UC Essays 2025-2026
If you are applying to UCLA, UC Berkeley, or any of the other 7 UC campuses, this article will explain how to approach the Personal Insight Questions (PIQs) required by the entire UC system. There are 8 PIQs in total, but you only need to respond to 4. Your answers to those 4 PIQs are then sent to every UC campus you choose to apply to. Yes, that means there is no Common App essay to submit to the UCs, these are not supplemental essays.
In other words, you can apply to up to nine UC schools using a single application, 4 questions, no additional essays required for each individual campus. For students, this is one of the best deals in the college admissions process: nine schools for the effort of one application.
1. Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts over time. (350 words)
To write a strong response to this essay, you don’t need to have held a formal leadership position. Even if you were just a rank-and-file member of an organization, you can still craft a standout answer. Here’s how. Think of moments in your life when you acted on a personal principle to help others. Consider times when you took leadership of yourself, when you weren’t simply following someone else’s instructions but were instead the one taking initiative and making a difference.
Once you’ve identified such a moment, describe it in a vivid, first-person account. Show exactly how you helped resolve a conflict or contributed to a group achieving its goals. The reader should be able to visualize how you interact with others, so they can imagine how you will contribute to the social vibrancy of any UC campus.
In addition to illustrating how you resolved a dispute or supported a group effort, include anecdotes from your personal life that show where your values come from. Help the reader understand the origins of the principles you put into action in this story.
To conclude the essay, describe where you see these values guiding you in the future, either in your career or in the communities you hope to be part of.
2. 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. (350 words)
For this essay, you want to give the reader a front-row seat to how your mind works when you’re tackling something. “Creative” can mean solving textbook problems, Olympiad problems, making art, journaling, writing, cooking, playing or composing music, or even social engineering. In addition to demonstrating how the gears in your mind turn when you’re engaged in something you genuinely enjoy, describe how this creative endeavor has shaped you as a person or enriched your understanding of your main academic interest.
If you can frame the essay with a narrative that shows how expressing your creative side contributed to your growth, one that clearly presents a compelling before-and-after picture, you’ll have a truly distinguishing PIQ response. If you can’t demonstrate a powerful before-and-after, then focus your conclusion on what this creative practice will mean to you moving forward, especially as you become busier and take on more responsibilities.
3. What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time? (350 words)
This is one of the must-do UC essays. How could you pass on the opportunity to write about your greatest talent or skill? Your greatest talent or skill should intersect in some way with what you intend to major in. For example, if you want to major in physics, you don’t need to say that solving physics textbook problems or doing thought experiments is your greatest skill, but whatever your greatest skill is, it should be enriched by your passion for and understanding of physics.
It is vital that you are truthful in this essay. Too many applicants try to choose something quirky as their greatest skill, even though it is not actually their greatest skill. If you are going to write about your greatest skill, it should be something that has allowed you to accomplish something that truly distinguishes you from others. The prompt, after all, does ask you to explicitly explain how you have “demonstrated that talent over time.”
To avoid sounding braggy, a tone that should be absent from your essays but very present in the activities list, focus on showing a strong personal connection to this talent and how developing it has been key to your personal growth. Discussing how this talent grounded you during turbulent times in your life will elevate the essay immensely.
To conclude, show the reader how you intend to use this talent to make a positive, tangible impact on the world.
4. Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced. (350 words)
Don’t write this essay about choosing to take AP or honors classes, or deciding to apply to summer research programs. Back in the day, when pursuing those academic opportunities was rare, they could work as compelling topics. Now, they fail to distinguish you from other applicants. If you choose this prompt, it is vital that you faced immense barriers. These barriers could include anti-science or anti-intellectual parents, a school with inconsistent electricity, a religious environment that discouraged secular studies, extreme poverty that limited your access to the internet, obstacles of that nature.
For most applicants, this prompt is simply not appropriate. One experience that many top students could use, in theory, is the struggle of securing a research opportunity through cold outreach. Cold-emailing professors for research positions is becoming increasingly difficult as more students try it and AI makes it easier to craft tailored emails. Discussing how you eventually found a long-term research opportunity after enduring hundreds, or even a thousand, rejections could make for a strong essay. However, this is still a common experience among top applicants to UCLA and UC Berkeley, even if not all of them write about it explicitly. For that reason, we typically would not recommend dedicating one of the four PIQs to this topic.
Another strong direction is writing about how you created your own opportunities, for example, securing an internship at a company that wasn’t even looking for interns.
To conclude this essay, either provide a full-circle reflection on the barrier you faced or discuss the deeper lesson you learned from overcoming it.
5. Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement?
For most applicants, this is a prompt to avoid. Whatever you do, don’t write about how a class was difficult. Many students applying to the top UCs can earn A’s in their most challenging AP and honors classes in their sleep, this is simply a cold, hard fact. As a result, discussing how academically difficult a class was will make admissions officers think you may struggle with UC-level coursework.
The challenge you write about should not be social in nature. Breakups, drama, or friendship issues are all red flags. Likewise, do not criticize your school in any way. Even if your frustration with a teacher is justified, speaking negatively about them will reflect poorly on you.
The only truly acceptable challenges for this prompt are severe disruptions that genuinely made studying difficult, such as widespread violent protests that shut down your country, civil war, abusive parents or siblings, extreme poverty, or significant illness. If one of these situations applies to you, you must describe it vividly and clearly connect it to how it affected your ability to study, understand course material, complete homework, and take tests. Do not assume the reader will read between the lines; make the connection between your hardship and your academic performance explicit and unmistakable.
It is also essential to show the reader, in first person, the steps you have taken to overcome this hardship and to convey how challenging each of those steps was for you.
To conclude the essay, describe what you learned from overcoming the challenge, how overcoming it changed your understanding of the circumstances that created the challenge in the first place, or how experiencing this hardship has influenced your goals and aspirations.
6. Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom. (350 words)
This is another must-do essay for applicants. There’s no need for an origin story. Instead, open by showing the reader you, fully immersed in the academic subject you want to major in, and having the time of your life. This moment can take place inside or outside the classroom. Give them a front-row seat to your mind as you engage in this activity.
Then explain why doing this activity is so meaningful to you right now. From there, describe how you deepen your interest in this subject. Do not list the classes you’ve taken or the extracurricular programs you’ve joined; admissions officers already have access to that information elsewhere in your application. Instead, illustrate how your personal way of approaching this subject, grounded in your lived experiences, pushes you to pursue certain avenues of growth both inside and outside the classroom.
Show how you go above and beyond what is required. Include moments when you stayed after class to ask questions, put more work into something than was necessary, created your own problems to solve, or explored multiple methods to approach a single challenge. Show the reader how you discuss this subject with others, and how those conversations, or your involvement in communities centered around it, have sharpened your understanding.
Make sure this essay includes the favorite thing you have learned while studying this subject. To conclude, show how this subject will enable you to make a positive, tangible impact on the world, or describe what it means to you on a personal level.
7. What have you done to make your school or your community a better place? (350 words)
If you can write a convincing response to this essay, please do so. Top colleges crave students who can create real, positive change in their local communities. They value this because it shows that a student is committed to improving whichever community they are part of, including their future campus community. Schools like UCLA and UC Berkeley look for applicants who will elevate the social and academic experiences of their peers by actively working to tangibly improve campus life.
That’s why it is essential that you write this essay in the first person, allowing the reader to clearly visualize you as a member of a community, interacting with others, and vividly demonstrating how your actions led to a stark before-and-after transformation. It is also vital to show what this community means to you and why you have such a strong connection to it. Include anecdotes from your lived experiences that illustrate why this community mattered to you, or why the idea of giving back and contributing to any community you belong to is so important in your life.
Another crucial component is showing how you benefitted from being part of this community. Finally, conclude by discussing what it meant to see the lives of others improve, what you learned from helping your community, or how the experience shaped your future goals and aspirations.
8. Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do you believe makes you a strong candidate for admissions to the University of California? (350 words)
If you choose to respond to this prompt for your 4th and final UC essay, consider what elite colleges value. They value intellectual curiosity. They value team players. They value applicants who can elevate the social and academic experience of their peers. They value students who hold well-thought-out, compelling perspectives that enrich classroom discussions. And they care deeply about your character and your social skills.
Once you identify the moments and experiences in your life that align with one or more of these traits, choose the trait you haven’t yet demonstrated in your other essays. Then write a vivid, first-person narrative that demonstrates how your actions and experiences reveal that quality.
If you want your college admissions essays to be the decisive factor that gets you into your dream school, schedule a free consultation with an admissions expert today to have all of your questions answered.
