<p>I am not familiar with the UC personal essay but I'm getting mixed signals about what exactly the personal statement should entail.</p>
<p>I understood it to be a vignette of who the student is-a deeper understanding of what makes them unique to the colleges- but I've been told the personal statement is for telling a school why you'd be a good fit for that school. </p>
<p>Which is a correct understanding of the personal statement?</p>
<p>Many thanks!</p>
<p>Hm, I just realized I never got a response. Maybe this would be better in the UC forum?</p>
<p>My D used the essay to give a deeper impression of who she is. She also used them to go more Into detail about why she made some of the choices she made. In my D’s case she wrote about why she made a big HS program change her jr yr.</p>
<p>I have recommended this Youtube presentation by a UC admissions rep several times over the years. It’s from 2007 but I think the basic approach still holds. Note: it’s about an hour long. </p>
<p>[Applying</a> to UC: The Personal Statement 2007 - YouTube](<a href=“Applying to UC: The Personal Statement 2007 - YouTube”>Applying to UC: The Personal Statement 2007 - YouTube)</p>
<p>You might get some insight into the UC application by reading a paper written by a Berkeley professor on the Berkeley admissions process. It is quite lengthy, but if you go to the very end it has a sort of checklist that the application reviewers use at Berkeley. <a href=“http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/committees/aepe/hout_report_0.pdf[/url]”>http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/committees/aepe/hout_report_0.pdf</a></p>
<p>Thank-you for the links. I will look through them. I am helping a young woman with applications and she plans to write about losing her house in a fire and how that affected her and how she persevered despite of it. Do you think this is appropriate?</p>
<p>writing about losing your house in a fire and perseverance is a good fit for the essay.</p>
<p>Hi Tx5 – Thanks for posting the link to that report. I didn’t read the whole thing thoroughly, so I may be wrong, but I think the checklist at the back was NOT a checklist used by the admissions department. Rather, I believe the checklist was used to code applications for purposes of the STUDY of past admission decisions that is the subject of the report in the link. The study went back and analyzed past admission decisions to determine what factors had influenced the decisions. I believe, but I’m not certain, that the checklist was developed for purposes of that analysis.</p>
<p>@nottelling. Thanks for the clarification!</p>