Interviews: MIT: This was my first interview, and definitely not my best. I think the interviewer started out impressed, but slowly got annoyed with me. I tried to recover in the end, but to little avail. Princeton: This went okay (I think). We talked about my interests in energy technology and sustainability, and he seemed appreciative of my aptitude for the subject(s). Nothing particularly special, though. Claremont McKenna: Definitely one of my better interviews. I was pretty conversational in this, and was able to answer questions fluidly and comedically without it coming off forced or unnatural. UPenn: Another decent interview. I vibed with the interviewer, and we talked about cars, energy technology (again), and my motives for applying to the VIPER program. As a VIPER alum himself, he was able to share some first-person accounts of studying in the program, which helped me in the decisionmaking process when I was ultimately admitted to the school. Berkeley Regents: Pretty good interview overall. The interviewer was an EECS professor, and he mostly let me talk about my interests and how I’d pursue them at Berkeley. He seemed genuinely interested by what I was saying, and I was able to go very in-depth about my interest in electric vehicles, charging infrastructure, and how social awareness contributes to decarbonization and sustainability at a global scale. Essays: Common App: Decent. I spent a lot of time revising it, and I think it's the best essay it could've been given the topic and content I had available to me. UC application: Pretty good. I had an incredibly bad first few drafts of these essays, and then completely overhauled them after realizing how awful they were. I probably wrote around 10 drafts of these essays in total, and I don’t regret it. The final writing was definitely some of the best that I submitted across all of my applications. Supplementals: Varied - some were quite mediocre (like my Penn supplementals) to pretty good (like my Cornell and Caltech supplementals). None of them were bland or poorly-written, it's just that not many of them truly stood out as "good, unique writing."