College Admissions' Parallel Universe: The University of California System
Applying to the UC Schools is just different enough that you need to watch out.
Giving general advice about applying to colleges can be strange. Every college determines its own process, including what application portals students may use, what application elements are required, and what deadlines students must apply by. Still, there is good advice every student needs to hear approaching their senior year and completing applications.
Get as high a score as you can on the SAT® or ACT®, to be more competitive even for test-optional schools. Ask teachers who know you well and will write positively about you for letters of recommendation. Create a Common Application account, which can be used for over 1,000 member schools. Write a strong personal statement on one of the Common Application’s essay prompts that tells your story. Craft a solid activity list that details your extracurricular activities.
That will get most students well on the road both to having applications ready for Early Deadlines, plus they’ll be set up to be competitive. There is a lot of work to applying to college, but getting a good test score, securing recommendations, starting a Common Application, drafting a Personal Essay, and building an extracurricular list helps any student apply to hundreds of colleges.
Except for the nine University of California campuses. The UC System is the parallel universe of admissions. Much like parallel universes in fiction, from Star Trek’s mirror universe to Bizarro Superman to the multiple Spider-Men (and a Spider-Pig) in Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, applying to UC schools is mostly similar to the Common Application, or the main universe of college admissions. Students still submit an application through a portal and are mostly assessed on their high school performance and personal essays. But the differences make it seem truly weird when placed beside applying to colleges through the Common Application.
The nine UC schools–alphabetically, Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz–do not use the Common Application. Instead, the UC’s have their own application. This isn’t just a proprietary application, but an entirely different beast than the Common Application. Students don’t submit a transcript, but fill out a detailed breakdown of their high school courses and grades based on the UC’s own A-G requirements. UC Applicants also don’t write one, 650-word essay, but 4, 350-word responses to “Personal Insight Questions.”
A huge number of students are UC applicants every year. For the 2024-2025 application cycle, over 200,000 students applied to the UC System as first-time freshmen. For individual campuses, the totals are even more astonishing. UCLA received 145,058 first year applications. Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, San Diego, and Santa Barbara all also had over 100,000 applicants. In total, 930,724 applications were submitted to all the University of California campuses. That’s an average of about 4.5 applications submitted per student.
That does not mean that students are working through 4 to 5 applications each. The University of California schools all take the exact same submission. For Common Application schools, the general information, main essay, activity lists, and school report get shared across applications. To submit to any additional schools, even those that don’t require supplemental essays, applicants must find the college, add it to their list, and answer a large number of school specific questions. To submit an application to an additional UC school requires students to click a button and pay the extra application fee. Sticking one more school on the UC application can be a last-second, easy decision.
University of California schools also don’t consider either standardized test scores or teacher recommendations. This puts less pressure on applicants to provide materials, but it makes the process more convoluted from the outside. Students essentially ONLY get in to the UC schools based on their high school transcript and application essays. (Barring things like athletic scholarships and other special programs, of course.) There’s just not much else in a UC application.
That means students who really want to go to a University of California school need to make sure their four Personal Insight Question essays are perfect. They also need to have it by a different deadline than other applications. The University of California application can only be submitted between November 1 and November 30. Most Early deadlines at other schools are November 1 or November 15, while Regular deadlines are often in January or February. And the difference between the Common App prompts and the Personal Insight Questions, as well as the difference between 650 words and 350 words, means that recycling essays is a lot tougher.
The parallel universe of the University of California presents a distinct challenge to any student applying to UC campuses as well as other schools. Quite likely, that is most students with a UC school on their list. 42,336 students from outside California submitted a UC application, and they likely applied to colleges closer to home. Many California-based students are applying to private schools in-state, especially highly selective schools like CalTech, Stanford, or the University of Southern California. For any student fitting those descriptions, they need to focus on applying through the Common Application AND the UC Application.
Takeaways
Anyone applying to a University of California school should view completing the UC Application as a separate process from completing the Common Application. You need to plan for devoting time to both.
Writing the four Personal Insight Questions requires a subtly different method to writing the Common App Essay. Your story will be told across four separate pieces, rather than one single piece.
The November 30th deadline will be slotted between Early and Regular Decisions at other schools. This creates a small window to focus on the UC Application, but you can’t leave it all last-minute, either.
Want help making your application essays the best they can be? We’ll review any draft you have and provide feedback in an hour-long session. Or you can sign up for a full, 10-session college counseling program to make sure your applications are their very best.
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