<p>In my personal statements, I wrote about the life lessons that i learned from my extracurricular activities and my life experiences… I feel that they definitely showed how I improved and matured as an individual over the course of my high school years.</p>
<p>Is this a big thing that the admissions officers are looking for? Some of my friends say that I did a really good thing to note down my personal improvements while other friends of mine say that I should’ve focused simply on details of my experiences.</p>
<p>What do you guys think? Does conveying significant improvement in character provide a boost for your essay?</p>
<p>All I can say is write from your heart. If you do a good job explaining how you have learned from your personal experiences, the UC admissions reps should be able to infer exactly what kind of individual you have become, and what kind of adversities you have overcome. Don’t just flat out tell them “I am more mature because I have overcome XXXX in my life”. They should be able to come to that conclusion on their own. Moreover, they want to see what makes YOU unique- What sets you aside from other applicants? Every UC writing workshop that I have been to strongly emphasizes using specific details to show what you have learned. Its best to find a happy medium between your concrete examples and your elaborations. Hope that helps! :)</p>
<p>Sounds like you are on the right track. Don’t stress, you’re fine.</p>
<p>I agree with kingdom. You know when you write about something you have a passion on, it will just flow out of your heart. For me I would not write about community service or volunteering because I thought these were redundant, but it could be different in your scenario but I think the adcoms have seen and read too many of these stories. Try to think about a hook in your life. I wrote about my struggles which are very personal therefore it was not that hard for me to write since I could relate to those stories pretty easily. I would say the hardest parts are:
how would you start it
how would you end it
and what vocab would you use to make your essay a bit more formal (idk it’s just for me. I had to go to dictionary.com to find synonyms to show my writing skills)</p>