Can I get admittion from a good university like UCLA,or USC by GPa 3.42 and some research and volunteer work?
Possibly, but we could use more info. What field? Master’s or PhD? How much research, and how good? And just FYI, volunteer work usually doesn’t matter in grad admissions, it’s not like undergrad where they are looking for a diverse group of well-rounded youths, grad programs are looking for hard-studying research machines.
A 3.42 is a pretty good engineering GPA, so you’ll definitely have a shot at plenty of good programs. It’s impossible to handicap individual programs because they are all quite different down to the department level in how they handle their admissions.
I’ll also second the comment about volunteering. Unless it is somehow related directly to your field, it means squat for graduate admissions. When I am evaluating candidates for admissions, I want to know that I or my colleagues aren’t going to be wasting our research dollars on students who ultimately fail or drop out.