they have to go on is what you and your recommenders have put on paper.

Similarly, colleges don’t typically put out rubrics or outline exactly what they want to see of you.

Well, most colleges don’t. Thankfully for all of us, the UCs do.

In a list called the “Points of Comprehensive Review,” the UC system describes in detail each part of their application review process. If you are really interested in this stuff, it might benefit you to read through the UC's own information on a page called " How applications are reviewed ."

But I’ll summarize them for you here.

First off, the UCs, like the vast majority of colleges, evaluates your academic performance within the context of your school. For example, if your school doesn’t have any AP or IB classes, your application will be evaluated differently than someone whose school does.

Other points of review are also relatively standard among admissions committees. These include factors like GPA, the number and level of rigorous classes, and class rank.

The UCs also look for students who have demonstrated commitment to and excellence at particular subject areas or special projects. That means things like going to your local college to take a more advanced math class or working with your city to study pollution in your nearby stream—things outside of the classroom that show initiative and impact.

If you’re following along on the UC’s How Applications are Reviewed list, then you’ll see that numbers 10-12 are bulky. They’re also the places where your UC essays can shine the most light and have the biggest impact, so pay close attention.

Number 10 lists off a number of considerations, including things like special talents, achievements, intensive studies or explorations, leadership, community service, and intellectual vitality.

Number 11 references the impact you’ve had on your school community, including special projects related to academics, school events, or programs.

Finally, number 12 states that the UCs also factor in how impressive your accomplishments are relative to your personal and family background.

If it’s your senior year, you can’t do much about where you fall on the first half of this list. Factors like GPA, class rigor, and extracurricular performance are, at this point, somewhat out of your control.

But these soft factors also play an important role in determining whether you’ll be admitted. How you talk about your accomplishments, your role in your community, your leadership skills, and your identity matters.

That’s why your essays matter. And that’s why it’s important to write them strategically.

Scroll to the bottom of the page if you want to jump straight to our prompt-specific guides, but we think it’s helpful to first go over three rules that will keep your UC essay strategy on track.

Writing the UC Essays

The UC essays are entirely different than your Common Application essay or supplemental essays. In particular, the most important thing you need to know about the UC essays is that they require a different tone and structure than the other, more personal essays required by many schools.

But if you do the UC essays right, they can also serve as the groundwork for all your other writing. This is because UC essays are relatively straightforward and to-the-point. You tell a story, highlight what steps you took to make a change, and reflect briefly on what it all means.

Going through this thought process for every UC essay you write can give you great material for your personal statement and supplemental essays. So take the process seriously, not only for your UCs but also for your other applications, too.

Before we go through the prompts, and definitely before you begin writing, we need to go over three strategies that will give your essays the best shot possible.

Here they are—are a few "rules" that will help you tackle the UC essays.

Rule #1: UC Essays Should Cut Straight to the Point

In non-UC personal college essays, it is generally OK to be reflective and abstract. Of course, the best personal essays are defined by their attention to detail. But many personal essays land on ambiguous and uncertain footing. There is often no clear-cut conclusion or lesson, and for those essays, that's OK.

But the UC essays do not follow the same rubric.

You simply cannot write a UC essay in the same way you write a Common App personal statement. This is because the UC essays are evaluated partly on their directness and specificity. They are not exercises in creative writing or in unvarnished reflection.

Each UC essay should tell a straightforward story from your life. They should highlight an experience, what you learned from it, and (sometimes) how the experience will shape your future.

Part of writing direct, to-the-point UC essays is also about effectively reading and understanding each prompt. The prompts often contain multiple parts and can have confusing wording. I’ll walk you through each one, but it’s important that you know the why behind doing prompt analyses.

Consider prompt #5 as an example: "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? "

This is not an invitation to tell a long story about the feeling of being privileged and bereft of topics for your college essay.

Instead, it's a time to talk about an acute problem (either persistent or temporary) and the actions you took to overcome it. The prompt also asks: How did it affect your academic achievement?

We can answer this prompt well if we do three things in this specific order:

• Explain a specific problem. Be a good journalist and expand on who, what, where, when, and why?
• Talk about the solution. What did you do to deal with your problem?
• Talk about the effect the problem had on your academics.

I know this might seem self-evident. But countless students have (and will continue to) roast themselves on prompts like this because they neglect to address a third of it. Every single part is important. The order in which you write about each part is important.

In case I haven't been clear: The UC essays require straightforwardness. Answer the prompt. Directly.

Rule #2: Try to Write the UC Essays First

It can be hard to navigate the transition from a reflective personal statement to the UC essays. That's why I usually have my students tackle the UC prompts first.

There are two benefits to this.

First, the UC applications are due earlier (November 30th) than most other schools. At up to 1,400 words collectively, they're a pretty major undertaking. So it's great to get going early, otherwise you’ll be stressed and write worse essays.

Second, I usually find that in the process of writing the UC prompts, my students discover the germs of the stories that they want to write about for their common application or for school-specific supplemental essays.

(Prompts about intellectual vitality, in particular, end up being easy to translate over to supplemental essays, and the prompts that ask about personal background can help you think about the stories that are most important to you.)

The UC essays are an exercise in concision. You will need to pare down your writing so that only the most essential details are present. If you rise to meet the challenge of the UC essays early, the rest of your essays will benefit from a war chest of succinct and powerful turns of phrase, sections of exposition, and whole paragraphs that can be transplanted at will into other essays.

Your UC essays lay out your stories, actions, and lessons. Your personal statement and supplementals can take these stories and run with them.

Rule #3: Select Prompts that Balance Your Narrative

Let's go back to that chunky block quote taken from the UC website for a second.

In your essays, they are looking for...

Special talents, achievements and awards in a particular field, such as visual and performing arts, communication or athletic endeavors; special skills, such as demonstrated written and oral proficiency in other languages; special interests, such as intensive study and exploration of other cultures; experiences that demonstrate unusual promise for leadership, such as significant community service or significant participation in student government; or other significant experiences or achievements that demonstrate the student’s promise for contributing to the intellectual vitality of a campus.

You can't be all of these things. But you can be at least four of them, because that's how many essays you get to write.

Have you ever played a video game where you had to balance your character's attributes? Turn up the speed, adjust down the strength, balance out the agility. It's kinda like that. You have a fixed number of "points" that you get to put into each category.

In this context, those categories might look like: creativity, intellectual vitality, leadership, resilience, compassion, and community engagement, just to name a few. They’re the kinds of values that we talked about way back at the UC motto and mission statement.

My advice: take a hard look at your application, figure out where your greatest strengths are, and lean into that area with two of your essays. Then, with the other two, show your diversity.

In other words, your essay narrative allotment should look like this:

Essay #1: Show a strength

Essay #2: Emphasize that same strength

Essay #3: Add some spice—throw a different topic in there.

Essay #4: Add even more spice—focus on a different fourth topic.

So if you're a really strong student, maybe you'll pick prompts #4 (academic opportunity) and #6 (intellectual passion). Those two should give you enough space to write expansively about your intellectual interests, research experience, and plans for study in college.

Then to show that you aren't just a bookworm, you can pick up prompts #1 (leadership) and #2 (creativity). The first will allow you to show the side of yourself that are externally engaged. The second will give you a chance to show you have multiple intelligences and diverse interests that go beyond a narrow academic scope.

Finding this balance is one of the keys to success in UC admissions.

OK, there are the rules: write in a straightforward style that answers the prompt directly, focus on your UC essays first, and choose four prompts that let you balance your narrative.

How are you doing? Need to take a snack break?

When you’re ready, it’s time to go through all eight of the UC prompts.

Here we go!

UC Essay Prompt #1: Leadership

The first UC essay prompt asks you to reflect on a "leadership experience." Whether or not you’re a team captain or manager at a restaurant, you can still answer this prompt. A leader can be any individual who shows initiative and effort, even if you’re working in isolation to change your community for the better.

Either way, this prompt is about "inter-relations." It’s a tool for getting at the question of how you relate to others. If written well, it can really help to humanize you in the eyes of the committee and show that you don’t just exist in your community—you contribute to it.

Let’s look at the exact wording of the prompt and dive a little deeper into how you can answer it.

1. Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts over time.

So this prompt is asking for two main things from us:

We need to “describe an example of” our “leadership experience.”

But it’s can’t be just any leadership experience. It needs specifically to be an experience where we:

a) “positively influenced others”

b) “helped resolve disputes”

c) or “contributed to group efforts over time”

The example you choose doesn’t have to address all three of these criteria, but it should address at least one.

Also notice that the prompt isn’t asking you to talk about the biggest or most monumental way you’ve led people. It’s simply asking you to describe a time you’ve taken on a leadership role and influenced the people around you.

Your “leadership experience” could look a lot of different ways. Here are just a couple of examples:

• Taking the lead on a group biology project
• Resolving a dispute between your friends or siblings
• Improving the process for packing hygiene kits for the community organization you volunteer with
• Encouraging your debate teammates to practice more regularly
• Organizing your choir peers to sing for the local retirement home

Whatever your experiences have been, this prompt asks you to think about the specific instances in your life when you have taken the lead and had a positive influence on the people and communities around you.

What this prompt is good for: The UCs value student initiative and leadership. This prompt can be a great way to show how you aren’t afraid to have an impact.

Prompt #1 Brainstorm Activity

To answer this prompt, begin by brainstorming some areas of your life where you’ve shown leadership. Remember that UC essays should be direct, to-the-point, and focused on the action steps you took. As you’re brainstorming, focus on examples that allow you to demonstrate actions and lessons.

Once you have a sense of your options, remember UC Essay Rule #3: you need to balance your overall application narrative. Narrow down your options by picking an example of your leadership that works in tandem with your other essays to create a holistic picture of who you are. Doing so will help the UC admissions committees learn about the most important parts of you.

Prompt #1 Outline Activity

Once you’ve chosen an experience to write about, it’s time to start planning out your essay. As we explain in our UC essay guide, the most important rule to remember when writing UC essays is that you need to be direct and to-the-point.

Writing a UC essay is completely different than writing your Common App personal statement or your supplemental essays.

Instead of writing creatively to tell a deeply meaningful story, your UC essays need to lay out exactly what the situation was, what you did to impact the situation, and what the overall outcomes were.

In the case of UC Prompt #1, let’s return to the criteria of the prompt:

Describe an example of your leadership experience

Explain how you positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes, or contributed to group efforts.

Your essay structure will likely depend on the specific leadership experience you’ve decided to write about.

But a good structure to use might look something like this:

I. Introduction: Introduce your leadership experience by briefly explaining how the experience came about.

II. Middle: Address the specific details that led you to positively influence others, resolve disputes, or contribute to group efforts. Write about these details in a logical (likely chronological) way, and emphasize the action steps you took.

III. Conclusion: Reflect on the implications of your leadership. How did people react to your influence? What lesson did your leadership experience teach you? What was your overall impact?

As you write, keep your sentences clear and straightforward. Make sure the story you tell is clearly-organized and action-oriented.

UC Prompt #1 Example Essay

You can find an example essay for UC Prompt #1 on our UC Example Essays post.

UC Prompt #1 Final Takeaways

You don’t need to have moved mountains to pick this prompt. Even if you were alone in your bedroom mapping out neighborhood routes to canvas for a politician in your community, your initiative and actions have undoubtedly affected the people around you. The UCs want to hear about those leadership experiences, so pick the ones that stands out best to you, and write about it in a way that emphasizes actions and outcomes.

UC Prompt #2: Creativity

This is another prompt that can be approached from both conventional and unconventional angles. The most straightforward way to answer this prompt is by addressing artistic creativity. Are you a sculptor or a musician? Maybe this is where you talk about your creative process or what you feel when you make art.

But your answer can also imagine “creativity” more broadly. One of the best answers I ever saw to this prompt was about soccer. The student linked his analytical creativity (the tactical mind of a soccer captain) to the organic, in-the-moment creativity expressed through play.

Let’s look at the specific wording of the prompt.

2. 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.

The central question this prompt asks you is:

• Describe how you express your creative side.

That means that your essay isn’t just going to be a description of your history playing the cello. Instead, your essay should focus on how it is that you express your creativity.

The prompt also gives us a few hints to get us started. “Creativity,” the prompt explains, can manifest itself in a number of ways: problem-solving, original or innovative thinking, or artistically.

Because the prompt allows you to write about more than traditional artforms or creative practices, you have a little bit of freedom with what you write about.

Here are just a few examples of how people might express their creativity:

• Playing an instrument
• Acting in theatre
• Doing comedy
• Building model trains
• Writing and testing code
• Writing prose or poetry
• Creating online or digital content
• Engineering structures or circuits

The list goes on and on. If you can make the case that your activity allows you to express a creative side of you, then you can write about it.

What this prompt is good for: Colleges love creative thinkers. Creativity, innovation, and problem-solving are all characteristics of people who aren’t afraid to make art and make a change in the world. If you want to show admissions officers that you’re one of those people, then this may be a good prompt for you.

Prompt #2 Brainstorming Activity

If you’re already deeply involved in a creative activity like music or theatre, then your topic choice for this question might be obvious.

Or maybe you’ve already quickly decided on a more unconventional creative topic to focus on.

But if you still can’t decide, then try out this brainstorming chart.

Hopefully you’re able to think up a few options. If not, then no worries! Maybe this prompt just isn’t the best one for you. You have seven others to choose from, so you still have lots of other options.

Prompt #2 Outlining Activity

If this prompt is the right choice for you, then you may find it helpful to outline a rough structure before you start writing.

With creativity essays especially, it can be difficult not to get distracted by personal expression and creative writing. But remember that all UC essays, even this creativity one, prioritize directness, so keep your focus on answering the prompt.

Here’s an example structure to get you started:

I. Introduction: Introduce what your creative activity is and what your history with it has looked like. You could also introduce what your “creative side” looks like.

II. Middle: Go in-depth on how, exactly, you express your creative side through this activity. Use specific details and action steps.

III. Conclusion: Briefly conclude by emphasizing what this creative expression has allowed you to do.

UC Prompt #2 Example Essay

You can find an example essay for UC Prompt #2 on our UC Example Essays post.

UC Prompt #2 Final Takeaways

Your creative activity doesn’t have to be a traditional artform. But you do need to make it clear a) what your “creative side” looks like and b) how you express that creative side through this activity.

UC Prompt #3: Exceptional Skill

When we think of skills, we might gravitate toward those singular abilities (juggling, playing an instrument, writing) that we have honed over time. But what you write about doesn’t just have to be something worthy of a talent show.

Here is a list of other, equally valid skills you might have: communication, listening, dream-interpretation, rock-skipping, phone repair, or doing a headstand. These other kinds of talents can be just as interesting and revealing.

Do these seem dumb? I admit: it might make for a bad essay to wax poetic about how you learned to balance on your head. But if talking about balancing on your head allows you to go deep into your quest to learn about physiology and exercise science, then we might be onto something.

What matter less than the specific talent you choose is the way you choose to write about it. If nothing immediately comes to mind for you, then it might be better to choose one of the other seven prompts. But if you do have something you want to write about, then run with it.

Let’s analyze the prompt and go over how you can write an essay that stands out.

3. What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time?

Of the UC prompts, this one is fairly to-the-point and straightforward. It simply asks you to answer three direct questions:

What is your greatest talent/skill?

How have you developed it over time?

How have you demonstrated it over time?

So the talent or skill you choose probably shouldn’t be something you learned on a whim and have only done once in your life. Maybe you learned that you’re really good at flying a hot air balloon but have only done it one time because you don’t own a hot air balloon. Okay, that might actually make for a good essay. But would it fully answer the prompt? Probably not.

Anyway, the talent or skill you choose should reveal something about yourself—or, more specifically, one of your core strengths—to the admissions committee.

What this prompt is good for: The skill you select can shine light on a deeper character quality or a commitment to learning and improving. From that angle, this prompt can be a good opportunity to showcase perseverance and stick-to-it-ness.

Prompt #3 Brainstorming Activity

Before you work through the following chart, let’s briefly expand on the difference between “develop” and “demonstrate.” I think you could interpret these terms a few ways, but I would say that this is the main difference:

Develop: How did you learn you were capable of this skill? What have you done to improve your abilities? How did you stick with the skill despite any odds?

Demonstrate: How do you show your talent or skill to others? How does it affect the people or world around you?

Prompt #3 Outlining Activity

Thankfully, Prompt #3 also provides a fairly straightforward way for you to organize your essay response. If it makes sense for you, you can outline your essay in exactly the same order the questions are presented in the prompt:

I. Introduction: Introduce your greatest talent or skill. Be detailed about what exactly it is that you can do.

II. Middle:

• Elaborate on how you developed this skill. Describe specific action steps you took to improve your abilities.
• Elaborate on how you demonstrate this skill. Describe specific action steps you’ve taken to share your skill with others.
• Don’t forget the “over time” part of the prompt, either. Your essay should emphasize how these factors have existed throughout time.

III. Conclusion: Conclude by reflecting on what you have gained from developing and demonstrating this skill.

UC Prompt #3 Example Essay

You can find an example essay for UC Prompt #3 on our UC Example Essays post.

UC Prompt #3 Final Takeaways

Prompt #3 isn’t for everyone, but it can be a great way to write about something memorable, highlight a special skill that few people possess, or demonstrate a significant perspective or ability to persevere.

UC Prompt #4: Opportunity / Barrier in Education

Alert: read. the. prompt. This alert is important for all UC essays but especially this one. This prompt is not an invitation to talk about any old opportunity or challenge in your life. It is specifically about how these have touched down on your education .

The UC provides some instructive info about this prompt. They say that "an educational opportunity can be anything that has added value to your educational experience and better  prepared you for college ." With this extra guidance, you have some flexibility in your topic choice.

If you enrolled in a foreign school and underwent a year of intensive language immersion, you might choose this prompt. But it doesn't need to be so grand. You could write about an internship you took that helped you clarify your research focus. Or you could go through what it was like to deal with the stigma of having an IEP.

Let’s walk through each part of the prompt, and then we’ll explain how you can best approach it.

4. Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.

This prompt can be confusing because it’s a “fork in the road” prompt, which means that it’s asking you to choose one of two different options. And the options it gives you are on opposite sides of the spectrum. Because the prompt puts an “or” in between these two options, we know that you do not have to answer both. You can choose to focus on one or the other.

Option 1: Educational Opportunity

For this option, you’ll need to do two things:

Describe a significant educational opportunity you’ve been presented.

Describe how you took advantage of it.

Option 2: Educational Barrier

For this option, you’ll also need to do two things:

Describe an educational barrier you have faced.

Explain how you worked to overcome it.

Note that the prompt says “ worked to overcome it.” That means that you don’t necessarily have to have solved every single part of the problem you experienced. What the admissions committee really wants to see here is effort. If your educational barrier is that you’ve moved several times throughout high school, then that’s not something you can solve. What you should focus on instead is how you found a way to persist and do your best in spite of the challenges.

What this prompt is good for: The advantage of this prompt depends on which direction you take the fork in the road. If you choose Option 1, then the advantage is that you get to elaborate on a cool opportunity you’ve been presented and show how well you can take advantage of what’s in front of you. If you take Option 2, then you have a legitimate and thoughtful way to explain any educational hardships you’ve experienced, and you can show that you are resilient and capable of improving.

Prompt #4 Brainstorming Activity

If this is the prompt for you, then something will probably immediately come to mind. If not, it’s better not to force a non-opportunity or non-barrier to fit into those boxes.

“Opportunities” might include things like: an internship or research opportunity, a particularly amazing teacher you connected with, a special guest lecturer, an educational trip with school or family, a study abroad trip, an educational extracurricular activity, and more.

“Barriers” might include things like: school or family situations that led to grade blips, parts of your personal health or mental health journey, experiences with learning differences, and more.

If something in this list resonated with you or sparked any ideas, then try moving on to the outlining activity. But if you’re still coming up blank, then you might consider choosing another prompt.

Prompt #4 Outlining Activity

The biggest thing to remember when writing this essay is to focus on actions . This fact is important in all UC essays but especially this one. The prompt very specifically asks you to describe the steps you’ve taken to “take advantage of” or “overcome” the experience you’ve decided to write about.

I. Introduction: Introduce the educational opportunity or educational barrier you want to focus on.

II. Middle: Describe the action steps you took to take advantage of the opportunity or work to overcome the barrier.

III. Conclusion: Reflect on how the opportunity or barrier and your response to it has shaped where you’re at today.

UC Prompt #4 Example Essay

You can find an example essay for UC Prompt #4 on our UC Example Essays post.

UC Prompt #4 Final Takeaways

This prompt isn’t for everyone, so don’t try to force it. But if you’ve experienced an impactful opportunity or want to explain some academic challenges you’ve overcome, then it can be a great way to let the admissions committee know. If you write this essay, just be sure that you’re keeping your focus on academics and emphasizing your actions.

UC Prompt #5: General Challenge

I think this is one of the best prompts to answer among the UC essays. Why? Because everyone faces challenges, even if we don't want to admit it.

From my perspective, this prompt can be worth double points. First, you get the opportunity to write a great essay about engaging with a problem. But second, you get to show off the additional maturity it takes to dig deep and admit to a committee of strangers that your life ain't so perfect.

Just remember, remember, remember: your job is not to elicit pity. It’s to show your maturity and resilience in dealing with adversity.

Let’s break down the prompt and talk about how to write it.

5. 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?

We have another three-parter here. The prompt asks you to do several things:

Describe your most significant challenge

Describe the steps you took to overcome that challenge

Explain how that challenge affected your academic achievement specifically

It's important to keep the wording of the prompt in mind. Notice how the prompt says “the most significant challenge you have faced.” It’s not asking for a day-to-day challenge or, worse, a challenge that’s actually a brag in disguise (”I worked too hard on building my award-winning robot!”).

It’s asking you to be vulnerable in sharing a deeply impactful challenge you’ve faced. And not just any challenge, but one you’ve dealt with enough to try to overcome. This should not be an essay about your ongoing efforts to deal with existential malaise. Your problem should be clearly identifiable, and you should also be able to point out how you have managed it.

Finally, you need to address how the challenge has touched back on your academic performance or experience.

What this prompt is good for: If you've faced any major challenges, this prompt can help share that story with an admissions committee. It’s also a great prompt to answer if you specifically had a big lapse in grades due to something that happened in your life.

Prompt #5 Brainstorming Activity

To make sure you’re hitting all parts of the prompt, consider filling out this chart. If you’ve faced a complex challenge or multiple challenges, you may also find it difficult to distill your experiences into a concrete example. If that’s the case, try being as specific as you can and filling out more than one row on the chart until you find something that you feel most comfortable with.

Prompt #5 Outlining Activity

This essay is one that you may not write in the exact same order as the prompt lists the questions. Since your challenge likely affected your academic achievement before you began taking steps to overcome it, it may make sense to discuss your academic challenges before your action steps.

If that’s the case for you, your outline may look something like this:

I. Introduction: Introduce the challenge and the effect it had on you.

• Describe how the challenge affected your academic achievement specifically.
• Describe the specific steps you took to overcome the challenge and improve your situation.

III. Conclusion: Reflect on what you learned from this experience.

UC Prompt #5 Example Essay

You can find an example essay for UC Prompt #5 on our UC Example Essays post.

UC Prompt #5 Final Takeaways

Don’t feel compelled to share anything you’re not ready to share. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: you do not have to write about trauma to get into college. In fact, writing about challenges that you haven’t begun to heal from can result in essays that miss the mark.

But at the same time, you may find that you want to write about a challenge to explain part of your personal background or transcript. If so, this prompt can be a great opportunity to share your story.

UC Prompt #6: Intellectual Vitality

Calling all nerds! I almost always recommend that my students answer this prompt, and I’ll recommend that you should consider it, too.

Why? If you've been reading closely, you may have noticed by now that many of these prompts come back to academic experience. It's no mystery: the UCs care above all about their academic culture.

This is the only prompt from the list that directly asks you about your academic proclivities. Go for it. Even if you aren't someone who strongly identifies as an academic, you should make an effort to talk about what inspires you in and outside the classroom.

Intellectual vitality can draw admissions officers into your interests and show them why you’re such a great fit for the UCs’ vibrant academic cultures. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to show what a curious student you are.

Here we go—I’ll break down the prompt and give you a few ways to choose the right subject.

6. Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom.

After the fairly complicated wording of prompts #4 and #5, this fairly straightforward prompt is a breath of fresh air.

In terms of answering the prompt, you have to do a few simple things:

Think about an academic subject. That means it can’t be just any topic—it needs to be academic and relate to a subject taught in college.

The subject should be one that clearly inspires you.

Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom.

So your essay should describe an academic interest that inspires you, and you should explain how you have taken your interest and run with it either inside or outside of school.

Part #3 leaves you with a lot of flexibility with the definition of “furthered.” You may interpret “furthered” to mean simply that you learned more about the subject, or it could mean that you took your knowledge and applied it to the real world. You may have advanced your knowledge by taking more classes related to the subject, or you may have taken the initiative to learn things outside of school.

With the prompt broken down, the real challenge comes in picking the right topic and writing about it in an interesting way.

What this prompt is good for: I recommend that everyone writes this essay because it’s a great way to show admissions officers that you are ready to tackle the intellectual challenges of college. The UCs are internationally recognized for their academic rigor, so showing that your intellectual vitality can match that of the schools is important. Additionally, it’s a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate fit for a particular major or general area of study you are interested in.

Prompt #6 Brainstorming Activity

Everyone learns. One of my students answered this prompt by talking about how his economics class helped him get into equities trading. As he learned more about regional markets as part of his trading strategy, he found that he became more engaged in the classroom too.

As long as you can relate your interest to an academic discipline, your options are really limitless.

If you’re applying with a specific major in mind, your academic interest can relate to that subject or not.

The key to choosing a topic, however, is that you have to be able to show concrete steps you took to “further this interest.”

Here’s a chart to help you brainstorm.

Prompt #6 Outlining Activity

I. Introduction: Introduce your academic subject. (Make sure it’s academic .)

II. Middle: Elaborate on how you furthered this interest. Explain whether it was inside or outside (or both) the classroom. Focus on specific details and action steps.

III. Conclusion: Conclude by focusing on how your intellectual vitality has benefited from this journey. You may also look forward to how you want to continue this academic or educational journey in the future.

UC Prompt #6 Example Essay

You can find an example essay for UC Prompt #6 on our UC Example Essays post.

UC Prompt #6 Final Takeaways

You should probably write this essay. It’s one of the best options you can choose because you can’t go wrong in demonstrating academic interest and fit. Just be sure that you focus on an academic topic and write about the concrete steps you took to “further” or advance your understanding of the topic.

UC Prompt #7: Community Betterment

Just as you have flexibility in defining “leadership” in prompt #1, the key to this prompt is to define the concept of "community." Community could refer to any scale of human organization. Your family. Your group of friends. Your graduating year. Your high school. Your town. Your state. The country.

It doesn't matter what level of organization you focus on. What does matter is that you have a compelling action to talk about. How did you improve your community? The change could be a cultural or material one. It could affect a small number of people or an entire city or state.

Before you begin writing, it will be helpful to analyze this deceptively simple prompt.

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

This simple question, only fourteen words, is actually asking you to do quite a bit of work. Let’s break it down.

First, you have to choose a community to focus on.

Next, you have to describe what actions you have taken

And finally, your actions have to be ones that have specifically made your chosen community a better place.

There are millions of ways you could approach this question. But what determines how you approach it is the community you choose.

If you’ve done something world-changing, then this is the place to write about it. But if you haven’t, don’t worry. Even small, local impacts within your family, friend group, or school community can have a deep impact on admissions officers.

What’s important to show is your care for and willingness to engage in your community.

What this prompt is good for: I find this one a bit boring to write, but it’s usually worthwhile. It shows off a great characteristic: altruism. The UC system is looking for students who are outwardly engaged in the problems of today. This prompt can provide an opportunity to align yourself with that value.

Prompt #7 Brainstorming Activity

Since you have lots of options because you’re undoubtedly part of lots of different communities, you may find it helpful to brainstorm what different community options might look like.

Start by writing down all the communities you can think of. Remember that “communities” can be more apparent (home, work, church, athletic, music, city communities) or they can be less apparent (friend groups, a specific classroom, an online community, a community of people with similar interests).

For each community you come up with, brainstorm the impact you’ve had. And if you don’t think you’ve had an impact—think again! Even actions as small as encouraging a member of your Spanish small group to speak aloud can have a huge impact.

Once you’ve determined your impact, think about what actions you took to get there. Be specific and detailed.

Finally, reflect on any relevant lessons you’ve learned.

When your brainstorm is complete, try picking out the community in which you’ve a) had the biggest impact and b) taken the clearest action steps.

Prompt #7 Outlining Activity

Based on what the prompt is asking you to do, a good essay structure may look something like this:

I. Introduction: Introduce the school or other community you’ve chosen to focus on. Describe your specific role in that community.

II. Middle: Explain a) what you understood the problem(s) to be, b) what specific actions you took to address those problems, and c) the ways in which your actions made the community better off.

III. Conclusion: You can reflect more on how or why you made your community better, what it’s like to be in a better community, or what lessons you learned as part of the process.

As always with UC essays, don’t forget to focus on the specifics.

UC Prompt #7 Example Essay

You can find an example essay for UC Prompt #7 on our UC Example Essays post.

UC Prompt #7 Final Takeaways

If you’re having trouble deciding between the prompts, this one is another good bet. It’s likely that you’re part of more communities than you realize. As you write, just be sure that you define the specific community you’re writing about and describe your action steps in detail.

UC Prompt #8: Open Prompt

I don't want to offer a ton of commentary here. I believe that most possible essay topics are covered by the first 7 prompts, and I usually try to steer my students toward those. But on a case-by-case basis, I think prompt #8 can be the right call.

That may be the case especially if you feel like a part of yourself hasn’t been fully represented in the other prompts. Or if you’ve written another essay or supplemental essay that you feel is necessary to understanding your story, then you may also consider this option.

But if not, don’t worry about not answering this prompt. The UC admissions committees explicitly state that all prompts are weighted equally, so you won’t be penalized if you do or don’t choose prompt #8.

If you do feel like it is the right choice for you, then let’s take a look at what it’s asking of you.

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?

This prompt lists a few requirements:

“Beyond what has already been shared in your application” implies that whatever you share in this essay should not appear anywhere else in your application.

You also need to choose something that “you believe makes you stand out”

But it can’t just be anything that makes you stand out. You should stand out specifically as “a strong candidate for admissions to the University of California.”

Like other open-ended prompts, you’ll have to make your case for why the essay topic you choose is important. Don’t just plop any ole essay in here and hope that it works. You’ll need to meet each of these expectations to write a good and effective essay answer.

Take another look at the Points of Comprehensive Review if necessary.

What this prompt is good for: If you feel like anything in your application is left unsaid, then this is your chance to say it.

Prompt #8 Brainstorming Activity

Since this prompt is so open-ended, a brainstorming activity probably wouldn’t be very helpful to you. It’s one of those “iykyk” prompts—if you know that you have something else to write about, then you already know that this is the prompt for you.

But as you’re reflecting on your topic choices, remember UC Essay Rule #3: Select Prompts that Balance your Narrative. Whatever you include here should be a piece of information that is essential to balancing out your application narrative.

Prompt #8 Outlining Activity

You have a similar kind of flexibility with how you structure your essay, as long as you’re adhering to each of the three parts of the prompt.

With those components in mind, your essay may look something like this:

Introduction: Introduce your topic in a way that makes the topic clear.

Middle: Describe any action steps you took in a way that makes it clear a) why this topic makes you stand out and b) why this topic makes you a strong candidate for admissions to the UCs.

Conclusion: Conclude by driving home why this topic is important to your story.

UC Prompt #8 Example Essay

You can find an example essay for UC Prompt #8 on our UC Example Essays post.

UC Prompt #8 Final Takeaways

If four of the other seven prompts work well with your story, then you might just want to skip past this one. But if you feel like there’s really something else you need to say, then just make sure you’re meeting all the requirements of this open-ended prompt.

Final Thoughts

The UC essays are exercises in precision, strategy, and honesty.

You need to understand your own strengths and weaknesses as an applicant, then carefully pick the prompts that support those. Then, you need to write clearly and directly, telling four stories that help the committee get to know you.

It's really hard. But doable, I promise. Hopefully this guide has been helpful! If so, check out our other college essay guides and the Essay Academy course for guidance on your other college essays. Until then. 👋

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UC Personal Insight Questions: 15 Tips and Examples

by Winning Ivy Prep Team | Feb 23, 2023 | UC Personal Insight Essay Guide

Wondering how to successfully write UC essays? You’re in luck! In this blog post, we’ll go over UC Personal Insight Question s tips and examples that’ll take your essays to the next level. 

And what does it look like when you effectively follow these UC essay tips? Behold: our 20 UC Personal Insight Questions examples .

Table of Contents

UC Personal Insight Essay Tip #1:  Make one anecdote the star of your UC essay

These UC essays are especially tricky because of the word limit: you only have 350 words to convey your message per essay. That means this: Don’t do too much in one short essay. In other words, don’t try to write about 3 different topics in one essay so that you can “fit” all you want to say. It’s always better to go for DEPTH per essay rather than BREADTH. 

Let me repeat that again: Depth > Breadth. 

Breadth is something you can easily tackle in your overall application because you literally have 4 UC essays to showcase breadth of experience. Depth is the piece that everyone’s answers to the UC Personal Insight Questions lack — so if your UC essays have depth, you’ll no doubt stand out from the crowd.

So how exactly do you add depth, you may ask?

In order to delve deeply into a subject, you only have space for one anecdote — one experience — as the main star of your UC Personal Insight essay. Here are basic steps:

• Showcase your anecdote by first setting up the scene of the story. 
• Showcase the conflict or obstacle that you encountered.
• Showcase your role in solving the conflict.
• Analyze how you grew and what you learned from this experience. 

So what does a UC essay with great depth actually look like? Checkout these UC Personal Insight Questions examples: 

• UC Personal Insight Example: prompt 7
• UC Personal Insight Example: prompt 2

UC Personal Insight Essay Tip #2:  Showcase growth throughout your essay

Writing about growth is honestly perhaps one of the more important UC Personal Insight tips I have for you. 

Why? Well, the answer is twofold. 

Firstly, admissions officers *love* to read about how you’ve grown from an event. An applicant’s ability to recognize learnings from an event and grow intellectually and personally is extremely important to colleges. Thus, admissions officers are on the lookout (especially via the UC personal insight essays) to pinpoint applicants that can bring this growth mindset to the UCs.

Secondly, writing about growth from an event is usually very difficult. So, not many students actually do this. Most UC essays I read fall short in this analysis department, so if you can go the extra mile and knock this out of the ballpark, you’re golden!

UC Personal Insight Essay Tip #3:  Showcase intellectual curiosity