Applying to the University of California (UCs) Schools

SAM: Yeah, fantastic. Well, Daniel, I have to say you are my favorite Prepory CEO, but you’re also the only one, so I don’t know what exactly that says. No, I’m really excited to talk here tonight, guys, again, my name is Sam Luby and I’m one of the Prepory coaches here. I have extensive experience as a college counselor for a little bit over a decade and kind of a variety of different roles from directly in high school to more the admission side. Today, with talking about the UCs specifically, I’ll share about my UC experience. So right now, I’m actually an instructor for the UCLA College Certification Program. I teach college counseling for international students. I’ve also been in admissions at UC San Diego and at UC Berkeley. Two years for both of them, where I primarily focused on reviewing first year international students and that San Diego is specific to Chinese students, greater China, and then at UC Berkeley was greater Asia, in general. So, I read thousands of applications and work with students on all, not just UC applications, but definitely the UCs is kind of my go-to. So, I’m really excited to talk about just the UC application tonight and dive into it.

DANIEL: Wonderful. Outside of Sam and I, I do want to let you all know that our colleague, Leti Casanova, is also here. She’s just backstage. You might see her name pop up in the chat box or in the Q&A. If you see her name, she is a member of the Prepory leadership team as well. She’s just hanging out to act as support for Sam and I this evening, so she will be supporting you on answering questions as well. As I mentioned earlier, I do want to say this just one more time: we do have an active Q&A box, so at the bottom center of your screen, there is a question and answer, a method that you can use and should use throughout the presentation. If you have any questions about what we’re covering or about what Sam and I shared tonight, please ask and we’d be happy to address that live as we go through or in written format in the Q&A.

SAM: Okay, great. Want to dive into Prepory?

DANIEL: Of course. Before we get into the UCs, we want to tell you guys a little bit more about who we are and our organization.

In terms of a little bit about Prepory, as I mentioned, we’ve been around since 2012, so we’re going on 13 years here. We’ve been around for quite some time. Our largest client base in our history has actually come from the state of Florida, excuse me, the state of California, despite our company being based in Florida, which is really cool and really interesting. What this means is that because we’ve worked with 14,000 students and the vast majority of these kids do come from California, we have so much historical data on what exactly it takes to go from your child’s high school or your child’s school district to whatever their UC dream school might be, whether that be Berkeley, UC San Diego, or UCLA. We’ve worked with tons of kids from California and know exactly what it takes to support those students in being successful. Last thing I want to say is our kids are 3.4 times more likely to be admitted to any school with an acceptance rate below 15%, which nowadays feels like every single UC. The University of California system is without a doubt, the most competitive public school system in the country, and it’s why it’s important to have conversations and help parents get informed and resourced like you guys are tonight by joining this webinar.

Alrighty. What you’re just seeing here is a smattering of a bunch of different logos where our students have been admitted. Every year, our kids get admitted to every single University of California school. This year, of course, our students were admitted to every single UC, and all eight Ivy Leagues, Stanford, MIT, and Caltech. We’ve crushed the cycle, and we couldn’t be more excited about our results.

SAM: Okay. Do you want me to take the agenda from here then? Yeah, of course. Let’s go for it. Well, thanks. As somebody that’s worked for Prepory, it’s almost three years, which is going to be crazy to think how fast time goes by, but it’s been a fantastic organization to work for and Daniel can definitely speak more about it. We’ll talk a little bit more towards the end too, about the Prepory differences you guys can see here on the agenda, but I’m excited here to talk about the UC system in general. So, with that, I’m going to get started. I’m going to try to look at the Q&A and hopefully I’ve seen some of the questions come in, and naturally I’ll answer it in our conversation if it makes sense, or again, there’ll be written responses, but we’ll definitely have time at the end to dive into questions.

SAM: So, let’s get started. So, the basics of the UCs in the University of California in general. I have to start off with this just because I’m a history nerd and that’s my focus. My PhD is the History of Admissions. In 1960 The California Master Plan was sort of a huge step in higher education. It was this idea of what university and higher education would look like in the state of California that created a three-tier system of the California community colleges, the CCC, the Cal State System, CSU, and then the UC system. The idea being that they all would have certain types of students that they would be trying to serve and function within the state of California in general, but they would also serve as great progression ladders, and it’s very common for students to go to a California community college and transfer to a UC system school.

So, with that being said, though, we do want to focus on the UCs in general. There are 10 campuses. San Francisco is a graduate school, so you do not apply there as an undergraduate student. But yeah, we have Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, UCLA, Merced, which is the newest campus. It’s really cool. It’s gotten really reputable very quickly. It’s a great option. Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. Santa Barbara is probably my personal favorite, just because it’s literally on a beach. It’s amazing. They have these great sustainability programs there as well too, and great research opportunities, but they all have their own shapes and sizes and things that kind of make them stand out. It has about 300,000 current students, so it’s a huge ecosystem. Right now, we’re on a hiring freeze, which is just, there’s a lot of people involved with a UC and a University of California campus, and the students themselves are a huge part of it, a very diverse group of students coming from all over the world.

But primarily, yes, we’re focused on the state of California and California residents. Undergraduate and graduate degrees, of course, that is the UC difference compared in the master plan that the UC system does have graduate school education, and as of last, I think this is last year now, there are six campuses in the top 50 national universities according to US News, which is pretty intense and goes to show a lot of schools that have been making ground like Davis, like Irvine, like Merced, that are just hands down, again Daniel mentioned this, but it is the best public school system in the U.S. and there’s just not a wrong campus here.

How are they different though? And they are very different. So, I’m going to try to use the Berkeley context a little bit to talk about these different things, but all the UCs are mission aligned. If you guys didn’t know, there’s actually a board of directors that oversees the entire University of California system.

So, there’s mission aligned goals for the state of California, but they definitely have different focuses. A place like Berkeley historically is very outspoken, very much social justice and individual rights and freedoms and being active in social justice is really important, and sustainability and community development, and that’s definitely a thing of UC Berkeley, and you’ll see that in the missions and the research and stuff like that. All the UCs have bachelor-to-PhD programs, but in various academic disciplines, this is also very true. And for Berkeley, there’s a lot of social science PhD programs and a lot of graduate school research related to social sciences. So, talking about economics, political science and education, psychology, which again, meet their specific mission and missions that are important to you. All the UCs have on-campus housing and a sense of community, but very different kinds of communities. Berkeley is pretty notorious for fighting a lot with the local residents of Berkeley for housing, and that is kind of a hot topic at the UC Berkeley system, that housing is a challenge. It is very different compared to some places like at UC Riverside or UC Davis, that is a little more of an ecosystem of housing.

Everybody lives very close and it’s a close-knit community where, for people at Berkeley, the reality is there’s people living quite a bit outside of the campus. All the UCs definitely have a social culture, but a range of sports and organizations and practices and priorities. So, Berkeley has D1 sports. If we’re going to compare football at Berkeley and UCLA, it’s probably a bit of a different story. So, you can kind of see that there are different priorities of institutions and what they see as being very beneficial. So, a lot of this stuff is really important. I’m bringing this up for you guys because it’s the kind of things that we as Prepory coaches will do is help your student understand more about the different campuses because absolutely your application, the story and messaging you’re sending about who you are as a student and your interests, should align with the campuses that you’re interested in, and you should make that clear in the different parts of the application.

DANIEL: Absolutely.

SAM: And we talk about that a lot. Daniel’s going to talk a little bit about the Committee Review process that we have here, and that comes into play for the UC system in particular is being able to help them because ultimately you could choose all the campuses to apply for, right? It’s very easy in the application. I will show you guys later on. But there are different priorities and different focuses at these various campuses. Daniel, I’m going to put you on the spot. Do you have a favorite UC campus or one that you feel like is the place to be at?

DANIEL: Yeah, my favorite UC campus is UC San Diego. Their campus I think is more beautiful than UCSB, especially the campus near La Jolla, where actually Dr. Seuss was initially written, or some of his books are based on that La Jolla campus, and I love that campus. It’s beautiful and unreal.

SAM: Yeah, no, I didn’t know that. That’s awesome. And they have the Harry Potter style residential colleges living, which is super cool too. No, I’m a big fan of San Diego. They have just skyrocketed in popularity from when I first started in 2012-2013, and it’s a completely different story. It’s a super competitive, very, very reputable school. So yeah, no, it’s awesome. And again, this is part of what we do at Prepory. Our historical data that Daniel was mentioning of seeing what kinds of students align to what sort of campuses and how to help them in their activities in their essays, sort of make that really clear. So yeah, how are the campuses different? We covered some differences, and I want to go to actual sections of the UC application at this point then to kind of see how to set this up.

SAM: So just a basic overview, for those of you who haven’t done applications before or maybe who only know about the common app, which is quite different from the UC application. You still have to do general demographics, background about yourself and where you’re coming from and all that jazz.

Then, the next biggest part is actually choosing the campuses and majors, which I’m going to show you guys in a second on the actual UC application. Again, I had mentioned this, but you could choose all the campuses if you wanted to, and then you have to choose a specific major, and choosing that major is very important because your application needs to be tailored to that major. For academics, everything is self-reported. There are no transcripts. Transcripts are sent afterwards after you decide to enroll or matriculate at that school. But everything is self-reported from grade 9 to grade 12. It’s very easy to trip up. It’s important to have some guidance there for sure. Their essays are four, 350-word personal insight questions or PIQs, or you just hear it be called the UC essays. This is not the Common App personal statements, although a lot of students will modify their personal statement to fit one of these four, but there are eight questions you choose four of them, we’ll talk a little bit later about that, but that’s a big part of it.

And then the activity list, there’s 20 of them. Another big difference from the Common App, which we’ll talk about, and then the biggest one is the idea that there’s no recommendation letters, there are no transcripts, there’s no official documents. Everything is self-reported in this application. There are a few caveats as far as certain majors at certain universities may ask for a follow-up recommendation letter or something like this, but overall, it is all self-reported in that sense. So, that’s kind of the application and the different aspects of it. I’m going to exit my screen. Let me try to stop sharing real quick. There we go. Exit full screen. And just because I did want to sign in to show you guys what I’m talking about, you can see the application right, the other time.

Okay, cool. So yeah, so what I was talking about on the right side, the demographics, the campuses and majors, academics, self-reported there, the activities and then the personal insight questions, the campus ones are going to be important. So again, you choose which schools are going to let me, oh, yeah, it’s not going to let me because we’re already past the application, but you’ll choose which campuses you want to apply to, and then at that point, see I have to choose campuses, at that point it will ask me about the majors. So that’s a big difference in this application, the academic history and how you’re reporting everything, how you’re reporting test scores, we’ll talk about that a little later on too, the activities and what the activities look like, and then the personal insight questions and these actual essays. What’s really cool about this system and especially what we do here at Prepory is we just have a lot of data and information of previous student outcomes and what they’ve put for these different things. We have a lot of documents that hold that stuff. So in the event of you applying for the UC system, we’re going to have a lot of feedback for you as far as what things you should be focusing on in different parts of the application to meet those stories and meet those fits of the different campuses.

Let me, oh, give me a second. Did it stop sharing? Yes, it did.

DANIEL: Nope, we can see it. Sam.

SAM: You can still see it. Okay.

DANIEL: UC system app overview.

SAM: Okay, the UC system app overview there. Okay. So yes, so let’s go onto the actual review of the application. Actually, let me, give me one second. I’m going to look at the Q&A just to see if anybody has any questions.

DANIEL: I think we have two questions, Sam, that we’d love for you to address. The first question is around sort of how you see admissions officers recalculate GPA, which I actually think you’re about to get to as you sort of talk about these minimum requirements. And then the second one is also about whether or not UCs consider 9th grade GPA and, since most likely not, what do they do with those 9th grade grades?

SAM: Yeah, no, those are great questions, and it leads into very nicely what I’m going to talk about now with the minimum requirements, but just with the GPA, yes, the 9th grade is dropped. Most campuses will be doing that to not consider 9th grade. So, what do they do? They just don’t calculate it into their actual GPA when they recalculate it, and yes, they do recalculate it. Each campus has their own methodology as far as how they recalculate it. So, I can tell you that for Berkeley, what would happen is you get extra points if it’s an AP or an IB course, but not necessarily for an honors course, and then 10th and 11th grade would be recalculated. So yeah, they don’t consider it. And what if they have a grade lower? Again, because it’s not factored into the UC application, the UC sort of recalculated GPA for that campus, it’s not detrimental to your application by any means. But, if you have a big challenge, a lot of challenges is to face value in grade nine, then it can be an issue, right? Because you do need four years of excellence. So, all in all, it’s very forgiving in that sense that if you have a couple challenging courses in 9th grade or getting prepared for 9th grade, that you get the sense to prove yourself again in grade 10 and grade 11. Do you think that was clear, Daniel?

DANIEL: Yeah, I think that was crystal clear.

SAM: Okay, awesome. So yeah, with talking about how applications are actually reviewed, yes, the GPA is very important. You can see here they have this 3.0 minimum for all students and then a 3.4 for non-residents. So again, people outside the state of California attend these campuses. I will tell you that some of the campuses are more flexible with this GPA, I have seen students with lower GPAs and these requirements get into these campuses, but not into the campuses that you think. You’re not getting into Berkeley with a lower than a 3.4 GPA. Probably not lower than a 3.9 GPA if I’m being totally honest. So, it’s a good benchmark for you guys to understand the rigor that’s required to attend these campuses and know that you do need to hit these minimums. They also have this thing called A through G courses. I’m not going to get into that too much tonight just because that’s a whole additional piece that’s important, and again, something we talk with students about, but A through G requirements are basically the categorization of different sorts of classes, so of English courses, of social science courses of hard science, language, art, that you have to be hitting those transcript requirements and class requirements, so being strategic with how you’re choosing grade 10, grade 11, grade 12 classes is definitely important to make sure.

I will say just overall, there are not a lot of surprises here. If you guys are all California, oh yeah, we’re all California residents here, so your high school is set up to meet these requirements. There’s usually not anything special that you need to do to meet them. It’s not always the case, but for the most part it is a pretty straightforward answer there. So that’s sort of the minimum requirements. The selection process. Now, this is going to be really specific to Berkeley, but I know UC San Diego follows something relatively similar, and that the very first stage is done by admission readers. So, these are external readers that are giving scores based on training from Berkeley of how to evaluate applications. So, it’s really like a score that you are assessed, and it helps to be really frank. It helps weed out the applications. You’re getting almost 150,000 undergraduate applications at Berkeley this year, which is just mind blowing when you think about that number. A hundred thousand of them are probably not qualified to get read, and that’s just the reality. And so that’s that first stage is the scores and the first evaluation of that. The second one then is a lot of regional admission officers. So, you’ll see this, you can look up Berkeley admission officers online, you can see what regions they’re responsible for. They’re absolutely having that next stage of giving their testimony on this. Department leadership. So, department leadership is department for the majors, because again, remember at Berkeley or at these UCs, you’re identifying the major of interest. Those department leaders definitely have a say in the admissions process. I can tell you Berkeley in particular that the chemistry department has very strict requirements of the applicants that they want.

And so again, that kind of institutional knowledge is helpful. But yes, departments and academic leaders certainly have a say in this process. And then of course, top-level leadership, kind of giving more of a high 30,000 foot opinion of who should get in and why and how that works. So that’s sort of the selection process and specifically to Berkeley. But again, most of the campuses follow something similar to these sorts of different stages that applicants go through when assessed for acceptance.

So, I’m going to dive into the two pieces of the UC application process that they’re looking at, which is the academic process and the holistic process. Before I do that, I’m just going to take a quick glance at the Q&A and see if there’s anything worthwhile. I’ll definitely talk about essays here in the future. I’ll talk about activities in the future as well too. How do they consider California as community college classes? I will talk about that as well, too. They give preference to California residents. They’re not going to share that information with you. Or if they do, let me know because I would love to see it. Most of the time they’re not going to share that difference in the California residents versus the non-California residents. There is some public information, I believe.

DANIEL: Yes, there might be some public information around in the common data set, but it won’t be crystal clear, and it won’t maybe tell you your percentage of admission of course, but it can say what portion of their undergraduate admitted class came from in-state versus out-of-state, and not all campuses were reporting that. It’ll depend.

SAM: Yeah, and I think there actually are some state laws that they have to follow as minimums for undergraduate enrollment. So yeah, that would make sense. Do UCs consider health and PE? Yeah, so at Berkeley we dropped health and PE from the calculation. Not every campus does that. That would be an awesome thing to ask your local UC admissions rep, or again, work with your Prepory coach to figure out how to confirm that. That would be an awesome one there.

Yeah, so the question is what are these scores based off of as to whether or not your application will be read? What I had meant is that Berkeley has, you can think of it as a rubric when evaluating applications of hitting certain measures, especially in those first one to two rounds, and if you are not meeting any of the rubric standards of measures, then you’re going to have a really tough time getting read and kind of moving on to that second round.

So that’s what I mean, and again, we can kind of talk about that further is how to make sure you get past that stage. You can think of it, you have to excel as much as you can essentially is how I would say it in this presentation. But there are different approaches, and we’ll talk about that later in the strategies of what to focus on.

Foreign language classes. I’m probably going to save that to the end. I feel like that’s a very specific question, but that is great to be thinking about. Looks like Daniel, you’re kind of doing that live. How is the department leadership piece affected for undeclared applicants? That is an awesome question. Really insightful there.

I really encourage families and students to choose a major because of that reason and undeclared applicants will of course be reviewed. Usually it’s by, it doesn’t really get a department leadership review or focus on, it’s kind of the general admissions team that’s doing that, but for the most part, yeah, it is helpful to kind of declare a major specifically. Let me see here. Okay, if a child’s major, so be able to submit. We’ll talk about that. Yep. I’m going to go through these a little bit later. Okay guys, I think we have done a decent amount, but let’s kind of move on. I’m going to go into this academic and holistic part, but again, keep pushing these through as they come up. Okay, so let me take it to the next page. So again, what I was kind of getting to is in the selection process, there are two ways to do this evaluation process, and the first one is academic.

So, you can find this on Berkeley’s website. It’s pretty straightforward. Again, there’s some kind of in-between the lines, things that are important, but for the most part these are going to be the process of exploring these and the academic review and where that is needed and coming from. The first one is that A through G subject requirements, so you have to identify them properly. We talked about the self-report process of this. I can’t tell you how many times we had worried messages, and I know Daniel has seen those fires of students not putting them in properly and we had to go in before they submitted to make sure that you have to clearly spell out this is an English course or this is a social science credit or computer science because you do have to make sure to hit those A through G requirements. So being able to identify them is really important.

And again, you do it this year-by-year self-report. There are some spaces to add things like college classes, college credit, where again, you can use that for A through G subject requirements. I’ll share that again later. But yes, you absolutely can self-report, not only all your high school classes, but any additional classes that you’re taking in whichever context. As you can imagine, certain contexts are going to be stronger than others. Taking calculus at your local community college is certainly going to be stronger than taking an EDX free calculus intro course online. So, there are strategies as far as which ones to be choosing and how to report it. As I said, the 10th and 11th grade is the main focus and there’s state requirements of at least a 3.0 minimum, a 3.4 for non-residents.

Testing. I’m assuming most of us know on this call, but I’m just going to make it clear, it is a test-blind policy from the state of California, so there are no standardized tests, meaning you cannot submit an SAT or ACT score. It will not be considered, but subject tests. The AP or IB tests. Those are very important, and I will talk about that later, but absolutely those can be considered. Rigor is paramount. It is the most important thing, especially when talking about these top four, top five UC campuses that everybody’s coming in with a strong GPA. And so, your rigor, which is the challenge of course that you are choosing, is super valuable. And I’ll kind of jump down here to the bottom point, but you can see when you’re reviewing the application, you can see all the kids from that school as you’re reviewing that student. So as a reviewer, you can very clearly know within their school context how rigorous choices and courses were and how did that play out and how does that fit their academic story. So, the rigor thing, your type of courses, again, how you’re identifying them is important. Calling it like grade 12th grade math is just so frustrating for me because that does nothing, as a reader and as an admission officer, of what you actually did in that course. But if you can identify it properly, it goes a long way.

And yes, so in 12th grade too, what we’re saying is grades aren’t necessarily counted, but the courses are important mostly because a lot of times you don’t have grades yet for grades 12 by the time you submit by December 1st. You can put them in, it can be valuable to add to it, but it’s not part of the calculation and there is no midyear report. I’m going to again make this caveat here though, that certain majors do ask for that. I know Daniel, we had a couple Prepory kids given to the M.E.T program, the management and technology program at Berkeley, which has a whole additional thing of letters of recommendation. You have to write another essay; you do a business-school-esque interview that we had to help some kids through. So, there are some majors and programs like that in the UC system that do take into account grade 12 grades, but for the most part, not as necessary.

I’m going to go into the holistic part before I take a look at this Q&A, but definitely the academics, it is probably more important. I don’t think a campus would ever say which one is more important, but if you had two and you had to pick one, the academic one is going to be the more important one. But let’s look at the holistic one. This is certainly a big part of this. So, I, this is directly from UC Berkeley’s website. You can go find this as far as how they’re doing holistic reviews. I would think of this as a numbered order as well too. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 are the most important things, and I try to put in bold kind of your opportunities to know what the most important part is. But again, the first one is all about academics and what that’s looked like too is the personal qualities and they literally drop which things that they’re looking for.

The thing that is really important when it comes to the activities in the essays, is looking for those words, or synonyms, that are those words, or themes and descriptions, that you use those words to identify with. That’s very, very important is making sure you, as an applicant, can really make it clear that you have these qualities and you have a focus or a spike on a particular one or two of them, or make it really clear of the kind of person that you are. The third one is intellectual and cultural vitality. This commitment, you might see it as diversity, but it’s much more than just your context or background of the person that you are, but what you bring to the table as far as your intellectual and cultural interests and backgrounds and passions and what that’s looked like.

So, number four is achievement in academic enrichment programs. This is a really big thing for California residents, so I’m glad we have this on the call, is those sponsored programs by the University of California make a big difference, and you’ll especially know that when you’re filling out the activity list is the ones that are sponsored by the University of California are made really clear in the dropdown, you don’t have to type them in, they’re already there. The more of those you have, the stronger your application is going to be. The commitment of it is important, which is also kind of how all universities will feel, but that time and depth of participation is what’s going to be really important. Other evidence of achievement. So, this is now where we’re getting to sports and arts and anything that comes from there, anything that maybe doesn’t naturally fall into the stuff that we already talked about, that stuff is definitely important.

DANIEL: Other examples, Sam, that I want to add there if it’s okay, are where really your honors and awards section carry a lot of weight. Competitions, for example, robotics competitions, Model UN competitions, DECA competitions, if your child participates in any FBLA competitions, I think oftentimes students and parents don’t really spend too much time thinking about their honors and awards section and how much weight you can carry in their application process, but I think this is a really clear example that it is a really important factor that admissions officers are considering when reviewing applications.

SAM: Absolutely, and so I think it’s helpful for all of us to think about these holistic review pieces as something that makes sense. It makes sense that universities want these things and that these are a value and everything like that, but actually being able to use this information to then work through your application and the development of this over two or three years is not so clear and you do need to work on it and have a strategy and have an approach of how are you going to hit these 10 or so adjectives that they put up there? How are you going to use your honors and activities to make that really clear? That is not something you do in August before 12th grade starts. You need to set up a plan and get this taken care of. Yeah.

DANIEL: I want to ask you a question for the audience, especially around these more maybe intangible qualities that are the second or third most important thing that a UC admissions committee is looking at. How would you work with your student to demonstrate things like insight, tenacity, or cultural or intellectual vitality in an application?

SAM: That’s a really great question. It takes a lot of skill when describing the activity. So, you get 250 characters, which is a small paragraph to kind of talk about what you did in these applications, but tenacity, like a really great one that I love for my students, is talking about their plans for grade 12 initiatives. I’ve been doing this for three years. I’ve been in student council for three years, then doing a lot of the traditional leadership roles, and now in 12th grade I’m doing this brand-new initiative with alumni of my high school and we’re bringing them back, we’re doing career night, we’re holding soul events. That’s tenacity, right? That’s like you’re getting at it even though you don’t necessarily have to, but you are continually not just hitting the leadership pieces, but you’re going beyond what’s expected of you. That’s how you then frame that activity to make that really clear of like, whoa, this person’s not messing around. Yes, it is February of their grade 12 year, but they’re still trying to make a difference in this. Does that help a little bit, Daniel?

DANIEL: Yeah, that’s really great. I think that was really helpful.

SAM: Awesome. And not if you only have nine out of 10 of these, it’s not like you’re a bad application by any means, right? If you have all of them, great, but what’s important is after reading your application, I can really grab on two or three of those that you are just shiny in those areas. And to be really honest, that’s kind of how we write up our reports, we use a lot of these words, like this student shows a lot of character. Looking at activity number seven and number 10, or whatever it might be when I’m doing the review of application. So yeah, this part is definitely important. Alright, so that’s kind of how things are looked at. Then again, the academic review, the holistic review. What I’m really excited then is Daniel sharing our Committee Review process and how we try to mirror this to really help you guys.

DANIEL: Yeah, absolutely. And so, I’m excited to talk about this as well. So as part of our programming here at Prepory, every one of our students who is working with Prepory to strategize around their college application process. When they are in 12th grade, they participate in something called the UC Mock Committee Review. Essentially, what that means is that we recreate an admissions office on our team led by former admissions officers from places like UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Davis, of course, tons of other schools, places like Purdue, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia. They’re all coming together to review your students’ application profile as if they were back in the admissions committee room, looking at their transcripts, activities, lists, what majors they were applying as their PIQs, their award section, and then we’re ripping that application apart. We’re jotting down broad strokes insights. What did we learn about your character traits, your intellectual vitality, your intellectual curiosity, your ability to demonstrate persistence in the face of adversity?

We identify strengths and weaknesses as your application, and then all of our committee teams’ feedback that sprinkled across your entire application profile, gets delivered back to your students and their primary coach here at Prepory, and then they have about 30 or 45 days to work together to implement that entire committee’s feedback. What’s so special about this is that you’re going through this application process one time before it really counts. You get to hear what your PIQs sound like and how they’re going to be received by an admissions committee before you hit submit. It’s a really special way in how us at Prepory aren’t just relying on your child’s primary coach to support you through their process, but really putting our entire team’s support and your teams, or excuse me, your family’s sort of back pocket to build the winningest applications possible. And this is something that we do that we really love and have a lot of fun doing.

SAM: I only have amazing things to say about this. It’s one of the main reasons I wanted to be a Prepory coach. This is so valuable. It’s great for us as coaches and former admission officers to kind of have that experience again and seeing it as an admission officer and giving that feedback. But as a coach, it’s invaluable to have additional perspectives on the student you’ve been working with and getting that kind of outside look. So yeah, no, this is a fantastic experience for our students here. Awesome. Well, I’m going to keep it going basically with talking about the committee review is the actual application timeline. Mostly, I’m using this timeline to just give you ideas of when these offers come out. It’s typically around December 1st. It’s so funny because it’s always around Thanksgiving, and so my Thanksgiving is kind of shot in some ways. I take the Thursday off, like the main day, but my wife knows by now that Friday, Saturday, Sunday is some application stuff, but it’s typically around December 1st that it’s going to be due for all campuses.

There is no early decision. It’s one thing that you’re submitting for and then you’ll find out about the offers, again, like late February, early March. A couple of the campuses go first with Merced and Riverside, traditionally. Mid-March it definitely picks up. And then Berkeley and UCLA traditionally do it on the same day, and it’s usually the last day of March or one of the last weekend days or something like this. So again, it might change year to year and really in between submitting and getting your decision, there’s nothing you really do, which is really nice. There is, again, like I said, there are some majors that have specific invites for students, but for the most part you just kind of wait till you get the offer. And then of course if you get waitlisted, there’s a whole process that we work through with students on that way. But that’s kind of the idea with the timeline and when you should be getting updates on offers.

DANIEL: What I’d love to add here, Sam, is just really for the students and parents and the audience, especially for the class of 2026, what you should really be realizing at this point is that the college application process for rising 12th grade students, so current juniors, is not towards the end of 12th grade. It’s at the very beginning. UC applications, you can submit them any time before November 1st or November 30th. And of course, we want you to be really thoughtful, strategic, and spend time writing these essays that take a lot of time to write and construct and be strategic about your application. So there really is, it’s really important that students and parents are getting started now, that they’re starting to think about their profile, starting to work around those essays now, because it’s going to get really crazy once the school year starts in August or September.

SAM: Great, great point. Makes my life a lot easier too, so I can only confirm that. Alright, so let’s talk about supplemental materials then. Mainly I’m focusing on these strategies. The first strategy I have to make really clear is to demonstrate this academic spike or academic focus of yours. So, this is really important just because as I had mentioned, when you’re choosing your campuses, you are choosing majors and you need to really demonstrate your excellence for that major, particularly at the big four big, five campuses that you’re making it really clear, like “I want to do mechanical engineering and this is all the stuff I can prove that I want to be a mechanical engineer and this is what I’m going to do.” It’s not like “I just want to work for Tesla and that seems like a cool company.” Maybe that’s not a popular thing to talk about now, but you have to have this demonstrated academic spike, this idea of why I’m built to do mechanical engineering, so no SAT, that’s fine, AP or IB exams, these qualifications are going to be really important. So again, if we go back to mechanical engineering, I’m really hoping I’m seeing one of the AP physics exams there, hopefully AP physics C for whichever variance you want to do, but AP BC calculus, that is going to be necessary for an engineering student.

That’s how you demonstrate that academic spike. Competitions are another great way to do this. So, any of the Olympiads or like the American courses like the American USA Biology competition, that is going to be really helpful. College credit. So, taking community colleges, local community college classes, doing anything online for college credit, that’s going to look really good. Certifications. But just in general, using your courses, your PIQs and activities to really demonstrate the spike is super valuable. I need a lot of curiosity in your application of the interests you have of the major you have and what you want to be, what you want to be focusing on.

We do a cool thing at Prepory of trying to work students through passion projects, so it doesn’t have to necessarily be in taking a college credit course in organic chemistry, but your community project, your passion project, you help develop, and showing your understanding of how local nonprofits work or volunteering or fundraising, that is you demonstrating your spike in communications or in management or whatever it might be. So, certainly there’s sort of the traditional things that we would help strategize with you to demonstrate academic spike, but this can come in a lot of shapes and sizes just regardless, it needs to be shown, it needs to be clear.

Strategy number two is trying to fulfill requirements using outside courses or using college courses. So, I was talking about the A through G requirements. You can absolutely use, and I encourage you to use, other ways beyond your high school curriculum to potentially fulfill an A through G requirements, but also this academic focus, this spike that you have in your particular area. I can’t stress that enough. Being able to make clear of your preparation and understanding of what it is you want to study and being serious about it is important. It seems crazy like, well, these kids are 16, 17, 18 years old, how do they already know? The hope, and that’s why working with a college counselor honestly is really helpful is you get a better idea of this in 9th and 10th grade, 11th grade, or at least a more general focus area rather than saying, “I like sciences.” That’s not enough.

I don’t want to be pessimistic about it, but you do really need to start building this clear academic direction, this vision that you have, and maybe you haven’t completely solidified on a major yet, that makes sense, but that you’re working towards thematic areas of interest. And so using college and outside courses to fulfill requirements to demonstrate stuff is going to be really helpful. We love UC Scout, I love UC San Diego or UCLA’s extension programs. There are a lot of really great courses that can help fulfill those things. And yeah, Coursera and EDX can work. It’s not as powerful, but it’s a free option. It can definitely be helpful.

SAM: Strategy number three, I have, and we were talking about the essay, so this is kind of where I’m getting into a little bit of the essay advice. I can’t give you the whole thing in this, right? But definitely one of the big things is that you are building and incorporating these keywords into your PIQs, into your activities. So, absolutely being able to show those things that we talked about in the holistic viewpoint and making sure, when I was talking about Daniel’s example, about the tenacity that if it’s not explicitly used, that you are implicitly making it clear through whatever the experience or demonstration of it was. As I had mentioned, there’s four PIQs, four essays that you have to write. You do get eight questions. These are my five main things. You have to have two out of the three. Number one, number six or number seven.

Number one is a leadership essay. Number six is an academic interest essay. And then number seven is a community essay. You should have two of those, and if you have three, great, but you should have at least two. For essay question two and essay question three, they’re really similar to each other. I really recommend not choosing both of them. You can absolutely choose one. I think that’s fine, but probably don’t do both. Avoid question eight. The question is basically how do you stand out competitively in the UC admissions process? I’ve never seen a good essay on that. A good topic on that. Maybe if you win an Olympic medal, maybe that’s how you stand out I guess, or you have a cancer patent, but you should be answering questions one through seven. That’s going to be the focus. Number four is to tell us about a significant education opportunity that you used or how you overcame a significant educational barrier.

I really recommend talking about the opportunity more so than the barrier because the barrier is just really tricky to communicate in a concise and helpful way. And then you can absolutely modify your Common App essay. You can use your main personal statement to modify it for the actual UC questions, and we have students do that all the time. There’s actually a strategy in doing that. So, I think that part is certainly important. Activities, we could talk about this for hours, but just the main idea is use the lengthy description wisely. If you are writing just to write and fill up the space, I’m going to get bored and I’m not going to pay attention to your activities as much, and that’s a problem for you. You have 20 of them, you don’t need all 20 of them, but having 14 is great and I want to read all 14, but if you bore me in activity three or activity four and you don’t use these subscriptions, well then I’m going to lose interest as a reader and have a tough time really seeing the story of your application. So use them very wisely.

DANIEL: I think, Sam, if it’s okay, I’d love to add something there. Sorry about that.

SAM: No, go for it.

DANIEL: Speaking on those PIQs, I think maybe what’s the most challenging part of these PIQs, and Sam I think you did a wonderful job of helping the audience have some really quick tips, is really just figuring out, and this is why I’ve been telling to some of the families in the Q&A to answer these questions, it’s so important that the students are self-aware that you understand your profile, that you understand your strengths and weaknesses, but that you especially know what admissions officers are going to want to know about you. And of course, as a high school student, it’s really hard to know that. And so having someone help you decide what part of yourself you should really turn into an essay or what extracurricular you should expand upon and how that’ll make you really attractive. I think the hardest part about these essays is really deciding what to write about and how to get started.

SAM: I love that part because that’s part of our job, but as a student, it is very intimidating. It’s like, what actually matters in my life? What should I be focusing on? What are these stories? And there are certainly strategies for that. So yeah, no, that’s great. This is my last strategy that I have, which is the idea of contextualizing lived experiences. So, what I mean by this is certainly, this paragraph has taken from Berkeley’s website, talking about the context of the opportunity the applicant has had and being able to communicate that to make it clear of any hardships or unusual circumstances or the insight that they got to overcome them or responded to them. Any sort of challenges regarding linguistics, background, parent education level, or under indicators of support, those they are important to have in your application, if that’s part of your story in a part of your context.

What I am trying to communicate here for your strategy is don’t make that the highlight of one of your essays. It can certainly be the backdrop. It can be the context, again, to something that is happening. You can use the additional comments to make sort of a really clear bullet point list of “These are my challenges and lived experiences that I’m having.” I’m fine with that. I know there are some admission officers that maybe aren’t as big of a fan, and maybe it is different student by student, but it can be helpful to share in that space. But as far as your essays go, you want to be all about your outcomes, how you responded to things and what’s your personality that’s been developed. And so the context, yes, is important, but it shouldn’t be the focus of those essays. We want to contextualize them for sure. I think that is it on the strategies in going through it. Daniel, should we look at the Q&A for a little bit or do you want to jump into Prepory?

DANIEL: I think we’ll go ahead and do that, and then I think Sam will go ahead and then once we wrap up, we can jump into Q&A for those who want to hang out with us a little bit later.

SAM: Awesome. Okay. Take it away, bud.

DANIEL: Alrighty. So, before we wrap up here, we want to tell you guys a little bit more about Prepory and what we do. Sam, you can go ahead. So, Sam and I touched on this as we went through this process. Of course, we’re a college admissions consultancy. We’ve worked with tons of families and students from California to make them the most successful applicants that they can be. In terms of our programming, there’s variety in our program depending on what graduation year or grade year your student’s in. So of course, our program for 9th graders is a bit different than what we would be doing with an 11th grader, and that makes sense. It’s the right thing to do. But all of our programs include a combination of one-on-one advising sessions with a college admissions coach like Sam, who works with students in our program every year to make them the most competitive applicants that they can be.

And we’re through those advising sessions. We’re working to strategize on essays, extracurricular activities, launching a passion project outside of those one-on-one sessions. You as a parent and your students will always be able to reach out to your coach via email, text message, and phone to just get real-time, offline support in between advising sessions. As we shared a bit earlier, every one of our programs actually includes a committee review style application for our 9th and 10th graders. It’s a bit different. It’s a preemptive review that’s mostly geared towards developing a profile, but still giving that opportunity for people to chime in and breathe into the profile that your student’s developing, not in 12th grade, but from 9th grade, and of course, our committee review style that’s much more geared to the real application for 12th grade students, like we talked about earlier. Every one of our programs includes unlimited essay reviews, resume reviews, and parent check-ins.

Those parent check-ins are one-on-one meetings between you and your coach or your students’ coach, rather, like Sam. As we saw from today’s Q&A, you as a parent have so many questions. There’s even a parent who said something so positive that they have a kid who goes to the UCs and they learn more about the UCs on this call than it sounds like before their kid even applied to that school, which is wonderful, and thank you for the compliment, but this is a space for you to ask questions to get support as a parent and as someone who’s just as invested in your kids’ process as us as their coach and your child themselves. We talked a little bit about this earlier, but our team is crushing it. Our acceptance rates are far higher than the national acceptance rates for students applying to the UCs. We’re doing a really great job at the UCs, and every year our kids get admitted to every single UC. You can go ahead, Sam. And Sam, go ahead one more time, I’m sorry.

SAM: Yes, sir.

DANIEL: Great. So first we want to say thank you so much to everyone who joined us tonight. If you have any follow-up questions about what you learned tonight, if you’re thinking to yourself like, “Whoa, this is a lot of information and this is really helpful, but there’s still so much I want to learn,” or “Wow, I realized I need to get started ASAP.” And this is a massive process and a huge undertaking, and this is only for the University of California schools. We haven’t even talked about any of the Common App schools. So, if your students applying to Chapman, Claremont, Pitts, or any schools outside of California, any Ivy League, or just any school on the common app, there’s a whole other application that we haven’t even gotten to talk about that they’ll also be responsible for building a competitive profile as underclassmen eventually applying for.

If you want to schedule an initial consultation with our team, there is a QR code on your screen. We encourage you to scan this QR code, schedule an initial consultation with our team. I would love to personally lead your family’s initial consultation to answer any questions that you might have about the application process, but really explain to you how we can support you, your students, through this application process to be the most competitive applicants that they can be. So please go ahead and schedule your initial consultation. Also, Leti, who as I mentioned, is backstage, she dropped a link in the chat box, so if you’d like, you can also click that link and schedule your initial consultation there. Again, thank you so much to everyone who joined us tonight, Sam and I will be here for the next 10 or so minutes answering any questions that will come up in the Q&A. But again, thank you so much and we’re so excited to talk with you guys next week as you all schedule your initial consultations. Alrighty, Sam, I think with that we can go ahead and jump to the Q&A’s in here.

Daniel: So, the very first one, Sam, that I think would be wise to give a little bit of attention to is, and this one came up several times, which is why I want to get started here. Can you tell us a little bit more specifically how admissions officers or the UCs consider community college classes? Are they considered APs or what type of courses are they considered?

SAM: Yeah, so most of the time for Berkeley specifically, we would see them in the same level as an AP and IB and get a bump as far as your score for your GPA. So, they are very valuable if you’re able to incorporate them over the summer or as a replacement course, or maybe you’ve maxed out math at your school, and so now you want to take linear algebra or some other intense math course at your local community college. Awesome. That’s going to look really good. It’s important.

DANIEL: Alrighty, thank you. And in terms of the Q&A, we also got this question a few times. First, can you explain what UC sponsored activities are and do you know any examples other than COSMOS?

SAM: Yeah, that is a good question. I can’t think of the sponsored programs off the top of my head just because they’re so localized and what that would matter. The UC sponsored, first off, there’s definitely others on their website, it’s going to be really clear to find what the sponsored programs are. A lot of the times also they’re specific to your city that you live in or the program that’s run. So Los Angeles has the Boys and Girls Club, that’s one that would be a sponsored program. Honestly, there’s over 50 of them. And so, a lot of the time they’re like local programs of a national organization that’s in a particular city or region of California.

DANIEL: Alrighty, thank you Sam. And talk about how these are viewed by an admissions committee? Are they typically seen positively by admissions officers or what’s the sense?

SAM: Of these UC sponsored programs?

DANIEL: Yeah.

SAM: Yeah. No, it’s definitely viewed favorably just because again, that’s giving us context of your involvement, how you spent your time, what you’re qualified for, what your context is coming in. So yeah, if you have the opportunity to participate in one, I definitely think it’s worthwhile again, especially if it aligns up with your story and your profile that you’re building.

DANIEL: Excellent. And then Sam, I guess I have a question, one that’s not actually featured in the chat box, but when you are, can you tell us a story about maybe one of your UC applicants this year and what you feel was the most important thing that you did that made them successful in their college application process?

SAM: Yeah, definitely. I want to do two just because why not, right? You’re an overachiever.

Yes, sometimes. So, Iman was one of my students this year. This amazing statistic has all the academic pedigree you could ask for as far as GPA and test scores and everything like this. So, he was aiming for a really top physics program, particularly Berkeley was his first choice, but he also really liked UC San Diego. And what we had to do, which was very different from the Common App, was provide a lot more context to the awards that he won in physics and then in the research and opportunities for exploring physics at a higher level. So, for one thing, this is crazy, but he got invited by the editorial staff of a very prominent physics journal to participate in a research paper, a joint research paper, and this was his third published paper. A lot of the times published papers in high school for high school students, it’s just not very helpful. It’s kind of a little secret in admissions, but it can look nice, but really a lot of these high school journals are not very good. But Iman’s was in a real academic physics journal. If you, as an admission officer, unless you have this really contextual understanding of the subject of physics, you wouldn’t know how amazing this was. And so, we had to do a really good job in his activity description to make that clear of how big of a deal this is and add acceptance rates and give a link even. So that was a really clear thing. He got into UC Berkeley, which was amazing. He’s going to go there. I’m very excited for him. So that was really helpful. Yeah. Do you want me to still share the second one or was that enough?

DANIEL: No, that’s fantastic.

Cool. I love bragging about these kids. This other one. So, she is creative, is how she would define herself, so she likes to make movies and write and do fiction and poetry and all this kind of stuff. So, we are trying to figure out how she would use her essays to make that really clear. And she decided to write purposely in a different style or different voice for all four of her essays. So, she had my first poetry essay, which I’ve never ever approved of before. It wasn’t completely poetry, but she had a bit of poetry in one of them. She had one that was set up as a movie script dialogue kind of approach. She had another one that was sort of a personal biography, narrative style. And then she had definitely, the major one was very argumentative and opinionated. So she took this approach of making all four of them really unique and stand out and for applying for communications and these more specialist artistic approaches because she did filmmaking for a major at one school and then she also did communications, but taking the essays that was really valuable that she was able to demonstrate indirectly what her creativity looks like and her focus is, and she got into UCLA and UC Berkeley, which you just don’t see a lot of that. I swear, they have some sort of hidden communication with each other to not lean on that, but getting both acceptances is super rare and I think she’s going to go to UCLA, but yeah.

DANIEL: She sounds like a UCLA student for sure, when you described her.

SAM: Absolutely. Yep.

DANIEL: Alrighty. Well, we just want to say one more time, thank you so much to everyone who joined us and stayed on with us to the very end here. Again, if you loved what you heard today and you feel like you’ve got so many questions still and you want to understand specifically how we can help your family and what we can do to make your student the most competitive applicant they can be for their application process, please go ahead and scan the QR code on your screen or schedule an initial consultation by going to prepory.com/book-now. I’d love to personally get to know your family, get to know your student, and really give you some advice around how they can be more competitive and what we would do to make them the best applicant that they can be in their process. Thank you so much to everyone for joining us and a huge shout-out and big thank you for Sam, really leading us and educating all of us tonight around the University of California system. Thank you.