I am just curious, for the students who have applied to UC’s and got accepted, for the first essay question about how you have taken advantage of your education opportunities, what did you write about?
<p>If you took part in an early academic outreach program, be sure to write that.</p>
<p>If you're the "typical" applicant with a school that has some nice advantages such as an AP program or IB program, then well... you can either write about how you challenged yourself, or you can be unique and write about something else besides the fact that you took AP/IB courses. </p>
<p>If you went to community college for summer school or whatever, that would be a good one to mention too. </p>
<p>For me personally, I defined "educational opportunities" to something else. Who ever said it meant ACADEMIC educational opportunities? ;)</p>
<p>Clubs with educational activites (speakers, etc), school activities (field trips), classes (AP, IB, Honors), summer school (High School, or advanced Community College or some other), Gifted And Talented Programs (some HS's have them), volunteer work (what you learned), Job (even if a simple one). You should say what you got out of every single activity.</p>
<p>Remember education doesn't only happen inside a classroom. And not all classrooms are created/written about equally. Choose wisely.</p>
<p>In our experience the thoughtful, focused approach to one or two things seemed to work well, not just a laundry list of your activities. She was accepted by UCLA, I think mainly from her essays. My daughter's focus was on theater, so she talked about how she created her own independent study for theater sound design in senior year. She discussed how she tailored her course to her goals in college, figured out what textbooks she needed, and described what she intended to achieve through the course--in her case to execute the load-ins and design for all senior year productions and refine her skills in ProTools, CAD, and mixing. </p>
<p>What I think was especially nice was that she showed she learned valuable lessons from other classes and was able to apply them to her theater work. For example she mentioned how being feature editor on her school newspaper helped her learn collaboration skills and how to work with others as a team, and why this was so important in theatre when working with cast and crew. She also brought in her AP English Lit class and described how this class taught her to read through a play and understand its essence. </p>
<p>So I think this answered the mail not only in terms of what did you learn, but what you did with what you learned. I think it also helped that she tied all three of her UC essay questions together with a common theme--theater.</p>