<p>Just want to give a little bit of hope to all those future UC applicants out there.</p>
<p>I’ve always been a fairly average student. I never received any major awards, and I only took 1 AP class in my entire high school career, which is during my senior year. My UC GPA (10th-11th) is 3.19, 3.37 including first semester of my senior year. I scored an 1810 on my SAT, which isn’t really spectacular for UC standards nowadays. Obviously, when I applied to UC’s, I had little to no hope of getting accepted to any of them. I didn’t apply to Merced, Riverside, or any CSU’s for backup, so I was preparing myself to take a gap year after I graduate. Especially because a very small amount of people get accepted with my stats, and college admissions get more and more competitive every year.</p>
<p>Turns out, I got accepted to UCSC! 
I know what many of you are thinking: “UCSC is a stoner school, it has very low standards, etc…” But believe it or not, there are MANY people with higher GPAs and test scores who didn’t get in. I also have a classmate who is the Senior Class Treasurer and has done far more extracurricular activities than me with a higher GPA, and she didn’t get into UCSC. And after doing a lot of research and looking into their academics and co-curricular activities, I think UCSC is a bit underrated. Besides, prestige shouldn’t always define the quality of your education or your college experience. It is what you make of it.</p>
<p>I think I got accepted because of the passion I expressed in my personal statement and in my application as a whole. I play the piano (I taught myself after discontinuing my piano classes), I love writing poetry, prose, and music, and I’ve participated in a good amount of community service. But I didn’t do it for the sake of getting accepted to college. I did it because I was purely interested in participating, and I gain gratification from helping others. </p>
<p>Is UCSC my first choice? No, because it isn’t close to home, but I wouldn’t mind going there. I’m appealing to UC Davis as well (I have legitimate reasons to appeal, not because I can’t handle rejection, btw).</p>
<p>What I’m trying to say is this: just because you aren’t class president, captain of a sports team, or leader of some club, and you don’t have 10+ AP credits and a 4.0+ GPA, it doesn’t mean you won’t get accepted anywhere. College admissions can be very arbitrary sometimes and statistics change every year. As long as you work hard, present your application in a way that shows there’s more to you than numbers, and you stay optimistic until the end, you’re going to make it in somewhere. </p>
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