Please tell me how well my UC Personal Statement #1 is

College Essays
1

<p>Here is my personal statement for the first prompt for UCs. Any suggestions/corrections would be highly appreciated.</p>

<p>Prompt 1: Describe the world you come from - for example, your family, community or school - and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.</p>

<p>My mom has always made evident the sheer importance of school and grades and how it will aim me towards a successful life. My mom has lived a rigorous life; she had to take the roles of a real estate agent and a homemaker ever since she first decided to have children. Eventually she had to give up her career in order to take care of her children. In the end, she gave birth to seven babies total, with me being the sixth.
Since my mom decided to take care of the family and have my dad be responsible for most of the income, it became difficult for her to support us when they divorced. After a few years she met someone else whom she decided to marry; however, his aggression and abusive attitude slowly became revealed, and my mom was put in a situation where she felt she needed to divorce again. Forced to support her three last children relatively alone, many basic necessities of our lives became difficult to come by.
After observing my mother's rigid life unfold, I realized the significance of the advice she gave me concerning my success in school: she wants us to live a more prosperous life than she has; she wants her future generations not to be confronted by major financial issues. When I started high school, I had these goals set to my mind. Throughout every year of high school, I made certain that I maintained A's in all of my classes. One of my biggest regrets, however, is that I only took one AP class during each of my sophomore and junior years. Nevertheless, they were in subjects that intrigued me the most, and I am attempting to redeem myself this year by taking five AP classes, which I have been successful in so far. No matter the case, spectating my mother's harsh life along with living a brutal life of my own has granted me the dedication to triumph to the best of my abilities; I am ensuring that I'm on track of becoming valedictorian, which, at my school, is to have A's in every single class all four years of high school.</p>

2

<p>Pros:

  • I love the overall theme of your essay!
  • Your final sentence does a great job of concluding the essay.</p>

<p>Cons:

  • You should use more of a variety of sentences. It seems like your entire essay consists of long sentences. Instead of using a ton of semicolons, try to split up your sentences.
  • You seem to be putting things in the wordy-est way possible, lol. Instead of saying, “Since my mom decided to take care of the family and have my dad be responsible for most of the income, it became difficult for her to support us when they divorced,” it might be better to say, “After my mom became the family caretaker, my dad became responsible for providing financially. This made things difficult for my mother after she got divorced.”
  • UC wants to know “how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.” You do a wonderful job of portraying your mom and your family situation, but I feel like you should really expound on how this has affected you. Your final paragraph seems to lack details in this area.</p>

<p>Overall, I think you have a great starting point :slight_smile: I wasn’t really checking for grammatical errors, but I think you should send this to your grammar teacher before submitting it.</p>

3

<p>You did a good job describing the world you come from but need to do a better job of describing how this shapes your dreams and aspirations. The back half of the prompt is more important than the front half from the standpoint of letting the reader know more about you. I feel you only scratched the surface.</p>

4

<p>Thanks for your guys’ suggestions! I appreciate it a lot :)</p>

5

<p>You probably should not post any more essays for everyone to read. Ask CCers if they will read it and then send it to them privately. Some more feedback for you:</p>

<p>Try to talk more about your FEELINGS and EMOTIONS when you answer this prompt. How did/does your family situation make you feel? Are you angry, sad, confused, motivated (which you touched upon), etc. You still have much if not all of your innermost thoughts over your family situation locked up inside of you that needs to come out.</p>

6

<p>Try not to talk about how you regret not taking more AP’s, it makes your essay weaker. In addition, try to show more how this world has shaped, not only in school, but in other activities as well. Saying that your mother’s story has made you struggle to get only A’s, considering that you didn’t take that many APs, sounds too superficial too me…</p>