Many applicants to the most selective university programs share high grades, high test scores, solid recommendations and generous doses of community service and volunteer activities. Yet, if they want to set themselves apart from the pool of exceptional students, a significant research experience in STEM or the social sciences helps.
The UC admissions readers need a well-wrought set of activities to appraise your application.
A candidate can submit 20 activities with up to 500 characters to describe each. An activity list can possibly reach a maximum of 10,000 characters, around 1,600 words or 3.5 pages. Now imagine being a UCLA admissions reader at 2am on a Saturday morning coming upon her 1007th description of an ASB council member heading up a beach cleanup? Yes, it’s part of the job description, but show a little mercy.
An article in the 19 February 2020 Harvard Gazette, contains one of a series of articles called ‘Focal Point’ in which Harvard faculty respond to a fundamental question: ‘If you were to write a letter to your students, what would you want them to know?” In this edition, the faculty member is a lecturer in the physics department and a co-director of Graduate Studies for Physics, Jacob Barandes, and his remarks warrant reading and can be found at Harvard Gazette.
Often students are asked about their passions: exercise, the LA Dodgers, the German language, or coding in C++?
However, a better question, according to an article by Jon Jachimowicz, Three Reasons it’s so Hard to Follow Your Passion, in the Harvard Business Review 15 October 2019, is what is your purpose? Central to the article is a Deloitte Survey of 3000 full time workers across all types of job levels. It found only a fifth were ‘passionate about their work.’
In 2019, two researchers, one from Harvard School of Education, Jay Mehta, and the other from the School of
Education at UC San Diego, Sarah Fine, visited 30 high schools representing a wide demographic and geographic mix to observe deep learning in four distinct high school curricula: project-based, ‘no-excuses’, International Baccalaureate, and ‘conventional’.
Harvard secured the top position on the US News list of top undergraduate economics programs. Consequently, it is closely profiled below to model the demands of a rigorous curriculum. Yet, one program does not categorically represent the diversity of offerings provided in such an extensive field as economics. That’s impossible. So, to gain a better sense of the scope of the major we’ll also look at how economics is offered at UC Berkeley, Northwestern, and the University of Minnesota: all top 20 programs.
A good way to gain a sense of how to approach this type of essay is with samples of essays that have successfully addressed this question. Here are portions of successful essays to give you a taste of some effective approaches.
There are no wrong approaches as long as the essay matches your interests with what the school is offering in a particular major. Make that connection well and you’re well on your way.
An essay prompt found often on applications is ‘Why us?’ Why do you want to come here and what will you do once you arrive?
One of the best ways to attack this question is to learn as much about the college as you can to really gain a sense of the place. If you can’t do this don’t waste the college admissions office time, and more importantly your own, by writing generalities about the school’s size, location or reputation.
About forty miles west of Boston, past Framingham, the starting line for the Boston Marathon, right off the I-90, is Worcester, Massachusetts. Contained in this town of 168,000 citizens are 38,000 students attending nine schools. While it’s not Boston, it shares in Boston’s rich fabric of higher educational institutions, including the medical school for the University of Massachusetts, and a branch of MCPHS (the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences), whose main campus is in Boston.
Hot off the press! We've had a chance to review the Fall 2018 admissions data released recently by the University of California and thought it would be helpful to summarize it and share our key findings.
Overall freshman admission rates are up for non-residents and down for residents as the University of California continues to settle on a new normal that accommodates a larger mix of out of state and international students. If you're an out of state or international student, pay close attention...there continues to be a window of opportunity to take advantage of favorable odds at several UC campuses.
