As of October 1, the UC application has become available for submissions for seniors But what does that exactly mean?
The UC app starts off with asking for your personal information (such as name, birthday), before moving on to selecting the campuses you wish to apply to and major choice. Note that not all UCs will have the major you wish. For example, UC Irvine does not offer Communications. After that, it asks for your Academic History, which is essentially all the courses and grades you’ve received from all the schools you attended while in high school. Be sure to reference your transcript while filling this section out, which can be accessed by requesting it from your counselor. Then, you insert all your test scores (AP and IB exams) before filling out the scholarship and support programs, where you checkmark a couple boxes and the UC system decides if they should award you any scholarships. Lastly, you fill out the personal insight questions. In this section, you choose four out of the eight short answer questions and write a 350 word essay each.
The College and Career Specialist, Danielle Watson, has some advice for seniors. She does not recommend only applying to the UCs or competitive schools.
“We recommend that students apply to 8-10 four year colleges and apply broadly. We don’t recommend putting all your eggs in one basket and applying only to the UCs, but if you’re going to, you should apply broadly within the UC System. Don’t just apply to UCLA, UC Berkeley, and UCSD because those are the most competitive schools; you should look at Santa Cruz or Riverside. But you should really apply to all the ones you want to go to” says Watson.
The application itself has been open for quite some time.
“The UC application opened on August 1st so it’s been open now for about two months, so if you haven’t already started your UC application, you should start now. They are due on December first”
Watson’s greatest piece of advice is to start immediately and use the resources Granada has available.
“We have created tip sheets that help you guys with all of your applications and we have one specific to the UC application so using that as a resource as well as attending our college application workshops that we hold during ACCESS,” said Watson.
She also emphasizes using the correct schedule (semesters not trimesters) when applying.
“The biggest thing is that all schools by default have to list Granada as a semester school, even though we were on a trimester system freshman and sophomore year,” said Watson.
Good luck to all seniors going through the application process. If you would like to check out the tip sheet, follow this link.
