After I submitted my application to the UCs (University of California), I decided to change majors from bioengineering to biology for obvious reasons. However UCB required engineering freshmen to write about their interest in major, which for me WAS bioengineering. As you may know, all the UCs share the two essays, so i discussed how i got interested in that field, by being an intern for city hall and witnessing engineering within the city to benefit people for the “describe your world” essay. I mentioned in the conclusion wanting to study biology and bioengineering. Will it hurt if the admission officers read the essay and get the wrong idea or will they understand that i changed majors and no longer want to study bioengineering? or will they hold it against me? The same thing also kind of happened with USC in one of their supplemental essays. When I emailed them, they said something along the lines of " no other essay is needed," or “no to worry.” I may be just over thinking this like crazy, but I just really want to get accepted.
What do you mean you “changed majors”? Do you mean you want to apply to Letters & Science instead of College of Engineering? Not sure if that’s possible at this point, but it might say on the admissions webpage, or you could try to get in touch with someone in the admissions office. Otherwise, people change majors all the time, the admissions people know that many people will not graduate with the major that they originally applied as. But engineering applicants are held to a different standard than non-engineering applicants.
@jpheys this was before, the admissions permitted me to change majors. I submitted the application as engineering, then changed it after submitting to letter and science. sorry if I wasn’t clear on that.
correction *this is before when…
Oh, I see. It might depend on the details of your correspondence/conversation with the admissions office – was it past the deadline to submit essays? Did they make a note in your file that you switched? If they know you switched, and if they did not allow you to submit a different essay, then I think the essay is fine as long as it still tells them interesting and useful things about you. If they don’t know you switched, they might think you’re trying to get into Berkeley under L&S and then switch into CoE (probably frowned upon if that’s even possible). But you did say biology as well as bioengineering in the essay (according to your original post), and “study bioengineering” could just mean taking a few bioengineering classes in addition to the biology major classes. If you think there might be a misunderstanding (i.e. they made no note and are now confused), perhaps you could try following up with the admissions office to clarify. But if you had the opportunity to submit an updated essay and didn’t, then they might be justifiably concerned. (I don’t know if that was the case, just saying if it was, that’s probably not good.)
@jpheys thanks, like i said, i switched majors but they wouldn’t allow me to update essays. SO hopefully they took note of the switch.
@sadlarry I have seen a lot of students get in a UC writing in depth about a major that does not match the major on the app (meaning they changed majors at the last minute). It really makes me wonder about the true importance of these essays. Anyhow, re transfers, only UCB and UCLA read them as part of application and they really only come into play if you’re borderline. Assuming your stats are good it won’t matter. And even if you are borderline and writing about engineering, they mostly care about getting to know you, your passion, that you understand the subject criteria, and your thought processes. You mentioned bio at the end. I wouldn’t worry about it at all.