<p>@Smith415:</p>
<p>Yeah, agreed, to some extent. I ran into my share of counselors who either didn’t have a firm grasp on what they should have known, had a rough time communicating what they did know or were otherwise flat out wrong. I found a few diamonds in the rough who by themselves were immensely helpful, but mostly it was a scavenger hunt and a quest for constant clarification. “Ohh okay, that makes sense, but so and so told me…” Eventually, the pieces came together and I had the complete picture. It sounds as though your experience was similar.</p>
<p>As tedious as that process was, I still found it to be more useful than just diving onto these boards, chucking my academic history into the waters and reading the chatter. Yes, shared admission / rejection / application process experiences have utility here, but I disagree with you in that anybody can offer a “specific sense” of what the UCs are looking for. That information is already available with as much specificity as anybody is going to get. What people <em>can</em> offer here is succinct specificity in terms of procedural requirements, prerequisites, and answers to obscure errata with which we’ve had experience.</p>
<p>We know GPA is very important, we know pre-reqs are critical, and we know that in order to be competitive applicants, we should have non-academic achievements that we can present in order to further define our value to the college. If somebody really has to ask something like “hey guys, my EC: I was vice president of public relations for the debate club my senior year, do you think that’s good?”, I just roll my eyes. It’s the kind of question a child would ask, not somebody ostensibly about to transfer into one of the most prestigious public university systems in the world. If you don’t know that having a bunch of ECs is a good thing – if you <em>really</em> have to ask that kind of question – frankly, without making any unwarranted assumptions, I can probably say something reasonably accurate about your brain power.</p>
<p>I know this is really long-winded and ranty, but it bothers me that other members here are so quick to play the game. “Mmmmm, yes, based on your academic history as presented, I believe you have a very good chance in the neighborhood of 75-85% for your first and second choices.” Come on. What if it turns out that the person can’t write worth a damn, and he/she turns in two pieces of barely coherent tripe (like my posts, for example) during the personal statement prompts? We all know applicants are evaluated holistically – why, then, are we so quick to throw numbers at people when we flat out don’t have the information necessary to make those calculations? Hell, the people who <em>evaluate applicants</em> for a living probably can’t tell you what those numbers are, and certainly not without seeing that year’s applicant pool. </p>
<p>We all want to be helpful, particularly those of us who made it through the gauntlet – but I assert that, sometimes, the most helpful thing to do is tell people that we can’t help them.</p>
please look at my stats and see if I have a chance to UCLA and UCB</p>