Webinar Transcript: Breaking Down the UC PIQs
Elton Lin
(This is a transcript of a webinar from August 2024, a recording of which you can find on our YouTube channel.)
Anthony Su (he/him): All right, we’re going! Good evening, everyone. Glad that a lot of you could join today.
We’re going to take a look at some of the PIQs. For a lot of our seniors—definitely if there are any younger students, you are more than welcome to join to get a bit of preview of what’s in store—but this is mostly going to be geared for a lot of our incoming 12th graders who are going to be doing the college essays and applications coming on.
If you have started your UC PIQs, I think you’ll be able to get a little bit more insight today. If you have completely not started, that’s totally fine as well; I think we’ll get the ball rolling today—and thinking about, you know, what your first step can be in brainstorming, and figuring out the right approach to the UC PIQ is—it can be pretty specific.
I’m joined today with Kyra and Grace. Kyra is the Essay Specialist Team Lead, and Grace is one of the Essay Specialists on our team that you have the chance to work with.
And we’ll go through the presentation—definitely, if you have any questions, you’ll be able to use the chat function and the Q&A. We’ll try to leave the final 10 to 15 minutes to cover anything, or if there’s anything really pressing, you can let me know; and I’ll be watching it the whole time, and definitely I’ll let Kyra and Grace know. We’ll bring it up in the conversation as we go through.
All right! Kyra, Grace, I’ll give the floor to you.
Agenda
About the UC Application
What are UC readers looking for?
About the PIQs
How do I choose which prompts to write about?
Which topics should I avoid?
How do I fit my story into 350 words?
How ILUMIN can help!
Kyra Jee (she/her): Sounds great! Thank you so much, Anthony! And hey, everyone; welcome to breaking down the UC Personal Insight Questions.
Like Anthony said, we are so excited to be talking with you all today about the UC PIQs. We know there can be a lot of noise and a lot of pressure for students, especially this time of year, especially if you feel like you’re just getting started, but I really believe that with the right support, and giving yourself enough time to get started and work at your own pace, writing these essays can just be the best way to realize that you have a lot to be proud of over the last couple of years.
So today, we’re going to be talking about some different ways that you can show that off in your application—myself, and my colleague, Grace!
Grace Crowcroft (she/her): Yes! Hello, all: as Anthony and Kyra said, my name is Grace, and I’ve been working with ILUMIN for a couple of years now as an essay specialist, and I’m just excited to be here with you all, and am ready to dive deeper into the world of UC PIQs. UC apps are due December 2nd this year, and so it is game time!
Kyra Jee: Yes. What you see on the screen is our agenda for today! We’re going to ease in with more of a basic overview: talking about what the UC application includes and what UC readers are looking for when they’re reading your essays. And then we’ll sort of narrow down and focus on best strategies for actually approaching your own UC PIQs: selecting the most effective topics and nailing your writing style and tone.
Grace and I are also going to be reviewing a real student’s essay to sort of show you some different ways that our essay team and the sort of things that you’ll hear about today in the presentation can help you go from draft one of your idea to a strong, well-revised final draft that you feel confident submitting on your behalf.
And then we will close today with a Q&A and talk a little bit more about ILUMIN essay consulting services, and how we might be able to give you some guidance over the next few months or year as you get ready to apply.
Quick Facts about the UC App
1 platform for all 9 UC schools
All selected campuses see the same app components
Personal Info, Transcripts, Activity List, 4 PIQ essays, Additional Info
You can change your major by campus
1st and 2nd choice major
Grace Crowcroft: Yeah! So let’s just jump right in and get to some quick facts about the UC app.
So what is the UC application? There are actually nine schools in the UC system, including Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Irvine, UCLA, Riverside, and Merced. They all operate using the same admissions platform, which means you actually only have to create one application, and then just check off which campuses you want to send them to.
So all of those schools will see the same application components and materials, including your transcript and courses, your activity list, and the essays. (The only thing that you can change between campuses is your major, if you want to strategically select your first and second choice major based on what each school has to offer.
About the PIQs
Choose 4 of the 8 prompts to write about
All campuses see all 4 essays
350 words maximum per essay
Prompts will be read in order from #1-8, so be mindful of repetition
No prompt is favored more than the others, so select prompts that best fit your own story!
Kyra Jee: It’s good to be able to recap everything! So yeah, like Grace said, the essays… you will be sending the same essays to every UC on your list. So that means that you're not writing specifically towards UC Davis or UC Irvine; it is just simply to the University of California school system.
And so that written component of the UCs, we call the PIQs, or the Personal Insight Questions. And today we'll go over sort of a brief scan of what those eight possible prompts look like, and then like we said, strategies about how you determine which of the four of those are the most valuable for you, and how you can choose the four that will best tell your own story.
You get 350 words in each essay, which is about one page, single-spaced, and even though the content and the style of what makes an effective UC PIQ is very different from what you might write in an English class, some of the basic mechanics and things are still the same. So even though you definitely should be using first person, for example, in a college application essay, and you probably won't be quoting anybody, you still want to use a strong thesis statement to act as a road map in your essay, you want transition phrases, multiple paragraphs—all of these good writing conventions too.
So from those eight, the prompts are also officially numbered in order from 1 through 8, so they'll typically be read in that order. This is great news for you, since it means that the same readers are going to be gaining insight into you as a person as your essays sort of build on each other's part of your application.
All of which takes me to our first sort of big takeaway of today…
What are UC readers looking for?
Given the obstacles and opportunities in your life, how have you spent your time? (Takeaway!)
Kyra Jee: What are UC readers looking for in those applications? Why are you answering all of those different questions? Everything in your application, we like to say, from the classes that you've taken any community engagement or volunteering, household responsibilities—all of these different things, they kind of boil down to try and answer one big question: given the obstacles and opportunities in your life, how have you chosen to spend your time over the last four years?
Trying to answer this question with your application is sort of the best way to put yourself in the mindset of the person who is reading your essays. And the essays are a good way to sort of take control of the narrative, we might say, right—to shine a light on the obstacles or the opportunities that you most want to be highlighted in your essays.
Grace, will you help us break that down even further?
What are UC readers looking for?
Your specific, quantified accomplishments
Numbers, details, proper nouns
Value clarity over creativity
Be clear, concise, and straightforward!
Highlight the ways you stand out from other students
Grace Crowcroft: Yeah! What are UC readers actually looking for?
When writing your PIQs, you only have 350 words, like Kyra mentioned; that means that every word counts. And we want to share two key takeaways to having a strong PIQ.
So number one is quantifying your accomplishments with practical, clear examples, [and] having specific details, like numbers. So in your club, how many people did you lead, for example? If you're writing about scientific research, you could also explain what steps you took to conduct your experiments.
And then number two: readers value clarity over creativity. So on average, an admissions reader may spend anywhere between two to eight minutes on an entire application. I'm going to emphasize that one more time: admission readers may spend anywhere from 2 to 8 minutes on an entire application, which is so quick for [students] spending so much time [on them], but like a resume, you need to really help your reader understand exactly what you worked on and why it's so meaningful.
Save the creative writing for your Common App Personal Statement, where you might include dialogue and figurative language. Instead with UC PIQs, be clear, concise, and straightforward. Chances are good that for any club or sport or major you're in, other kids are going to be in it too, but focusing on specific numerical details about your individual responsibilities will help you stand out and highlight what was so meaningful about this activity to you.
What are the PIQ prompts?
Leadership
Creativity and Problem-Solving
Talent or Skill
Educational Opportunity or Barrier
Significant Challenge
Academic Interest
Community
Supernova
These topics are indicative of the qualities the UCs value!
Kyra Jee: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, now that we’ve had sort of a preview to warm you up for what kinds of things are thought about in the application, let's take a look at the actual prompts.
So Anthony is going to put in the chat for you all a link to the official University of California PIQ website that has the full and official prompts. What I'm going to do today is just summarize those, for the sake of our presentation and our time with you all this evening.
So if you're following along: I want you to get a sticky note and a pen and make a list of—you know, one through eight, and I want you to kind of check off the topics that you think might resonate with you and your experiences, and then sort of cross off or put in X next to the topics that just maybe don't make as much sense for you in your application.
Okay, here we go!
Prompt one offers you the chance to talk about an official or unofficial leadership position that you've held.
Prompt two wants you to describe an aspect of your creativity, whether that is more of an artistic or visual and performing arts kind of way, or just problem-solving—creative and innovative thinking.
Prompt three asks you to describe a talent or a skill that you have sort of grown and nurtured over time.
And then prompt four is an “either-or” question, so—educational opportunity or educational barrier. You can either discuss an exciting opportunity that has helped you learn something beyond the scope of the usual everyday classroom environment, like an internship or a summer program, or you can discuss a barrier that impacted your everyday, usual classroom environment.
Prompt five, the significant challenge prompt, gives you the opportunity to talk about a challenge that might have impacted your life. So not everyone has one, but if you're thinking right now of that big major event or circumstance or thing that happened to you personally or to your family, this is a good place to provide some context for how it affected you. You know, maybe that circumstance eventually led you to gaining an interest in your major, or maybe that kind of circumstance had a negative impact on your transcript or your ability to kind of give your all in an academic setting. So the UCs are really interested in both things that you have achieved, right, but also anything that might have—anything that can give more context to what you have achieved in that time.
Prompt number six is usually the “why are you studying in this major, why do you intend to apply for this” prompt.
Prompt seven asks you to talk about a community that you've positively impacted.
And then prompt eight, we like to call the supernova prompt. So we'll talk a little bit more on this one later, but the wording of it is: is there anything so tremendously unique or tremendously unusual about your experiences or your application or you that doesn't fit into the any—doesn't fit into any of the other prompts that we've looked at so far?
Okay, and that is the eight UC PIQ prompts. With the combination of the four that you pick, you get to design the way that you present yourself to the UCs!
Anthony Su: On a quick note, just to keep in mind: the number six prompt tends to be centered around the student major, and this is this part where, again, you need to be strategic; you're sending the same four essays to all schools, and if you decide to shift your major [between UC schools] and things like that, you have to keep that in mind that, you know, it'd be very strange if you were writing about biology, and then suddenly the school sees that you're a student for environmental science or something else. So keeping that in mind again as part of the strategy for the entire UC system.
How do I choose which PIQs to write about?
What are your biggest activities, in and out of school?
If you could only tell the readers 4 things about your last 4 years, which are the most “telling” about what kind of student or person you are?
Offer multiple aspects of yourself instead of telling the same story.
Use the prompts creatively!
Grace Crowcroft: Sure! Okay. So yeah, kind of touching on both what Anthony and Kyra said: it's difficult sometimes, or it kind of feels difficult, to pick what four PIQs to write about.
But the good thing is that you aren't starting from scratch. Instead of starting with the prompts, you can actually start by considering the activities that you've been in, in and out of school. And you should ask yourself: what clubs, service projects, research papers, tough classes, or responsibilities at home take up the most of your time?
It's good to have a variety of examples. You should offer multiple aspects of yourself instead of telling the same story. Even if you spent three years in mock trial, you shouldn't spend three essays describing that over and over again. Instead. use one essay to talk about mock trial, and then talk about different activities or qualities or aspects in your other PIQs.
And then something else to think about is: use your prompts creatively.
Use the Prompts Creatively
Consider different ways you could write about the same topic! (Example: DECA could demonstrate #1 Leadership, #2 Problem-Solving, or #6 Academic Interest!)
What are your main personal qualities, character traits, and values? What story can you tell to demonstrate these?
Kyra Jee: Yeah, absolutely! Many of your activities or your stories are going to relate to more than one prompt, but that is a good thing.
So let me give you an example: let's say that you've been competing in DECA business and econ competitions as a club at school. You could use prompt one—which, remember, is about leadership—to talk about entrepreneurship and pitching ideas on behalf of your team, talking to judges, things like that. But let's say you already have a prompt one that you want to write about instead, but you can't just leave DECA out of your application altogether.
So instead, we want to think creatively about how you can use your prompts to tell your stories. For example, all those same examples: pitching to judges, entrepreneurship, economics understanding, and sort of translating your ideas and your process in a competition setting—all of those things are still going to apply to prompt number two: Problem-Solving and Creativity.
So you would just write your thesis statement, your reflection, based on more directly answering prompt two. You don't actually have to have done anything different in your own experiences in order to take advantage of multiple different prompts, right, because you can't write the same—you can't write more than one essay to the same prompt; you’ve got to pick four different ones.
So: making sure to take advantage of the creativities in your benefit, right? The prompts are there to guide you, so instead of feeling restrained by them, using the flexibility can let you make sure that your most important activities, your most important qualities and values, make their way into your application somewhere.
How do I choose which PIQs to write?
Start by making two lists:
Obstacles
Opportunities
1. Which have had the biggest impact on you?
2. Which ones helped you make the biggest impact on others?
3. Which prompts could apply?
Takeaway!
Kyra Jee: Which takes me to my next big takeaway: a little activity when brainstorming your possible PIQ topics. This is like the first exercise that I assign to all of my essay students, no matter where they are in the process.
You want to start by making two lists: make a list of obstacles, make a list of opportunities. (It's okay if you have more than one—if one of the lists is longer than the other.) And then you want to ask yourself: Which have had the biggest impact on you? Which ones helped you make the biggest impact on others? And how many of those PIQ prompts could reasonably apply to each of your topics?
A lot of students, just by habit and enjoyment of a certain activity, trend in one direction. Like if you know that you're a good test-taker—maybe you've just swept the line in like AMC and AIME and Science Olympiad and you have a lot of similar activities. So taking the time to figure out what possible prompts can help you separate your stories and talk about different parts of yourself will help you balance out your four PIQs.
Balancing out your PIQs
No matter which prompts you choose, try to address:
Your Major
Positively Impacting a Community
Leadership and Initiative
Extracurricular(s) or Special Skill(s)
Grace Crowcroft: Yeah, I think that's a great exercise to help feel a little less overwhelmed by the process. And something else is balancing out your PIQs. So even where there's a lot of flexibility, we do have some wisdom to share with you all about fundamental elements in your PIQs.
No matter the prompts that you choose, you absolutely need at least one PIQ about your intended major and one about making a positive impact on people around you. Those two are really important and things that you see readers really gravitate towards.
For example, a future compsci major might use PIQ 6 to share about coding challenges they've completed or the hackathons they've won to demonstrate their interest in computer science. Then, for PIQ [7], the compsci major might share that they've been in a computer science club, such as Girls Who Code, but they want to make sure that they're focusing on the community and service aspects of their participation rather than on the relationship to computer science itself only, right? So you're using both pieces.
After you've addressed these things, other great themes include: leadership, that's always a strong suit; and then any special skills or accomplishments that you've had; and of course, any significant challenges or obstacles. Those are all good and help to balance out your four PIQs.
Kyra Jee: Yeah. If I can add a piece here too… I want to emphasize that … yes, absolutely, you want to make sure at least one of your essays is about your major. And even though PIQ 6, that academic interest essay, makes very easy sense for talking about it, when we're saying “you must write about your major”, or we encourage you to write about your major, we encourage you to write about community: you don't have to choose six and seven. Using that exercise to sort of creatively figure out where your activities go means that maybe you talk about your major in prompt four, the educational opportunity (you had an opportunity to learn more about your major through an internship), or maybe you're going to use prompt one, leadership, to talk about positively impacting a community. All good, a lot of flexibility, even though there are some of these sort of core themes that will help give you good foundations in strategizing three or four PIQs.
Which topics should I…
Avoid
Focusing on COVID
Discussing other people
Discussing distant accomplishments
Prompt 8: Supernova
Highlight
Personal and Academic Growth
Resume items
Contributions to your community
Quantifiable achievements
Grace Crowcroft: Absolutely. So we're telling you a lot of things that could help you to make your PIQs stronger and stand out, but there are some topics that we would avoid or advise you to avoid.
So one: focusing too much on COVID. Don't focus too much on it, because we're remembering—or we want to say that you're wanting to stand out from other applicants, and COVID was a worldwide phenomenon. So if you have a unique angle or take that stems from the pandemic, then yeah, sure, share that. But you just want to be careful that the essay you write isn't one that the UC reader hasn't seen already a hundred times.
And don't get caught up in discussing other people. You want to focus on yourself and your awesome accomplishments and what you've done the last four years, not just about the person who's inspired you or has hindered you.
And another thing to avoid is discussing distant accomplishments. Focus on things that have happened to you in high school. Although the middle school piano recital probably was really impressive—in most cases: too young to be relevant to who you are today as an applicant.
And then finally, be careful with the prompt number eight, otherwise known as “supernova,” which asks, “What makes you stand out?” We typically suggest students avoid this prompt because its simple wording often leads students to answer with things like, “I'm really perseverant,” or “I really want to be admitted.” Prompt eight isn't really asking for you to—if you're one in a hundred. What it's really asking is if you're one in a million. So while these things might be true, ask yourself: are the circumstances of my perseverance really different from my classmates’ perseverance, or [is there a] better prompt, like prompt number three, talking about your greatest talent or skill, that would make this stronger.
Topics you should highlight in your PIQ include: resume items, such as accomplishments, awards; your contributions to your community; and quantifiable achievements.
How do I fit my story into 350 words?
Be straightforward, not poetic or metaphorical
Answer the prompt
Write your thesis first, then cling to it for dear life!
Every sentence, without exception, must advance your thesis! Toss out unrelated exposition!
Get clear on the “So what?” What did your actions accomplish? Why do your future pursuits in this field matter?
Kyra Jee: Finally, here are some very last writing tips that we want to share with you before we move on to taking a look at a sample essay and reviewing that one together.
So unlike some private schools, which might have a smaller applicant pool, the UC readers move through applications extremely fast, right? Grace gave us that number of 2 to 8 minutes for your entire application altogether before moving on. So in order to match the speed-reading approach of the UC readers, there's a very specific way that we are encouraging our students to write their essays.
So some of this is going to be familiar, hopefully.
Be straightforward! We want to start our essay with a very clear thesis statement that answers the prompt directly, avoiding hooks, figurative language, metaphors, sensory description—all of these things—if you've heard that an essay needs all of these things, you probably are thinking of the Common App Personal Statement, which is a whole different bag.
When we're working on the UCs, though, we're prioritizing clarity over creativity. So in most cases, dialogue, figurative language, sensory imagery—all of that can go, in favor of sticking to answering the prompt and giving more evidence and description about what your activities looked like, what you accomplished in those activities.
We also want to make sure to answer sort of the “So what?”, or the reflection aspects, that is, one way that we're going to differentiate our essays—our PIQS—from the 20-piece activities list is that the essays give you room to answer the question, “So what?”
So you’ve just written an essay about being accepted to a prestigious summer research program? Okay! So what did you learn there? So what did it inspire you to do next? So what are you going to do with that knowledge as a prospective student at the UCs?
Anthony Su: I'll add one comment here, I'm going to talk about a bigger structural thing for a lot of 12th graders to consider: you may or may not have heard the idea that the, again, the UCs and the UC PIQs and the Common App main statement kind of act very differently, and this is the main reason why.
The UCs are so succinct in comparison and so straightforward, and [for] the Common App, the main statement, you're typically spending that time to try to reflect, be vulnerable, tell the admission reader a little bit more about yourself, that it's really—these are two very discreetly different types of writing, which is why you hear this idea [of] … “Don't take a UC PIQ and make it a Common App Statement,” or “Don’t make a Common App Statement into a PIQ,” because they just—you just need to start from different points when you're working on these essays.
So again, just as an additional note to any students starting both at the same time.
Let’s look at a sample essay.
Before and after!
Grace Crowcroft: Yeah! Okay, so: feels like now we have a lot of information, we have a good foundation of what PIQs generally are going to look like. Let's switch gears, then, and take a look at a sample essay: one that has gone from first to final draft with the guidance of an essay—with the essay team.
Prompt #2: Creativity & Problem-Solving
Grace Crowcroft: So, prompt number two: Creativity and Problem-Solving. “Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side.”
Prompt #2: Creativity (Draft 1)
Grace Crowcroft: Okay, so: “Prompt #2: Creativity (Draft 1).”
The way I demonstrate my creativity is through art. I have loved art since I was very young, with drawing and painting being two of my specialties. Whenever we had an assignment where you could either write an essay or design an art project, I would choose to make presentations, dioramas, or posters. In 8th grade, my diorama of a particular scene in a book we were reading for class won a competition at my local library. In college, I hope to major in art or maybe illustration if they have that in particular.
During high school, I have learned more about art to improve my abilities, especially in drawing and painting. For example, I took art classes both in school and outside of school, where we practiced basic skills. Attending art classes has been my favorite activity because it allows me to use my imagination to make meaningful messages to other people and experiment with different colors.
Last year, I decided to learn about a new form of art, digital art. I had never used digital art before because I didn’t have the software for it or interest in it. But I entered a contest to design a logo for a team at school and my design won. This experience inspired me to learn more about apps and other digital tools that artists use in marketing and advertising to create eye-catching effects. I started practicing every day, learning the different brush strokes and color palettes.
After college, I would like to apply for a job in marketing or advertising where I can use my creativity to help businesses communicate and grow.
So that's a solid first draft for a PIQ, but I'd like to know a little bit more about how the essay team can help. Kyra, what advice would you give to this student to improve their draft?
Kyra Jee: Absolutely! Before we really kind of dig into it, I want to give the context that this is actually a real student essay that came to us, maybe, two or three years ago that we worked with—and they very generously donated it to our webinar today so that you could take a look at what their first draft looked like before they underwent some brainstorming with their essay specialist, and then produced a more finalized draft that we'll get to take a look at in a second.
Okay, so. Thinking back to all the different things that we learned so far today in the webinar, I want to start with strengths. I like that the student showed growth over time; we can see art classes moving to digital art.
And so any of the prompts that you choose, whether you're answering prompt two, which—this one, creativity—or prompt three, which is about a talent or skill that you've grown over time, or prompt one, like leadership that's positively impacted other students over time… UC readers are interested in seeing you sort of grow and strengthen your skills, and how you have improved since you first started with that activity. So it's good that this student has sort of made their way over the course of a couple of years in talking about their creativity.
That being said, there are sort of three things that stand out to me that I want to first advise the student in making revisions on them.
Number one: keep your anecdotes a little bit more recent. So this eighth grade diorama project is a good memory, and maybe it really was that important turning point in the student's personal life, but from an admissions standpoint, hopefully you have all had new realizations or new accomplishments since middle school that you might be able to talk about instead that can sort of show, maybe, the more advanced version, the older version of where you are in your journey now.
The second thing is that obstacles and opportunities slide… if the student hadn't done so already, I would assign them to make the list of specific opportunities—art-rated opportunities or art-related projects, so that we could review it together. I really just want to see more in this essay, more specific examples of how they demonstrated creativity through art, what kinds of skills they learned, what kinds of projects they did… you know, how did they get from illustration in the first paragraph to marketing at the end? Very curious about that!
And let's see… I think the third big thing that I would share with this student in their essay is needing a more robust thesis. The two things we want out of a PIQ first sentence, or thesis, right in the first paragraph is: we want to answer the prompt directly—which the student does, “I demonstrate my creativity through art”—but we also want that sentence to act kind of like a road map.
We want it to foreshadow the other activities that are coming up down the line in the essay in order to help out that reader, who is moving very quickly through your essay. We don't want to hide important information or new realizations buried in the back [for] half the essay; we want to make it very clear what you're going to be talking about all throughout the essay.
Okay, and maybe the last thing is: it's a little short. They give you 350 words for a reason; do your best to maximize in a way that lets you say everything that you need to say about your essay.
And I would say those are the four main advice categories that I would give to a student who brought this in as a first draft for us to take a look at together.
Prompt #2: Creativity (Draft 3)
Grace Crowcroft: Okay, so let's move on then to our next draft. We’ve gone to our essay specialists, like Kyra, and she’s given us some really solid advice; and so this is with all that feedback. And now, draft three! Same prompt, but another draft:
By studying different techniques, exploring digital arts software, and setting personal design challenges for myself, I’ve discovered a passion for design and marketing.
I have taken art classes every year in school to build a good foundation of basic skills. For example, I practiced realism and human anatomy in Advanced Drawing II and studied editing software in Digital Photography. Focusing on how an emotion looks on someone’s face reminds me that art does not always have to be beautiful, and it is more important to me to convey a message. Practicing regularly allows me to combine my imagination and knowledge to create something new.
However, it wasn’t until last year that I realized my passion for digital art. I entered a contest to create a new logo for my school’s field hockey team. I incorporated our mascot and colors, which was required, and tried to design a logo that looked professional instead of youthful, like many of our other sports teams. When my design received the most votes, I was excited to see I could use my creativity to communicate someone else’s message as well as my own.
This summer, inspired by artists I’d seen on social media, I began designing imaginary book covers and movie posters. I wanted to practice applying my skills to more real-life projects. After noticing that posters from major film companies tend to use may of the same color palettes and effects, such as Marvel overlaying collages of main characters with red and blue lighting, I wanted to create posters that looked more distinctive, Experimenting with color, composition, and even changing font size and placement, I designed 12 new posters for my favorite movies. I even posted my art to social media and began receiving requests from strangers. Through Coursera, I plan to learn about other software platforms professional artists use in marketing and advertising to create eye-catching effects.
Expressing my creativity through art and design has not only helped me gain confidence as an artist but also encouraged me to pursue the world of marketing.
All right! So this student has taken that feedback and has created, now, a really great draft with specific, concrete examples of creativity in action.
Something else that stands out to me is that “12”—it pops, right, it's a concrete, numerical data point. And we also have more context for the journey from art to marketing. We've added a stronger thesis statement that not only answers the prompt but also sets us up for the upcoming paragraphs, so the readers know what's to come! And now they've realized—this writer has realized another opportunity to write about. There were already a lot of great transitions in this person's writing, but what we have done is we've gone in and we've proofread for commas and verb tense too, so it's a little bit crisper. And now I think it reads a lot better than that first draft!
Kyra Jee: If we can take this essay as an example—not just for the writing style, which, of course, is what Grace and I have been talking about for the last couple of minutes—but also just, maybe from a younger perspective, too, or from a brainstorming perspective, about what kinds of topics you could talk about in a UC PIQ.
I think that, sometimes, I have students or families come to me and say, like, “I don't have a lot of—I don't always have an official summer program specifically where I learned all my things; I am self-taught, I just took a free Coursera class online to learn a little bit more by myself, is that okay?”
Yeah! It's fantastic that you took the initiative to learn more about your activity, even if it didn't come through the official structure or formality of a summer program—which, of course, does have a lot of value too, but I don't want you to burn out all of your ideas just because you think it has to sort of be a certain way. The essays are this opportunity to talk about those opportunities and sort of talk about why they are so important or interesting to you as well.
And there we have our essay sample for today! I wanted—again, kind of go back—I know that we kind of added some drama, the sort of the time warp of having these two drafts at the same time, but it was a very real essay with very real feedback from a high school student, probably like many of you who are watching today, who is generous enough to share it with us.
And so we hoping that by sort of walking you all through a broader overview, lecture-style, in presentation of what kinds of things to look out for, and then a sample feedback session about what we might work on in a meeting, you can see how we can sort of help students take your writing from that first draft into a more finalized third or fourth draft version, right, based on both what the student is proud of—what they have spent their time doing—but also based on what we know that UC readers are looking for in their applications, so that the students can feel very confident and ready and prepared to submit their applications.
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Kyra Jee: On the screen here, we have just a brief overview at ILUMIN: our hourly essay consulting program matches students up with a member from our wonderful essay team, like Grace, to go through any essays, from any school, at any stage in the process, any time of the year.
So whether you're working on UCs right now, or you are working on the Common App supplemental essay, [or] some combination of those, or all of them all at once, we would be very excited to help you walk through the process from brainstorming your topics, coming up with activities and exercises to help you really pull ideas out, and then bring it into the stage of refining and proofreading.
We are almost at September! The UCs are due 12/2 this year, so it is a good time to, maybe, to consider exploring a little bit more about some way you could get some structured support as your senior year really kicks into gear.
Anthony Su: Perfect! All right.
Kyra Jee: Yeah, I think that's everything we have on the UC PIQs today! How much time do we have for questions, do you think, Anthony?
Anthony Su: We have about 20 minutes, but also we have no questions so far, which means that everyone was listening incredibly attentively to our presentation and getting the sense of feedback. But yes, definitely, if you have any questions, feel free to put [them] into the Q&A right now.
I've put some links in chat as well, if you wanted to look at the packages for the 5-hour and 10-hour [essay consulting packages]. We're doing a promotion code, “SUMMER”, for 10% off.
Here… let's see… okay, our first question: “If my main area of focus is healthtech research—I started a company and then a nonprofit—which prompts would work?” Good question.
Kyra Jee: Whoa! Very cool.
Anthony Su: Let’s go back here [returns to slide listing all the PIQ prompts] and then I’ll read the question again, and then we can think through it a little bit.
So this student says they are involved in healthtech research, they created a company and then a nonprofit. So let's see… let's start with “healthtech research.”
Kyra Jee: That's extremely cool. If I can get some clarity, does it look like the question is saying that these are all different exercises: healthtech and nonprofit?
Anthony Su: I think these are different, yeah.
Kyra Jee: Okay, okay! That's pretty cool, yeah! Let’s see if we could sort of feed it through this exercise of what possible prompts you could use here. Okay. “Healthtech.” That’s very cool.
So… you’ve got a lot of options. So I think that starting with… maybe I will… I’ll give an option, and then maybe, Grace, you could give us a different option, and maybe I’ll come at you with a third, because I already see three or four possibilities in here.
I think the first, easiest answer is PIQ #1: Leadership could be a good option for you to talk about this experience. Anytime that you've had a chance to create something that didn't exist before, whether it's the academic aspect or research of health and technology or bioinformatics or whatnot, or it's about creating a service that provides that education to other people, PIQ #1: Leadership is a good way to sort of point to the initiative that you've taken to develop out a very cool nonprofit warehouse of resources and things like that. It's very cool!
Grace Crowcroft: Yeah, I would—as Kyra said—I think there are a lot that would kind of fit under this question… I think Creativity and Problem-Solving as well, if you are using your nonprofit as a way to solve something that hasn't, you know, a problem that hasn't existed—or like, a problem that exists, but hasn't been solved, right? You can think about different ways that you have brainstormed creatively in order to answer that problem through your nonprofit.
So that one, I would say, would fit as well.
Kyra Jee: Absolutely. Maybe the last bullet point for this question is: I think you could write about this in PIQ #6, like your academic major of interest, if you are majoring in a field that very closely relates to the type of work that you've been doing. I think you definitely could make that work; for example, if you are interested in pursuing like a premed pathway, and part of building a nonprofit related to healthtech involved a lot of like biomedical research, then I think you could talk about it in prompt six.
But it's also possible that you—you know, focusing on the organization aspect of your work might lend itself really nicely to PIQ #1 as a leadership prompt.
Anthony Su: I think also, potentially, you might just need to think about the fourth example in which one it would fit in, and then kind of have the other three slot in from there.
Kyra Jee: That's true, it is a big puzzle altogether.
Anthony Su: One question… the question was… let me try to make this more concise. Sorry, give me a second.
The question was: “For a larger umbrella topic, such as—or something a little bit more sensitive, such as having a disability, would it be okay to bring that topic up in a PIQ, or do you think that it would be placed somewhere else?”
I will state that most schools will have an additional information section if there is something that you just want to, hey, let the school know that, “hey, you know, I have this disability, or I have this medical condition, or you know, this happened to me in sophomore year,” there's always a space for that if you want to not write a whole essay about it, but just let them know something happened.
But I guess—Grace, Kyra, your thoughts about something like that, talking about something more sensitive?
Grace Crowcroft: Sure! Yeah, I think that's a great idea, doing like—using the additional information, that's a really great box to kind of put all the extra stuff. But also, if this is an area that feels really core to how you've grown, and how the last four years have really—like if it's been pivotal in the last four years of your growth, too, I think that is absolutely something that you could write about.
And in terms of writing about it in multiple ways—and I'd love to hear Kyra's thoughts on this too—but I think when you're using different examples, you can use the topic overall, but using different aspects to that topic might be important. So as long as you're able to still look at [for example] community, right: so if you found community through, like, disability, or—so that could be like one topic itself, or one PIQ; and then looking at, like, if you found creative ways to live life because of the disability, right, those are two ways to use the same topic in a creative manner.
Kyra Jee: I would definitely echo what both of you have shared so far. In essence, if it's had a big impact on you and your life, then it belongs somewhere in your application, too.
I think that the additional information section does work really nicely for this; it's worth noting that the UC version is 500 something, 500 odd characters, so it's not quite the the space… thinking about the space, do you want the 350 words to be able to properly clarify and add transparency, or do you maybe just have a shorter overview of something specific that you want to add?
But I do think it is important to be able to provide more context in your life, especially if it has had an impact on your academics.
If I can just give a very small vague example: I had a student who was, over the course of their junior year… they were pulled out of their fifth and sixth period almost every week for a semester due to a personal health issue, and that impacted their academic transcript from, simply, you know, both the emotional things, but also literally missing class. And if we don't provide the UCs with that information, then all they see is the dip in the transcript—they don't have the context for what else was going on in the student’s life.
Yeah, I think that was a super thoughtful question!
Anthony Su: Question about the activity list in the UC apps and how to tie that to PIQs. It’s a good question.
So UCs, I know, will give you an option to put 20 extracurriculars. (Common App will only give you an option to put 10.) I think, to be honest, most students have struggled to get up to all 20, so maybe you'll get away with 15 or 12, or you just put the 10 from the Common App; but I guess, how would you build a relation between the extracurricular section and the PIQs?
Kyra Jee: Hm! Great question! Yes, so: as Grace mentioned all the way back yonder on, like, slide two, your activities list is going to be the same for all of the colleges that you—or all the UCs that you send it to.
You… it's okay to have some overlap. In fact, anything that is big enough to be in a PIQ probably is making its way to your 20-piece activities list as well, and so probably something to think about here is: your biggest activities are probably the ones that belong most in a PIQ, because you need the 350 words to show off all of the great work that you've done, to detail out all of the research that you accomplished, and it just usually doesn't fit into the activities list—whereas, if there's a club…
I know that in some places, something like [the] National Honor Society might have a lot of students in it, but you—even though it's a club, you might not accomplish a lot of projects in it. Probably doesn't need a whole PIQ! You could sort of, you know, squeeze it into an activities list if it was important to you as well, as you're trying to fill up your 20 activities and awards.
Anthony Su: Oh, just a clarifying question of, like, “Does the activity include where you put honors and awards?” I believe those also fit in there as well, right?
Kyra Jee: Yes, the UC activities list has a couple of different dropdown categories. You don't have to fill all 20; it's a maximum of 20.
So it's: volunteering and community service that you have done for free; jobs or internships that you've been paid for; general extracurricular activities; awards and honors are in there, too; educational opportunities; and then non-A through G classes are the different categories that you can talk about in your activities list.
Anthony Su: I can't believe you have it memorized. [laughs]
Kyra Jee: [laughs] I see a lot of activities lists, yeah.
Anthony Su: Let's see: a question of, “If there's a niche program you participated in, should we explain it?”
I guess, again, in the context of like, are we talking about a PIQ or your resume section?
Grace Crowcroft: Yes. In a PIQ, you would provide—and again, with only 350 words, it would be pretty brief and succinct—but you can still do that [explain the niche program].
A lot of times, like, at the very beginning in our intro, you might name what activity or program it is, and then briefly explain, just so the readers have that context; and then, similarly, there is a little description [box] in the activities list that you can… you have a word count there as well, and so, again, being succinct and clear when you're writing, like, “this is what it is,” just to give the readers a heads up.
Kyra Jee: I totally agree. This comes up a lot when I'm working on, like, a draft two or draft three with the student, when we have a pretty good idea of what we want to write about and which anecdotes. I'll do the sort of… we'll stress test the organizations and whether it's understandable what you did—and how much explanation you need to provide for your activity.
So like, if you are deep in it, you know what “USACO” means. I'm sure there are dozens of you right now, I can say USACO and you know exactly what I'm talking about, but maybe others haven't heard that USACO is the shortened version of the USA Computing Olympiad, you know, the full competition.
So one of the things I work on with students is trying to figure out: when is the activity so clear that we know what the acronym stands for, and when is it important to spell out or explain your technical jargon, your industry-specific knowledge; this is definitely something that we work on with students to ride the line between providing context, and then not taking up too many words from the 350 that you have to work with.
Anthony Su: Yeah, it's hard to say, because I feel like most admission readers will know what like a DECA or an MUN is, and then it becomes, you know, for some other clubs, might be very specific or regional where, you know, that clarity is better.
The question of: “Is it better to do activities inside or outside of school?”
I don't think it will dramatically matter in the context of a PIQ—of, you know, where… I guess, here, let me go back. There's a—we had a slide on this, right? Where's the one where we—here. When we're talking about both obstacles and opportunities… I don't think it matters exactly where the obstacle or opportunity happened, as long as the student recognizes it and there's something to be written there, you know.
But I guess: Grace, Kyra, anything you want to add?
No? Cool.
Grace Crowcroft: Second that!
Anthony Su: A question about portfolios: so the question specifically was about showing research or coding projects.
In general, they probably will not… you probably don't have a space to put that item. I think even—there are some schools that have a rule of like, if you put a link in your extracurricular section or in the resume section, they're not going to click on it. So you need to, you know, you have that word count or the character count in the resume section is… that's it, right?
And same thing with your essays: don't put a link in your essay, they're not going to click it. You need to try to explain everything on the resume section; if you can't do that, you can make an essay about it.
But again, at the same time, I want to clarify: you're not—none of these essays are asking you to give us the technical details about your research or something you did. They want to know about these things: impact on you, impact on others, and then what you basically bring to the school. So you don't want to go in detail about a research assignment.
Kyra Jee: Yeah. If I can echo that: undergrad apps are not like grad school apps. You're not—they're not typically going to be read by a professional in the field that you're studying. Just because you're a computer science applicant doesn't mean that your essay will be read by a computer science department member; it's going to be read by the admissions team. And so that means that it's up to you, or up to the specialist that you work with, to try and translate the work that you've done and everything you know about your subject and why it's so meaningful or impressive, into language that answers questions like these.
Anthony Su: Let's see… “If my school DECA doesn't do state competitions, only on-campus conferences, is this an important extracurricular to write about?”
Let's see. I guess, Kyra, do you want to tackle that one?
Kyra Jee: Sure!
I would… if we were in a meeting, stranger, friend, I would want to also ask about the other activities that are going on around it, right? It's about context. So if DECA is where you sink all of your time, and it's your business-related subject, then [it] doesn't matter if you haven't gone out of state; you've still committed your time and your effort and your sweat and fatigue into learning more about, and being part of, DECA.
If it's only one of multiple examples of, like, economics that you've learned how to do, or just one program among other business or entrepreneurship programs, and you feel like it's maybe less significant, then maybe it can just be described in your activities list, and you don't have to spend your whole essay on it, or you don't have to include it in an essay.
Anthony Su: Maybe a good thing to consider is, like: try not to think, “Is this extracurricular good to write?” Think [instead], “Is this the best thing that I could talk about? If, you know, if I only have four chances to talk about something, is this something I really want the reader to know?”
Hopefully that makes things easier? I hope it doesn't make things more confusing in terms of just looking at your list of items and things like that.
“Can you elaborate on obstacles and opportunities with examples?” Sure!
Grace Crowcroft: Well, what comes to mind—I mean, at this stage, at the brainstorming stage, it can be pretty, like, whatever comes to your mind. So: what things have come up that have made, you know, academics challenging; have made your first, second, third, fourth year challenging, right?
So something that I can think of is: if you broke your leg and it took—you had to do multiple surgeries or something, and it took you out, a few weeks out of class, right? That would be an obstacle, because you would be—it would be something that you're having to overcome. Or if your parents are working a lot, and so you're the one taking care of those siblings: that would be an obstacle.
I mean, it's really open-ended to what has been challenging for you to do the things that you want to do, to feel successful, right?
And then in terms of opportunities, kind of that inverse. Opportunities, things that have helped you to grow, that have helped you to explore your academic interests and other skills and
things that bring you joy. So opportunities could be like a camp that was offered, and you took that camp, and you really learned from it, and it planted a seed to, now, what you're going to—you intend to go in for your major. Those are opportunities.
But this is—again, and, you know, I'd love to hear from the two of you, too—but this is kind of starting off, and those words exactly mean what they are, so just think about things that have both hurt and helped you throughout your high school career.
Anthony Su: I think, while brainstorming, what I would recommend is also: try to be as specific as possible. If the opportunity is a summer camp you went to, maybe it's like, “hey, specifically this exercise that we did as part of talking about… this type of marketing,” right… maybe that's—you want to talk that specifically about an opportunity.
Same thing with obstacles. Maybe it's like, “hey, I was part of this club, and there was a conflict between this person and this person, and I had to go and resolve it, and this was what was at stake.” Making it very clear like, “hey, here's the ‘So what?’ of it, here's why this is important to me, or why I think this is important enough for me to talk about.
Kyra Jee: I think—absolutely, those were all very good examples of ways to do it.
If I can give you an example of something maybe to stay away from, too, is that… there's that Prompt #5: Significant Challenges, like “Is there a significant challenge in your life?” is… they do mean significant.
Sometimes I have students try and double-check with me once they've made their list, like, what counts and what qualifies as an obstacle, and the truth is it really is—ultimately it is subjective, and it is dependent on how much of an impact that you felt it had on you in your academics.
But at the same time, try and think bigger picture once you have brainstormed all your different options. If your obstacle is that you got a B on one test and you're not used to getting B's on tests, and so your obstacle was working really hard to get an A the next time: definitely a good example of perseverance, and maybe that could be, you know, part of a greater essay on your—on Prompt #3, like your greatest talent or skill, but I wouldn't call that a significant personal challenge.
I would say a significant personal challenge is… it can be something enduring, or with an enduring impact on you—like, mental health could be something like this… as Grace said, responsibilities for siblings in a way that maybe encroached on homework time… those are obstacles.
Anthony Su: Yeah.
I’m going to launch a poll for a free consultation, if you're interested. I'll just take this time for some final questions. As well, I think—let me just—obstacles, opportunities… I think it's a helpful exercise just to go through the sample essay and just identify them, because…
Kyra Jee: Oh, yeah, totally!
Anthony Su: Mostly opportunities here, right, but—example here, they’re talking about the exact kind of technique the student learned in the courses, right? This is why it was important to the student; it's like, “hey, it's important to have focus on that emotion, not just have the art look nice.”
Let’s see… opportunity to design the new logo, right? Anything else… there was an opportunity when people wanted to book her to make the new poster, or like, people were contacting her to—yeah, contacting, receiving requests from strangers to make a poster. So definitely, again, this essay has—a lot of parts of it are trying to show the opportunities that are, you know, a little bit different. I'm talking about the student-specific reflection of that.
Trying to see if there's any obstacles, anything in particular that's…
Kyra Jee: I wouldn't say there were any specific obstacles in this essay, which I think actually is a pretty good example that, if you are… if you have a significant challenge, I encourage you to determine how you might be able to share that context, but if you're sitting there thinking, “Man, I do not have a significant challenge,” that's okay too!
You have a lot of other exciting parts that are just part of your everyday life, and maybe you're already aware and proud of those things, and maybe you just need a little bit of nudge or brainstorming exercise to realize that they can make phenomenal essay topics, whether they're PIQ topics or supplemental topics across the board.
Anthony Su: Another thing to consider is just: think of—look at all the opportunities that the student [from the sample essay] is talking about, with the course, the logo, designing the… you know, there’s at least, like—Coursera, even—so there's at least four opportunities in this one PIQ. And it goes to reflect how information-dense a PIQ is, of like, “here's the examples, here's the things I did, and this is why I enjoy art, design, marketing,” right? They're putting everything on the table here.
Perfect. All right! I think we got everything today. So I want to take—say thank you to Kyra and Grace for spending a time, letting us know a little bit more about the UC system… and thanks, everyone, that can make it live.
Of course, we'll have a recording; we'll post that, probably tomorrow, once it's all loaded out.
Stay tuned! We definitely have some more webinars coming. I know there's a couple for kind going over the other essay topics as well. We'll definitely cover the Common App soon.
But yeah, if you have—feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions, or any other kind of ongoing things, okay?
All right, everyone, have a good night! Thanks.