The UC Essay Prompt 8 is perhaps one of the most versatile of the Personal Insight Questions. As such, students should greatly consider writing this as one of their required essays.
It is obvious that every UC Personal Insight Question requires you to describe what makes you unique. What can admissions officers learn about you as a person other than your achievements? This question allows the applicant to express themselves the most.
That’s why this question is the easiest path to impressing the admissions officers!
With that said, here’s what the UC Essay Prompt 8 looks like:
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“Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do you believe makes you stand out as a strong candidate for admissions to the University of California?”
Things to consider: If there’s anything you want us to know about you, but didn’t find a question or place in the application to tell us, now’s your chance. What have you not shared with us that will highlight a skill, talent, challenge or opportunity that you think will help us know you better?
From your point of view, what do you feel makes you an excellent choice for UC? Don’t be afraid to brag a little.
University of California Official Website
We actually have another article that covers what makes a good or bad UC essay topic. You can find that article here.
The gist of it is this: typically, making a sob story is a bad idea.
First, the reason sob stories are typically a bad idea is because of the difficulty in competition and the difficulty in making them look good. It’s one thing to be able to formulate a good admissions essay about the tragedy that weaves back into the prompt without essay advising or teacher help, it’s another to make it good enough to beat out the rest of the students with the same idea.
Yup, sadly, a lot of students also have the same idea of making a sob story in the hopes of earning enough pity points to buy admission into colleges. Some of them are good, but there are plenty of bad ones.
The fact that admissions officers get to read sob stories practically every other second makes it a bad idea to write them. Don’t do it. However, if you insist that you must write your sob story in your college essay, it had better be good and beyond the admissions officer’s expectations. Consider asking yourself this: how does my sob story actually show admissions officers that I’m a good candidate for the school?
Everyone has an identity, and that identity is unique. There are certain attributes about your identity that make you feel special and make you different. Now, there are two things important about this: personal bond, and effort.
The personal bond you have with your special attribute is what you feel is most special about you. The importance of feeling special isn’t just rainbows and butterflies talking, it’s streamlining the writing process.
How easy would it be to write about a part of you that you identified with your entire life compared to an arbitrary talent you had to think up of a few minutes ago? Yeah, the first one.
It’s also especially important that you talk about what you feel is best because if you don’t, the admissions officers will more often than not see the lack of passion through your writing.
Now, let’s talk about effort.
The “effort” part is rather self-explanatory. You have a trait or aspect of your identity that you had to work for and put effort to earn that you feel had most defined you.
Never learned the value of perseverance until you mastered Tae Kwon Doe? Great, use that!
Had to learn self-respect after struggling with anxiety and body issues? That’s also a great topic!
Now, maybe you don’t have a big mountain that you had to climb like some other applicants. That’s okay. Not everyone is going to have everything and the admissions officers know this. You just have to stuff your pockets with as many advantages as you can.
Note: You have to clarify WHY that characteristic or trait is important and makes you a good candidate for the school.
Personality traits develop in young teenagers after having discriminated between different traits and sorting between them over time. It takes work.
Values are developed after having gone through hardships and experiences that teach you things about the way the world works. That takes work.
Passions are simply the extensions of our souls. It’s what makes our burning bright, but that isn’t possible without having gone through work.
We don’t exactly mean work in the sense of schoolwork in particular. We mean work as in any experience that required some sort of action or input on your part. What that isn’t is arbitrary talent.
Arbitrary talent would be qualities and traits that differentiate you from the rest only due to things beyond your force. For example, you have a yacht and no one else does. You have a beautiful nose bridge compared to the rest of your family. These are all characteristics given either by privilege or by God, there is nothing that can provide moral value without giving a bad impression to the admissions officers.
After all, it would be even worse if the admissions officers had the impression that the only thing that differentiated you positively from the rest was something arbitrarily handed to you and nothing else.
The UC Personal Insight Questions must be 350 words or fewer. That’s short.
Because of that, most application essays will be about 1-3 paragraphs. The sweet number is 2, though. Why? Well, story structure.
If you have only one paragraph, you make the entire essay one big boring block of text. Having three will stretch you out too thin. Not only does sticking to just two paragraphs give you a sweet middle ground, but it also separates your story between engaging imagery and thorough explanation.
Speaking of stretching yourself out too thin, make sure your topic only focuses on one trait about yourself that makes you stand out. If you talk about more than one, you’ll only be able to reserve so many words for your positive traits.
Others who only focused on one trait would have more thorough descriptions about what makes them great than you!
Also, note that the UC Essay Prompt 8 is very similar in nature to the other Personal Insight Questions because it requires you to differentiate yourself from the rest of the applicants. As such, make sure you write about a different topic for all your UC essays.
Remember: the UC Schools provide you with great resources to practice coming up with ideas to better write the personal insight questions. They can be a little vague at times, but every bit of help counts!
Can’t think up of a good topic for your UC Essay Prompt 8? Not sure if you can make your essay look good? Afraid you won’t be able to make your dream school all due to being a poor writer? That’s what we’re here for: to help. Send us a message and we can take a look at everything you’ve got and provide expert opinion and feedback on your work!
