SAM LUBY: Are we live?

ALISON KALESHI: We are. Fantastic. Welcome in, everyone. I’m really excited for tonight’s conversation, Sam. It’s really great timing.
I know that we’ve had a lot of UC admissions questions, so I’m excited for tonight’s crowd to come on in.

SAM LUBY: Yes, it is coming back real fast. I mean, we had a lot of decisions, but I’m already with some grade 11 students starting the UCSAs right now and it’s a never-ending cycle. We get the offers and then we start with the younger kids. So, yeah, the UCs are very fresh in my mind. That’s absolutely for sure.
Great.

ALISON KALESHI: Top of your mind. We do have that poll coming in too for all of our attendees that are entering in, please feel free to go ahead and answer a couple questions on our poll and we are excited to start tonight’s conversation with Sam Luby at 9:05 PM. And as you all are trickling in, please answer our poll and we will go ahead and get started in about four minutes here.

SAM LUBY: 9:05 Eastern time too. Yeah, we have a bunch of different time zones in here. I’m sure we have a lot of California time zones and Pacific and everything.

ALISON KALESHI: Welcome in, everybody. Yeah, I’m excited about this conversation. I feel like every year the Personal Insight Questions — I like seeing how our students kind of change it up and thinking about those topics and those drafts and obviously the activity section being longer than the Common App.

SAM LUBY: Yeah, absolutely. Now we’ll get into all that. There are so many features with the UC application, but it is still my favorite application. Common App is great. We like the Common App.
It’s the majority for schools, but the UC application — there’s something, I don’t know, special about it. But it’s good. There’s a lot of information, right? There’s a lot of things you gotta do and go through and it’s a lot of work and tedious, honestly, to finish it all, but it’s good and it’s definitely worthwhile.

ALISON KALESHI: Yeah, I think it’s funny because even though it’s technically four questions and it’s considered to be four smaller essays, the time that goes into it is always underestimated on first glance.

SAM LUBY: Yeah, looks like we got a lot of eleventh graders in.

ALISON KALESHI: We do.

SAM LUBY: Yeah, I was surprised. I’m glad — you guys should be watching. This is the right time to be able to figure this out. So I’m glad you all made it.

ALISON KALESHI: I love that. It’s like 50% — 50% of our attendees are eleventh grade. So this is coming up for you guys soon. And with that, as we have a couple more people trickling in, we are excited to kick off tonight’s conversation. We’re gonna get started in about two minutes here. And with that, feel free to answer the remaining questions on our poll for the UC webinar, and we’ll go ahead and get started here soon.

SAM LUBY: I think next time in the poll, I would like to know where people are from. So it’d be exciting to kind of see where you all are logging in from and everything like this. Because I mean, now, you know, it used to just be California kids really focusing on the UCs, but it’s a mainstay for my East Coast kids. Even like Midwest kids are trying to get out to the UCs. So it’s very — and obviously international students too.
Right? So, no, I’m excited. It’s maybe the best public university system in the country. Right? I don’t know.
Debatable. There’s a couple other states that maybe would push back, but the UCs got it going on.

ALISON KALESHI: I would agree. It really is a great school system. There’s a lot of opportunity there. And when I think about it, I think there’s more and more students that are considering the West Coast in comparison to even a couple years back.

SAM LUBY: Yeah.

ALISON KALESHI: All right, with that, we are officially at 9:05. We are gonna go ahead and end the poll. Welcome in, everyone. We are so excited to see you all and to kick off tonight’s conversation. With that in mind, we officially have ended the poll and the bulk of our conversation tonight will be led by Sam Luby, and I’m gonna let him introduce himself in just a moment.
Tonight’s webinar of course is on the UC application — everything UC — so having a winning strategy with that insider guidance from our former admissions reader, Sam Luby. And with that, a quick introduction about me. My name is Alison and I’m an enrollment manager here at Prepory. I have over a decade of collective experience in college admissions and high-impact college counseling. And this evening, when you book a consultation with Prepory — we’ll share more about how to do that later this evening —
you will meet with me or a member of my team to learn how enrolling in Prepory’s program is gonna support your UC-specific goals, your academic background, and your long-term plans. And with that, tonight, we’re gonna be discussing how Prepory students can position themselves early, develop that academic depth, cultivate the right leadership activities, the right profile for the UCs, and ultimately build a highly compelling narrative that stands out in the UC admissions process. With that said, some of our attendees tonight may also be thinking about long-term transfer and graduate admissions. We do provide transfer and graduate-level advising at Prepory as well, but tonight’s webinar is focused on high school students that are applying to the UCs. And as we go through the presentation, please feel free to drop your questions into the Q&A.
We do have several admissions experts and team members behind the scenes that are gonna be answering your questions. And I will also be moderating, and Sam will be answering some questions live as well. With that, Sam, I’m gonna go ahead and turn it over to you. Go ahead and introduce yourself.

SAM LUBY: Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you, Alison, for all of that. So again, my name is Sam Luby. I’m gonna lead tonight’s conversation. I’ve been doing coaching for over a decade in a couple of variety formats.
So I was the head of university counseling for a top IB school in Shanghai for a while. I’ve worked in education firms. I’ve worked in admissions at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley. And now I’m here representing Prepory tonight, which is very exciting. Prepory is a fantastic organization.
We’ll definitely talk more about what Prepory does and kind of how we can help support you all. Yeah, it’s been a journey and it’s really exciting to kind of talk about admissions in this standpoint to be able to share not just, you know, kind of the nuts and bolts and kind of information about this, but we’ll also introduce a lot of case studies or examples from the different pieces just so you all can kind of get contextual information tonight of what we’re gonna go through. So with that being said, should I get to the agenda and we should get going?

ALISON KALESHI: Awesome. Yeah, I really love your expertise and how thorough you are, Sam. And with that said, we’ll give a quick overview of Prepory and we’ll dive right into the agenda. So with that, who is Prepory? We really pride ourselves on being a college counseling firm that you can trust.
We have over a decade of experience in helping students and families navigate every single grade level of high school really strategically. So from ninth grade, tenth grade, eleventh grade, twelfth grade. And in that time, we have guided more than 14,000 students towards their highly competitive college admissions goals. And we consistently rank as number one in this space, with excellent admissions outcomes to show for it. One stat that we are very, very proud of is 94% of our students are admitted into one or more of their five top choice schools.
And when we say top five, it’s about aligning with each student’s goals and aspirations, not just a number. And our work is really about turning those competitive dreams and goals into results during the most competitive time in US admissions history. For our students who are targeting those highly selective schools like the UCs with under 15% admit rates, our students are 3.38 times more likely to gain acceptance than the general applicant pool. And we have spent nearly fifteen years helping students stand out in the admissions cycle. One area where we see huge impact is how students can develop a winning strategy that will differentiate them in the UC admissions process.
And we can go ahead to the next slide, please. And so last admission cycle alone — really, really excited, Sam. I know we talk about this frequently, but our students were accepted into every UC school, every Ivy, and every single school from number 1 to number 50 on the U.S. News & World Report list. And with that, Sam, I’m really excited for you to go ahead and kick off this evening’s agenda.

SAM LUBY: Fantastic. Well, with the agenda, I’m the one controlling the slides so I know exactly which one to go to at this time.

ALISON KALESHI: So thank you for bearing with us all.

SAM LUBY: So, yeah, our agenda — I want to go through the UC basics. I’m gonna compare the Common App versus the UC system and talk about kind of the strategy then of filling out the UC application. Then we’ll talk about timeline. We’ll have a short break in between as well too, and then we’ll kind of finalize with talking about the Prepory difference.
We are planning to have some time for a live Q&A. I know it’ll be quite late for us on the East Coast by that time, but stick around and we’ll have some conversations that you all are bringing up either again in the chats; potentially we’ll bring it up in the live conversations or have the opportunity to kind of answer some questions that were previously asked. So with that, I will jump right in. So the UC basics, just to kind of start off — like, what the UC system is, right? The UC system is made up of all of these universities that you see below in front of me.
The notable thing that I need to make sure here is that UC San Francisco is for graduate school. The rest of them are for undergraduates. So we are targeting these nine schools. The newest one being UC Merced and the first one being UC Berkeley. Gosh.
I should know that for sure. I’m almost positive it’s Berkeley. One of the — it’s either Berkeley or UCLA. I know they like to fight with each other. So we have these campuses available for us to apply to in the undergraduate cycle.
Overall, the UC system was made by the 1960 California Master Plan that created this idea of the UC system and then the Cal State system, so the CSU system, and then the community college system that exists in the state of California. There’s almost 300,000 current students that attend the UC system specifically — undergraduate and graduate degrees. There’s six schools now in the U.S. News top 50 national universities. A big change that happened was because of the ranking system that changed with U.S. News in the past couple of years that really valued ideas like social mobility, improving first-generation student outcomes, and diversity outcomes. And we know the UC system is very good at establishing that.
So it’s been well regarded — a lot of really great campuses and great options to be applying towards. What is nice is that, yes, they’re all in the UC system. They all share University of California values, but they do have different focuses. So they have different missions just based on where they’re located or the programs that they have. They all have bachelor’s and all the way to PhD degrees.
A lot of them have non-degree certificate programs you can do as well too, but a lot of various academic disciplines. So some majors are available at some campuses, some are not, and vice versa. And they all have on-campus housing and a sense of community, but it’s really different types of vibes and environments going from a UC Berkeley to a UC Merced to a UC San Diego — three completely different living arrangements and communities that are built at those campuses. And so it’s really important to kind of understand those differences, and they all have some sort of social culture. Right?
Colleges are going to in general, but a huge range of what that actually means — from sports and organizations to actual priorities of the institution themselves. A lot of what I’m gonna share next is very specifically to UC Berkeley simply because I used to work there. They’re not — you know, it’s not like the UCs are that different from each other that it would be a huge difference, but it is important to understand that each campus does have kind of specific things that they’re looking for — majors and personalities. And so we’re just gonna look at this from the UC Berkeley context this evening. And in order to do that, we have to kind of really — I want to separate the difference between the UC and the Common App.
So for those of you that are unaware, the Common App is the application system we use to apply to the majority of US universities, a lot of international universities as well too. And there is a quite stark difference between them. The first one being recommendations. So you all can read on this table. I’m just gonna go through a couple of really key ones.
The recommendations, like I said, are really important here — that the UC application does not accept recommendations. There are a few exceptions in later processes in different majors and different campuses. Those kind of exceptions and exclusions are really important to know. But in general, especially to submit the first round of application for the UC system, there’s no recommendations involved. Where in the Common App, it’s required and different universities have different requirements for that.
The essays are very different. I want to talk a lot about the PIQs tonight, the Personal Insight Questions. There’s four of them, which is different from the Common App, which is one main personal statement plus supplementals. The activities are different. The amount of activities, what you can report, how much you can report. The admissions plan —there’s only one deadline for the UC system, where the Common App and most US universities have a lot of various deadlines. The academic reporting, and then the test-blind and the testing circumstance. The UCs are test-blind — SAT/ACT is not only not considered, but you can’t even report it at all. Where for the Common App, it’s test-optional or test-required. Those are just some of the big hits. There’s a lot of really small differences between them.
You know, for most students, they think they can copy and paste or it’s going to be a lot of carryover, but they’re really very different approaches — and even the activities are different, which we’ll get into a lot this evening. It’s great for us coaches, right, just because we get to work on different systems, but also, you know, it is a lot of work trying to manage both applications if you’re going about it for this application season. So looking then specifically at the UC system — these are kind of the different sections that you’ll go through. The first being demographics — you’re filling out usual demographic information.
The next is choosing campuses and majors, which I’ll talk a little bit more about later on in this presentation, but you absolutely have to because it’s one system. Right? It’s this one UC system. You have to choose the campus that you want to attend, and then you have to choose the major. There’s a primary and an alternative major that you have to choose as well too, which again, we’ll get to a little later this evening.
Then the academics, which is all self-reported grade 9 to grade 12 grades. There are instances where you can report grade 7 and grade 8. There’s also a huge testing section as well too, where you can do all different kinds of testing except for the SAT/ACT. Again, we’ll kind of touch more on that later on, but it’s all completely self-reported. So you put in your high school information, you have your transcript up, and you’re putting in everything that your transcript is saying.
Then you have the essays, which are four 350-word Personal Insight Questions, or PIQs. Those same essays get submitted to each UC university that you apply for, that you submit for. There’s no different essays for different schools. It’s the same four that are sent to all of them. Then the activity list, in which you have 20 entries.
There’s six different sorts of classifications of what the activity type is, including honors as part of that. And they are very important. Arguably, I think it’s almost the most important part — the activity list — but more on that later. You get 20 of them. And then again, there are no rec letters.
There’s no transcripts. There’s no official documents. So the obvious question then is like, well, why can’t you just say whatever you want? Right? They do have an audit system.
So they do reach out randomly to applications that are submitted where you have to get your counselor and school verification on this as well too. But the other key thing is if you get accepted and you want to matriculate to that university, you do have to send an official transcript. You do have to send official AP scores. There is actual contact with your high school. So, no, you can’t just fictitiously make up the whole application.

SAM LUBY: So that’s the overview, the different sections of it, and we’re gonna kind of dive into each one. In this then, we’re trying to review these different sections and understand what they mean and what we should be reporting. Again, I want to kind of do this from a Berkeley perspective. Different campuses have different ways they’re reviewing applications. The scoring is different.
The processes, who’s looking at it is different. So I’ll just want to report it from how Berkeley has done it and know that there might be slight variations. But they have minimum requirements, and there’s A through G courses. Those are the same across all UC campuses. And if you look it up online, you can see specifically which courses are included in each type.
And there’s nothing gonna be surprising. Right? If you go to a public California high school, you do this automatically. It’s just listing kind of usual requirements we see in most states. There’s not a huge lift.
You just have to make sure to be monitoring, right? That you are on that kind of trajectory of finishing all those courses. You do have to have four years of English. You do have foreign language requirements and just making sure that you’re fulfilling all of those. There’s art requirements.
So it is important to kind of have guidance on that, but it’s your usual suspects as far as the different courses and the requirements. For UC Berkeley, it is a 3.0 in grade 10 and grade 11 and a 3.4 for non-residents. So yes, it is higher — the expectations, the competitiveness is higher for out-of-state residents. This is the same across most state universities in the United States, that for in-state students the bar is a little bit lower than out-of-state students. And that’s the case for GPA minimum requirements as well too.
The selection process specifically for academics then — I should have done this in a one, two, three, four. It’s usually pretty linear where admission readers are going through all the initial applications. They’re giving scores on it. So there’s a rubric that’s associated with the GPAs, the recalculation of it, understanding the different curriculums that are used, and then looking at the PIQs and the activities and making sure they have different traits and characteristics that the UC Berkeley team is looking for, which I’ll get to here in a couple of slides. So they’re giving scores and leaving comments on this. That is then taken by the regional admission officers.
So sort of like the admission officers that have different territories that are responsible for taking those scores and then adding more testimony and context and deciding again, as far as, you know, who’s going to continue to be reviewed or who is no longer being considered. Department leadership then is absolutely making some of those final calls as far as — this is the bulk of our class being created. These are the students that we for sure want to have. These are the ones we’re going to wait-list. And then a lot of executive admissions and university leadership weighing in.
Anything from sports to art or other kinds of fulfillments that they’re looking for — and departments as well too. Subject departments have a say as far as students that they want or types of applications that they want. For example, the chemistry department at Berkeley is pretty notorious for having some pretty strict requirements for their incoming students. And so that kind of just gets — and that’s why it’s not exactly linear, as those last two steps kind of go back and forth as far as shaping up what that class is gonna look like. And they are looking at it from first in the academic perspective, but then absolutely a holistic perspective. So the academic review, the academic perspective — back to that A through G subject requirements and making sure everything is identified properly.
It’s year by year. It’s self-reported. Tenth and eleventh grade is absolutely gonna be the focus — that requirement of the 3.0 again. Twelfth grade grades aren’t counted, but the courses are really important. So you should be putting in what courses you’re taking for grade 12 so they understand that.
Rigor, as you can imagine, is very paramount. It’s important to show that you’re taking challenging courses and that you’re progressing in your curriculum. You do choose your curriculum as well too. When you put in your high school and your high school information, you are electing what your curriculum is. And the testing again is blind.
So the SAT and ACT are not allowed. It is test-blind, but subject tests, including the APs, right, external tests — so GCSEs, A Levels, IBs, and of course the APs, which is the most familiar for most of you — are included and are very important. We absolutely want you to be figuring out how to get some APs reported because it is very helpful context. And then the last point is achievement versus your classmates.
They are your number one competitor. I mean, looking at a student, the very first thing I would do is click on their high school name. I would see all the students that submitted from that high school and I would sort it by GPA. That’s the first context for me — like, how did you perform within your school context? So GPA and how you are achieving within your high school is very important.
Then we get to holistic review. And so there’s a lot of text here and that is on purpose because it is coming directly from the websites of Berkeley — of how they do holistic review. So there’s not like a secret here. The challenge and the strategy is communicating these things, right? So the full applicant’s work is included and reviewed, including the number and rigor of courses taken. The personal qualities of the applicant, including leadership ability, character, motivation, insight, tenacity, initiative, originality, intellectual independence, responsibility, maturity, and demonstrated concern for others in the community are considered.
There’s a reason why these are bolded — because literally those are the words that are being used by the application review team to determine your application, of what you’re actually doing, to see what sort of attributes, characteristics, or qualities that you’re exhibiting in your activities, in your personal statements, in the application as a whole. So these are very important things to be aware of. And that third point — likely contributions to the intellectual and cultural vitality of the campus. So you have a broad range of these interests, but you absolutely have diversity in kind of your story. And what you basically need to interpret this as is that you have to own what your direction and narrative and profile is. Right?
You have your specific things that you’re really interested in. They should be celebrated. They need to be communicated, and you have your unique angle. If you don’t know what that unique angle is, then, yeah, that’s a really important reason to kind of start thinking about this process — developing what that looks like, because absolutely the UC system, pretty much every campus, will follow this. They want to create a very holistic class.
They want all different viewpoints represented. They want backgrounds represented. They want social and academic and professional interests represented. And it’s so important that you’re able to make that clear explanation of your contribution that you can make to the intellectual and cultural vitality of the campus. So then they can understand, okay, this is how this student fits in our entire class.
So holistic review is really important. In addition to that, they do look at achievement and academic enrichment programs. How they are measuring that then is by time and depth of participation, by the progress made by the applicant during the participation, and the intellectual rigor of that particular program. What you all need to understand is that they are looking at different programs or initiatives that you are a part of and trying to ascertain what exactly that value was, how much you committed to it, and what that outcome was. And your ability to quantify and communicate what that is —
can’t stress that enough. And that’s absolutely coming in the activities. It’s a really easy kind of win to miss — you underwhelming us in the activity description. I’m not able to understand what exactly your commitment was, what are some outcomes that you can tell me about, how important this was to you. And this is such a missed opportunity for those activities because, quite frankly, I don’t have the time to really think about it. Right? Like, to do research or to go in and take a lot of time and energy and effort.
I need you to do the work ahead of time in your application to develop and make those things really clear for me as an admissions reader. And so I can’t stress that enough — where again, you’re using the spaces to really be communicating this direction that you’ve been doing, the depth of the things that you’ve been doing, and really the value that you bring. I want to know those things. And so it’s really important to be able to maximize that space and how you’re explaining it, how you’re communicating it. And that’s the end part, right?
You have to do the two or three years before that of actually doing those things to make that story really great once you submit it in November. There are other evidence of achievement, though. So sustained achievement in an intellectual or creative endeavor, accomplishments in extracurriculars, you know — performing arts or athletics, leadership in different ways. Basically, what this is trying to say is that, you know, there is no one single way to show excellence. You do have academic enrichment programs.
That’s definitely important, especially when you’re communicating your intellectual curiosity and the direction of your major that you really want to be pursuing and kind of that academic story. But absolutely, you need other evidence of achievement, just because, again, they want to see the full picture of the student that you are, the different things that you’re involved in, and a lot of different things are celebrated. And race, ethnicity, gender, and religion are excluded. So what that means is that that is not part of their holistic review process. They are not including that.
That is due to recent changes that have happened in the admissions process. And for them, what they want to be focusing on is again kind of your activities, the things that you’re reporting, the things that you’re into, the academic enrichment pieces, the other pieces of evidence, and being able to do the entire academic overview as well too. So I’m gonna pause there. That was a lot of talking for me, Alison. So I will let you chime in a little bit, but there’s a lot — I just talked about the review process of academics and extracurriculars and we still have a lot more to get into.

ALISON KALESHI: Yes, we absolutely do. I mean, we see on the slide that we do have excellent outcomes for the UCs, but we’re also getting some really unique questions in the Q&A chat that I think are super important to talk about as they’re coming up. And one of the questions we received was thinking about: do the UCs consider academics and extracurriculars evenly, or is one more important? And Sam, feel free to chime in. But from my perspective, I believe that within any competitive admissions environment, academics is just the baseline.
You really truly need a highly competitive extracurricular profile, which is something that Prepory absolutely is gonna work with you on — building that winning strategy for the UCs. And thinking about too, what are the multiple components that Sam discussed earlier just one slide ago, but thinking about how can we really maximize your chances? I would argue that they’re gonna be viewed in combination with each other, but one will never be without the other. You need to show both academic and extracurricular excellence. With that, another question had come up, Sam, that I was hoping that you could touch on.
When we think about UC Berkeley and chemistry as a very highly exploratory/competitive major with rigor, it’s kind of posed some questions. Can you give a little bit more information on this? We have some interest in the chat about chemistry — we often are heavily applied to as a major too. So maybe you can speak a little bit more on that.

SAM LUBY: Yeah, definitely. So there is certainly — this is not just UC Berkeley either, by the way. All these UC campuses have this where there’s certain majors that are more challenging to get into than others simply because either they’re just more popular, there’s more competition, or the faculty and the department just have a higher standard for their incoming students. Chemistry is just one of those at UC Berkeley. If you look at their colleges and the undergraduate options, it’s a standalone one, which is a pretty unique approach to the undergraduate process in general. What do I mean by “they have a higher standard” and stuff like this — the departments are giving feedback to admissions and the schools about what kind of students that they want.
So they absolutely are having a say in their opinions of what kind of students they want, what their expectations are. So for students that are really interested in these high-level or highly competitive programs, you really need a strategy to see — okay, which major am I going to do? Is this going to fit exactly what I’m looking for? Is my profile matching what these expectations are? And it is an important conversation to be having.
And it’s, you know, not to be salesy about it, but you should be booking a call to figure out in your context. Right? We can’t go through every single individual situation, but start to think — different campuses and different majors have different expectations.

ALISON KALESHI: Yeah, and feel free to grab another sip of water, Sam, I know we have more conversation upcoming. I’m gonna go ahead and answer a couple more common questions that I’ve been seeing in the chat. When we think about applying to college in general, UC specifically, we do want to have a plan — an intentional plan. And that is what Prepory’s program is designed to support. But with that, do we recommend an undeclared plan? I personally, given how competitive admissions is — and Sam, if your opinion differs, feel free to chime in — but I believe that these profiles are significantly stronger with an intended plan going in and having an understanding of the majors and your plan of action for the UCs if admitted would be a stronger positioning strategy than going in undeclared.

SAM LUBY: Absolutely. Yeah. I’m on the same wavelength. I like to respect undeclared. It’s just a missed opportunity because —

ALISON KALESHI: I agree.

SAM LUBY: — you’re not communicating the direction or interest of yours. Yeah, not advisable.

ALISON KALESHI: Yeah. And with that, I’m getting a lot of kind of nitty-gritty questions about, well, if I have dual enrollment, is this better than getting a B in an AP course? What if I increase the rigor? The hard truth is you need both. You need to have an excellently rigorous academic profile.
The more rigorous, the better — but you also cannot expect that having that rigor is going to excuse a much lower grade than planned for. So if I were to pick, I would say I would like to see A’s on the transcript within the most rigorous courses that are also aligned with your pathway — not just stacking APs randomly, but having an understanding of that course enrollment strategy, which is absolutely something that we will support with. With that in mind, I do think we are ready. Sam, if you’re ready to go to the next slide.

SAM LUBY: Let’s do it.

ALISON KALESHI: All right.

SAM LUBY: Yeah, and because I’ve seen a couple of questions kind of on the timeline and stuff like this, so this will be timely to talk about the timeline. And so what we have here is sort of like a best-case scenario for a student starting this process, and that is right now — grade 11. Right? So that you are working to identify your campuses. You’d be starting to do the activity inventory to kind of understand, okay, what have I been doing?
What am I gonna be explaining? And then kind of identifying your spike and different majors that you’re going to do at the UCs. You can kind of see then as you’re slowly going from month to month, then you’re developing the materials and the information and getting everything ready to go. The application is going to be due by November. So that’s November 30.
I have seen years where a couple days before they’ll say something like, you know, the system is down and we’re extending the deadline to December 3 or something like this. Absolutely do not rely on that. Right? Thanksgiving break — I always try to give my students the clear, you know — if it’s Wednesday midday, like I’m not answering your questions for the next three days. So please get this over with.
But it is November to submit it. If I had a magic wand, right, I would be doing this even a year before, because when we talk about “begin the activity inventory,” you need two years. And you have to have a good inventory. The activities are just so valuable in this, especially for the UCs because of how much space you get to explain kind of what you’ve been involved in and what you’ve been doing. This timeline starting in grade 11 is great if you already have robust activity development. Right?
And so that’s something in consideration — like, to get to that first box, what do you already have done? But you can kind of see then this broken out in these next, you know, two, three, four, five months. We’re about to all go on this timeline right now as far as getting these UC applications in. So then let’s talk about strategy for the applications, right? Especially for those of us that are in that spring of grade 11 time where we’re really thinking about kind of what to be doing.
So academics first, right? It is firstly academics — associated holistic review is layered on top, but certainly the academics are going to come to the forefront. Got to focus on the completion of your necessary courses, upward academic trends. And the UC system is going to recalculate the GPA per tenth and eleventh grade coursework. As you’re seeing as well too, grade 9 is rarely put into that calculation.
It is considered, but they’re not going to use that in their recalculation numbers. But you know, if you don’t do well in grade 9 — it’s not like you get a pass. It’s still there. We still see it. And the college courses are going to matter much more than testing.
So what we mean by that is showing rigorous courses is what’s gonna stand out. Of course, getting, you know, a college course or getting AP scores or getting IB scores is beneficial to your application. Right? The UC system is test-blind for SAT and ACT, but you have to have the coursework in your transcript to show that rigor. The UC system really values the idea of what you’re doing in your school context.
Senior year courses are reviewed for rigor even if the grades are not counted. So you still need to be taking challenging coursework. And it should really connect directly to your intended majors or what you’re speaking about in your PIQs. So I shouldn’t have to do a lot of guesswork as far as when I see the major you applied for and then your coursework. So what do we mean by that?
Right? Like, let’s say you want to do mechanical engineering and do the engineering program. If you have not maximized physics and mathematics at your school, then I’m not going to understand why you chose mechanical engineering. That is literally what you study in the first year or two. And so you absolutely need that high school evidence of demonstrated understanding and hopefully some sort of mastery in those subjects to really convince me that, oh yeah, this major makes a lot of sense.
Like, this is why they chose this. And now I can’t wait to look at the activities and the PIQs to see that backed up. Right? But the academics are gonna be really important. So then we get to the majors and campuses, right?
So each UC campus is reviewed independently. No matter how much I think — especially when I was an in-school counselor — that Berkeley and UCLA talked to each other, right? Because I felt like I never had students that were accepted into both. It was either one or the other. But that’s not true.
They are reviewed independently, and they have major-specific differences. So they have certain amounts of students that they’re trying to get in specific majors in different departments. So there are numbers associated with this, right? And you really need to be considering that primary versus alternate major strategy. So you do — except for UCLA — get to choose a first choice major and a second choice major.
As you can imagine, your second choice major, especially if it’s for a university you’re really interested in, should be a bit safer. Right? If you’re choosing mechanical engineering, your next one should not be aerospace engineering because those are two very challenging courses to get into. There is definitely the strategy of, you know, choosing a more relaxed course. However, if you don’t want to go to that campus unless you study X major or Y major, that’s a completely different story.
But you do need to be thinking about and being thoughtful with your major choices. But you can’t also — you can’t do like mechanical engineering and art history, right? Like that doesn’t align really well, right? Unless maybe you have coursework associated with it or there’s some PIQs where I could get that, but it’s kind of a stretch. Right?
So you do need to be thinking about the major choices. The other thing too — again, aligning with your profile is so important on that, that you are having an honest conversation — you know, I really want to do mechanical engineering, but you have no calculus in your transcript. You probably shouldn’t be doing mechanical engineering. This is going to be really hard for you to get into. And no matter what, if you think that’s the best major for you, you have to think about the reality of the other students applying with mechanical engineering.
Not only do they have calculus, but they might have multivariable calculus, right? They might have much more advanced coursework than you do. And so because of that, you have to be really considerate about the majors that you’re choosing and making sure that aligns with your coursework that you’ve done, the activities that you’ve done, and the stories that you’re going to talk about in the PIQs. And also have to identify kind of the campus-specific strengths — which campuses have different focuses for life sciences or social sciences, or what majors that we are seeing are getting in with certain profiles versus other profiles. That’s frankly going to come from a lot of guidance, if we’re being really frank about how to do that, just because it takes a lot of industry knowledge.
And the last thing that I would say is choosing the campus based on academic fit instead of just the rankings is so valuable in this process. A lot of times students want to just be picking the ones that are the most highly ranked. And that’s an ill-advised strategy because if you don’t have a major or a program that makes sense, then that doesn’t really align very well. The easiest one is business. Choosing business just at the top UC schools doesn’t make a lot of sense because some of those schools don’t have business majors or undergraduate business colleges.
And so you should really be doing your homework to understand how your profile is gonna be read and what sort of campuses are gonna be a great academic fit for you. Now we’re on the PIQs — we have a couple slides about this. So listen up, buckle up. I think this is really important. So these are responses, not personal statements.
What do I mean by that? You are answering the question. If you lose me in your story, then I’m done reading. I need to know answers very quickly. I’m reading thousands of applications.
I need to be knowing what your response is. How are you responding to this question with your one, maybe two answers related to that? I should almost be able to take a highlighter and highlight your main ideas that you’re talking to me about. This is not the time to get cute or fancy with your writing style. You absolutely need to be communicating in a thoughtful manner.
I don’t want it super dry. Right? But I need to know kind of your main ideas very quickly. We’re looking for leadership, initiative, intellectual curiosity, and resilience and growth. Those are the four things that are just like — I need that somewhere in your application.
It’s really important to me. Now — I really want to make it clear. There is no just one way to be a leader. Right? You know, it doesn’t have to be that you’re captain of the soccer team.
You absolutely can do leadership in a lot of different ways. So that’s taking care of your siblings after school, or if that’s leading an online community of friends or whatever it might be. But demonstrating these qualities is really valuable. And there’s, you know, kind of strategy for every student as far as which one do they really lean into or a couple they really lean into. Again, talking about using grade 9 and 10 and 11 to develop those activity profiles to have that evidence to be showing these things.
But if you had to take away anything about what you should be writing about for your PIQs, these would be the four things that you would really need to be showing. They’re direct — so a strong PIQ is kind of these bullet points: direct and reflective. They’re focused on the impact and insight. They’re showing growth over time. That arc is really important, right?
We want to know, especially as a high school kid — things change a lot in your life from when you’re 14, 15, 16, 17. We want to know what that looks like in your context just because it is significant, and we really need to be seeing those things. This last point is so valuable. Avoid repeating the same story across multiple PIQs. And my personal suggestion is that you can only have two PIQs be about an activity that you listed in your activity list — that you’re giving space for new stories and new insight.
That part is really important because it gets old after a while if I’m reading the same story or the same experience talked about in different angles. So definitely try to avoid that. And this last point — you can use Common App essays, but they absolutely have to be revised for the UC style. A lot of students think they can just — I’ll make my 650-word personal statement for the Common App and then use that for one of the PIQs. And that’s just a really missed opportunity to do that.
I’m gonna show now the questions for the PIQs, and there’s eight choices. You get to choose four that are 350 words. Number six is what I would think is a requirement when you’re answering and writing these. So the highlighted ones are my strongly suggested ones to be looking at to answer. Number six, absolutely.
This is your chance to share your academic interests. For the most part, you do want to be talking about something related to your major. I want to — you know, this is getting a little too in the weeds with this, but when we talk about academic subject, it doesn’t have to be physics or it doesn’t have to be, you know, history or English literature. Right? You can be really narrow and specific, and you should be.
You should be niche. You should be nerdy about this. Number six absolutely should be answered. One and seven — I say either you do one or the other or ideally do both, because number one is a leadership one and seven is community impact. And again, the UCs really want to see both of those things.
So if you’re just like, I don’t know which ones to answer — you have an answer tonight. One, six, and seven. So now dealer’s choice for your fourth one. And these — sorry — these do not change from year to year.
I’ve been doing this for almost a decade and they stay the same. These are the questions for this year, so you already know what it is, and you can go from there. The University of California website system — they have a great webpage for you to look at the different questions and then some context for what they want out of those questions. You know, that’s just a great free resource that all of you can take, and I definitely would take a look at that because that will be very helpful.
So onto the activities. I had said earlier in this presentation that this is just such a key and important part. I think it separates students, quite frankly — especially when I was doing Berkeley applications. It’s just really clear from the activities and the time and the effort and the care you take to communicate them. And then showing all that impact and commitment you made to the activity itself is super valuable. And that will just separate you.
Because again — and Alison had mentioned this — the academics are definitely important, right? But they’re almost like everybody’s going to have them, right? There’s only so much you can do for academics, and you have to maximize that out, especially for these top campuses. And so the activities, the PIQs for sure, but the activities especially — that is where that separation happens, where you can really make yourself stand out. So you very much need to do it.
You get 350 characters to talk about each activity. They are like mini essays themselves. For anybody who’s had to write in a condensed word space, as you know, it’s much easier to write a lot than it is to write a little and make it impactful. So it’s really important to get these right. Depth, consistency, and impact is going to be really important. Sort of, you know, we had the PIQs — some things that I was looking for.
These activities — definitely the four of these are important: intellectual spike, leadership, family responsibilities, work, and volunteering. The last two are ones that are kind of wildcards for some people, but absolutely need to be shared. I have one student whose younger brother is severely autistic, and he drives him to therapy appointments, and he himself got certified to do therapeutic exercises for his younger brother. I would love that as an activity. That is a great thing because you are committing a lot of time and effort, and that’s a huge part of your lived experience and your profile.
And so talking about family responsibilities is a great thing to do in the activities. Right? I don’t want 10 family responsibilities. Right? And I don’t want to hear about how you have to vacuum your room or mom makes you make your bed — that’s not a family responsibility.
That’s just your personal growth. You need to do that. But something that is in addition, that really shows a lot of character in who you are, absolutely should be highlighted. Work and volunteering is another big one. Community impact, showing responsibility, showing maturity.
The UCs really want that of their students. They want students who are mature, that they’re ready to come to campus, come to a very large institution, and hit the ground running and find success. And so really showing that through any work and volunteering experiences is really important. The other things down here, just kind of some quick-hit strategy things — any sort of certificate or academic proof or any ways you can quantify things that you’ve done is always really helpful. So learning French, you can take the DELF.
There’s a lot of certificates that are outside of the AP curriculum for languages. For students that are doing engineering, having a CAD certificate — CAD is the type of software that engineers use — is another great thing to be doing. Strong descriptions are just going to explain your impact, and that part is valuable. The other thing, especially for our students in the audience that you need to understand — this doesn’t go away when you apply to graduate school, when you apply for jobs. You have to use materials, most likely the résumé, to showcase what the impact is and the things that you’re doing. And these UC activities are the exact same in that regard — that you are absolutely trying to showcase what that impact looks like.
You want to prioritize substance over prestige. So, you know, what we mean by that is that you want to be focusing on the things that made that activity worthwhile instead of just being in the activity itself. Right? So if you were chosen to be the head lifeguard at your local community pool after lifeguarding for a couple of years, simply just putting that title is just not going to do enough for me. In the activity description, I want to know what you did in that role now that you have this prestigious-looking title, right?
And to be able to give that to me. One of the biggest pet peeves is when we see “co-founder of business” or “co-founder of app” or something like this. And it has this really fancy title — like CFO of the blah, blah, blah. And the substance is just — there’s nothing I get out of that. And that’s just such a missed opportunity because it’s like, oh, this sounds really cool.
What a great thing that you were a part of and that you got this role. And then you give me this, you know, 100-character statement just explaining what the club is. This is such a missed chance for you to really prove what the substance was of that particular activity. So all these factors should be coming together to tell a cohesive narrative. So the coursework, the PIQs, the activities — we’re all balancing together to kind of make this come alive and be really clear because of the majors that you’re interested in and the direction that you want to go. I can look at these three things and understand — okay,
that makes sense. This person clearly has been studying for it and showing excellence there. They’ve done some activities that demonstrate an interest in this and an aptitude for this potential career and major. And then their PIQs give them the chance to communicate what that looks like and how that plays out in their regular life. So you should be having definitely a cohesive kind of relationship between these things.
Context matters. And funny enough, I’m going to just bring this up — context that we are getting close on time. And so I’m going to try to do my best to keep on going. Are we okay, Alison? Am I still going through the slides?

ALISON KALESHI: Yes, absolutely. Keep going.

SAM LUBY: Okay, cool. So context matters in the UC system. They want achievement in context based on the school course availability, the family responsibilities, any sort of health or personal disruptions, educational or geographic limitations. You should absolutely be giving your context. I had mentioned at the beginning how a lot of these UC campuses have been going up in the U.S. News rankings because of the ranking switch of prioritizing or giving more points, if you will, to social mobility and first-generation status and helping first-generation students. And so absolutely putting in your context and the challenges that you’ve faced because of whatever that might be — you should be explaining and giving that to me as a reader.
So then I can know what is going on. Most of the time when we’re reading an application and we start to see certain themes and stories, that is sort of like an indicator that I should be looking at the additional information to look for more information about what’s going on. Maybe, you know, you’ve had somebody pass away in your life, or maybe you live in an area of the world that had war or famine or some other huge, you know, challenging situation. And so use the additional comments and the circumstances to really share with me what that is so I can understand in context what is going on — that you are focusing on the growth and the response of what actually happened, and that you’re giving the circumstance clearly. I don’t want another essay out of this, but certainly I need to understand what’s happening.
So context is very important in this process. So kind of doing a summary here, and then we’re gonna talk a little bit about next steps with how to get involved with Prepory and how we can support you with this. But just to kind of finalize this — what makes you really stand out at UC schools. The academic rigor relative to your opportunity — that you were able to maximize the rigor available to you in your context, in your high school, and the resources that are available. That’s just paramount. You have to be showing that because the UCs, if you think about them, have poured millions of dollars into their facilities and their opportunities for students to maximize them.
And so they need to see that you did that in high school in order to believe and trust that you’ll do that in university. So you absolutely need to do that. Sustained commitments is really important. Just a bunch of different activities that don’t really align or make sense and that seem like résumé padding is gonna be a little bit of a red flag.
Right? So you want that clear commitment to whatever it is you’re doing — that is very important. Clear intellectual direction. Yes, you are selecting majors. Can you change majors? Sure. That’s not impossible to do. Very contextual and different for every campus. But are you expected to know exactly what you’re gonna do the rest of your life when you’re 17 and applying to the UCs? No.
Should you have a pretty clear idea of a direction you’re interested in, and you can show evidence that you’ve pursued that direction, and that there’s things that I can look at and read and understand to know — okay, yeah, this person’s really taking initiative and leadership and commitment to find these things? Yeah, you absolutely need that. And so it needs to jump off the page — like, this is a chemistry student, this is a mechanical engineering student, this is a history student. It should be really clear from that narrative you’re pushing through. Leadership through initiative, not titles.
Again, I gave the examples of the empty titles thing. That’s a really kind of a challenge in the application review process, sifting through that. So make it easy by explaining and quantifying the impact and giving great descriptions and PIQs. The impact — I want to see impact in your school, in your family, and your community. So impact is not limited to one place.
It’s not limited in one way. Impact can look different in a lot of different situations. And so I want to see the variety of the impact. If you remember talking about the UC system, they want to understand the intellectual and cultural vitality you’re bringing to campus. It should be multidimensional, and they want you to be involved in different things when you get to their campus — that you have different clubs and communities you’re a part of and that you’re passionate about, that you’re able to show kind of a variety in the type of person that you are and the excellence that you bring.
The growth over time thing. So this upward academic or personal trajectory is really important. You’re not expected to be perfect in ninth and tenth grade. We want to know how you’ve improved, what has changed for you, what does that growth look like, what is your reflection and kind of direction, how that trajectory has changed. That part is really, really important.
And then just this last piece — you want alignment between coursework, activities, and your PIQs. Those are just the three things — the sort of agency you have in this process for the UC system to really understand you is these three separate sections, and you’re creating a really strong alignment between the three. That is a clear narrative, a clear story. I understand that you’ve taken the time and the effort to really craft and communicate what this looks like — not only in November when you’re submitting it, but in eleventh grade and tenth grade and ninth grade as you built up all these pieces about you to get to this point where then we’re reviewing your application to determine that. Okay.
Great. So are you feeling inspired, Alison?

ALISON KALESHI: I — more than — honestly, every single cycle I’m ready to go back a hundred million years and apply to college again. But I know with your help I will get in. With that said, we think a lot of ways about how Prepory can help you in getting admitted. And this is an important part of understanding: what is the purpose of seeking professional support in a highly competitive admissions landscape? Across all of our programs, your program will differ based on grade level, but you are going to be meeting with admissions and counseling experts over the course of one-on-one, hour-long advising sessions.
And you are going to be assigned a highly dedicated college admissions coach. With that in mind, there are several components that we include across our programs. So for example, there will be thorough parent check-ins and thorough parent notes after every session. As parents, you will never be expected to be the project managers of your student’s profile. That is why you’re hiring professional support and really making sure that you succeed across all grade levels.
With that in mind, one of my favorite parts about Prepory is you have unlimited essay and résumé reviews. And with Prepory, that’ll be for up to 15 distinct college applications. And our support also extends to our admissions team. We really have a full team of collaboration to make sure that you are as competitive as possible. And of course, when we think about interviews and application reviews, you’ll have a mock committee review in addition to the interview specialists that’ll make sure that you’re really developing that executive presence to help you succeed.
With that in mind, we do encourage you to book your free session to continue learning about how Prepory will support you. We have a ton of questions that I think would be better answered live. So Sam, I’m gonna kind of rapid-fire some of these off, and we will try to answer as many questions as possible. But you are highly encouraged to go ahead and scan that QR code to make sure that we can discuss how Prepory’s program and your enrollment in our program can really help you succeed for UC admissions and college admissions across the board. Sam, good question for you. So I’m seeing this a lot.
Many applicants are often kind of surprised that the UCs are not going to consider your SAT score. If I am a student and I want to mention my SAT score, do you care? Do you recommend it?

SAM LUBY: Absolutely not. Do not recommend it.

ALISON KALESHI: Glad that we are aligned.

SAM LUBY: Don’t put it in there. Don’t put it in additional comments. Don’t write it in —

ALISON KALESHI: It is a hard no. Don’t sneak it in there. They are specifically reviewing you outside of test prep. When you are thinking about the UC calculation — this has come up a lot — they’re calculating grades 10 and 11. What about grade 9? Can I bomb grade 9?
Do you look at that?

SAM LUBY: Yeah, right. So every grade is looked at, right? As in, your grade 9, your grade 10, your grade 11, your grade 12, the courses that you took and the grades that you got — they’re all being considered. The recalculation, the understanding of what your GPA is from the UC perspective, is done for grade 10 and grade 11. So for grade 9, that calculation does not make an impact.
Can you bomb it and still get into really top campuses? Yeah. If everything aligns well and you do okay, you have a lot of extra work you’ll have to be doing, absolutely. And then with activities and things like this — but you do have a bit more wiggle room for ninth grade. And then in grade 12, what’s really important to understand is that you still need to be demonstrating rigor.
Right? That you’re showing that you’re taking advanced coursework and really continuing to push yourself.

ALISON KALESHI: Absolutely. I’m gonna go ahead and answer this one. You are able to select different majors dependent on the campuses that you are applying to. You do not need to apply with the exact same major. And when we’re thinking about dual enrollment — would you consider one more important than the other?
For me, I like seeing that you’re maximizing your school’s offerings. But if you’re gonna be pursuing dual enrollment, it needs to make sense for your intended pathway. So taking a bunch of different courses that have no alignment with your pathway — it doesn’t make that much sense for me in comparison to doing excellence in your AP courses at school. Sam, what do you think?

SAM LUBY: Yeah, I mean, it’s just so context-specific, right? Like, why are you taking the dual enrollment? What are you getting out of it? What’s standing out? Maybe you don’t have APs available to you, right?
So then the dual enrollment makes sense. So it really kind of depends on the student context. Whatever you need to be doing is within your base school, right? The school that you’re in — that you are maximizing what’s available and what students are doing. And so, you know, it might make — if everybody’s doing APs and then you’re the one student doing dual enrollment and being really successful in there, there’s an argument maybe that does make sense, right?
And there’s also, though, why are you not taking the APs? Or are you doing some APs and some dual enrollment? As you can tell, my answer is varied and all over the place simply because it does really depend on the individual situation.

ALISON KALESHI: Absolutely. And when we’re thinking about a more specific case where students have different options for math courses — one anonymous attendee said, I chose to take an advanced math course with an online university to really challenge myself at the university level. Is this going to reflect poorly, though, because I did not maximize it at my high school? I feel that this is more of a context-dependent case when we would want to look at the full transcript and really assess that as a team. But on a high — kind of just a general overview — would that automatically count against the student?

SAM LUBY: Yeah, no. Again, we would want to know why you didn’t take that. It’s different — like, if you took online courses because you don’t have AP courses, right? Or that you don’t have the advanced coursework at your school — that’s celebrated, right? And what we mean by your school context: if your school does not have some of these things we’ve been talking about tonight, then trying to add those things or do those things is going beyond your school context, which is great. That’s fantastic to do.
So yeah, I think it would just have to depend on the student situation.

ALISON KALESHI: Yeah, and kind of dependent as well when thinking about these schools’ profiles and how they’re calculating GPA. Something I do want to share — and this kind of applies broadly to a variety of questions that we’ve received in our chat — is that each school, whether it’s on a point system or a grade letter system, whether your school allows A minuses and A pluses or it doesn’t, the university that is reviewing you is gonna have an understanding of your school’s profile. So if you have a 90, you’re not going to be viewed in a lesser sense than somebody with an A minus, or if your school considers that to be a B plus. It’s very school-dependent in the way that they’re reviewing your GPA. And of course the UCs are going to be calculating your grade 10 and 11 based on their system.
With that, we do have a couple more specific situations that have come up. So I do want to encourage our audience — if you have a specific case and your question hasn’t been specifically answered, we do recommend that you scan the QR code to book that consultation so that you can meet with a member of our team and think about how Prepory can support you. With that in mind, if your school does not offer certain APs until senior year, will the UC system take that into account? Sam, is that a deal breaker? For example, a student has the opportunity to only take AP Bio in twelfth grade. It’s only offered at that time.
Is this gonna deeply affect them?

SAM LUBY: No. In that, you again are just kind of following what is available at your school. And so, yeah, there’s definitely some schools where it’s like, you have to take regular biology first in order to get into AP Bio, or they can only do certain grades or stuff like this. So you, again, are trying to maximize what’s available at your school. Can you do things differently in order to demonstrate interest in biology or aptitude in that? Absolutely.
Right? And so that’s where, again, you’re kind of planning out years in advance of doing that — if that’s through some sort of biology-related competition, or if you have initiatives related to intellectual curiosity in biology. Those are great ways and examples to be pointing to of your ability to find success in biology, especially if that’s an interest of yours.

ALISON KALESHI: Definitely. And you brought up a really important point, Sam, is that you are going to be evaluated against the competitiveness of your peers at your high school. So one high school — you’re going to be in a different applicant pool as opposed to a different high school across the country. When we’re thinking about these students, if you are at a notoriously rigorous or difficult school, do you have to work less hard than a student who is at the top of their class at a differently ranked school?
I think that this is a really unique question that’s been asked in a variety of ways this evening. And in my eyes, you need to maximize the opportunities in front of you at your specific school. But Sam, if you have additional thoughts, feel free to add those in.

SAM LUBY: Yeah, no. I mean, going to a really exceptional high school is kind of a double-edged sword in some ways, right? Because it certainly helps you have the resources, the opportunities, and sort of the reputation to do really well and to get into really good schools because they have a good track record and placement record — and the opportunity is there for you. But you have to take that opportunity. Right? You can’t sort of get lost in the crowd.
You do need to work to excel and be maximizing what those options and availability are. So as far as which one is harder, right? That’s kind of a — you know, it’s hard to be the top of your class in a school that has no resources, right? Because you’ve probably had to independently do a lot of that work. Where at a school that’s highly resourced, you know, they have it there for you, but then you have to take advantage of it. So, yeah, you definitely don’t get the opportunity to slack off or not maximize that just because, you know, there are so many other options.

ALISON KALESHI: Definitely. And I think in the alternative — if you were at a school that doesn’t offer APs, how would you navigate that?

SAM LUBY: Yeah, well, one would be UC Scout and some other online opportunities where you can take coursework that — you can even get a transcript for it. They have live online classes. They also have asynchronous classes that you can do where you can show kind of a credential or show proof that you’ve learned this material. And then obviously taking the AP exam itself, right? And having that piece of information too.
So that’s one kind of just obvious way to do it. And others would be simply finding different substitutes for what that AP course could be. Right? So a lot of the UC system’s actually — so the UCLA Extension system, where I teach a course, allows you to sign up for courses without being a degree-seeking student. And so if you don’t have AP Biology, let’s say, you could take a college-credit-level course through UC Extension on exercise and nutrition science, right?
If that’s an interest of yours. And so while it’s not a one-for-one replacement, it definitely is a good indicator of your interest and that you took that initiative and that leadership to have the intellectual curiosity and do something different.

ALISON KALESHI: Definitely. And that’s very, very helpful. We are going to be wrapping up. And with that, I think I’ll go ahead and answer a final question that I had listed I would answer live. For pre-law — this came up a couple webinars ago.
You are absolutely right. There is not a specific major that you need to select for law school. You have a variety of options, and something Prepory will help you do is selecting those majors that are aligned with your narrative and your overall profile. Given that we’ve had so many incredible questions tonight, we did try to get to as many of yours as possible. If we didn’t, no worries, because you have another chance to have them answered one-on-one by me or a member of my team.
And we want to thank you guys so much for joining. You all are very, very capable. You ask very thoughtful questions, and we are excited to support you on this highly competitive but highly rewarding journey. And we hope to see you soon.

SAM LUBY: Thank you, Alison. Thank you, everybody.

ALISON KALESHI: Thank you, everybody.

SAM LUBY: Bye.