GETTING STARTED

Before you can begin writing an essay, you need to collect (and recollect) real about yourself, to jot down notes about yourself, what you’ve accomplished and where you are headed.

1. List all your activities for the past three years, including:

   • School activities

   • community services

   • other activities (lessons, work, and travel)

   • awards and honors. Include years of participation in an organization and offices held.

2. Record travel experiences and list your strongest impressions and how they affected you.

3. Think of one or two sayings that you’ve heard again and again around your house during your childhood. How have they shaped your life?

4. Describe an accomplishment that you had to struggle to achieve. Include what it was, how you tackled it, and how it changed you.

5. List any shortcomings in your school record and explain why they occurred.

6. If you could relive the last three years, what would you change and how?

7. What personality traits do you value most in yourself? Choose a few and jot down examples of how each has helped you.

🤔 Since these experiences are for you, feel free to put down single words or phrases. They are to provide information, which you can use, when writing your essays.

HOW TO APPROACH YOUR TOPIC...

Here are four types of essays:

1. "Tell us about yourself."

Show who you are, not just what you do, and how your experiences have shaped you as an individual.

• Assess what in your personality and accomplishment best illustrate the strong points that describe who you are, what you think and do and what you want out of life.

• Your focus may be a commitment to ballet, or your skill in managing a household of brothers and sisters, or the intellectual growth you experience through an activity or personal contact, or your ability to bounce back in football after a season of injuries. One successful applicant described how the tedium of working in a grocery store for four years actually gave him self-discipline, a sense of independence, and his college tuition. Another wrote how she felt that first day in the College Office staring at the rows of college catalogues on the shelf and how much she has learned since then.

Remember to stress the positive rather than the negative side of experience.

• Emphasis what you have learned from the experience and how coping with adversity has strengthened you as an individual.

2. "Tell us about an interest or idea."

Colleges want to know about you, how you think and what you feel. Be sure to show how the book, experience, quotation or idea you discuss reflects your outlook and aspirations.

3. "Show us your imaginative side."

Here’s an opportunity to show off your originality both as a writer and as person. You can be fanciful or serious in tone.

4. "Tell us why you want to come here."

Schools want to know why you want a higher education, what you hope to accomplish with it, and why you think their school, in particular, is the right place for you. (Do not mention a particular UC campus.)