I made it so that my non-"why this school" essays were UC prompts which saved a bunch of time. In addition, since besides the "why this school" essay I could kinda manoeuvre one of the other 4 essays into the topics, I only wrote about 10 unique essays total.

regular decision

I manifested my acceptance to Cal. Thank god for holistic admissions. essays matter a lot lot lot and have the power to save you. I wasn’t confident in the rest of my profile at the time so I thought I had to overcompensate by putting everything into my PIQs. And it worked. I will say though that a lot of the mid-tiered UCs are kind of stats based, and even UCLA. I have friends who were rejected from UCs but got into Yale and other T20s. They do be random tho I think the best thing for me was the fact that I went into it all not really expecting anything, but just doing my best, doing what I was passionate about, not putting all my hopes into an unattainable dream school. And at the end, I got exactly what I wanted, my dream school (berk!) I am very happy with my results :) Looking back, I had a lot of bad advice shoved down my throat by family members who went to these top schools—people telling me from my freshman year to join clubs and work my way up to be president. To create clubs so that I can get a board position. To start a nonprofit organization. But none of those things actually mean anything if you yourself don’t care about it. I had no interest in starting meaningless clubs just for my resume. I didn’t want to start a nonprofit that would die after I graduated high school. It all seemed so shallow to me. Playing that game can work for people—I’ve seen it, friends who started 5 different clubs to be president in, getting into T20s—but I just knew that personally I would’ve regretted spending that much time doing something I didn’t truly care about. Plus the feeling of doing all that and not ending up at a school you set your expectations for, would’ve been heartbreaking.

Round 2 지원. Online으로 video 인터뷰 진행하였음. 현재 금융에서 MBA 이후 Tech로 진로변경 희망함. 버클리 Haas는 Tech/VC 허브인 Bay Area에 위치한 몇 안되는 탑스쿨 중 하나. Big Tech들이 몰려있는 샌프란과 매우 근접(대중교통으로 30분)하고 실리콘밸리/팔로알토도 가까워 tech 리크루팅을 하기에 가장 용이. 그외 해당 지역의 좋은 날씨를 포함하여 생활여건이 가장 좋다고 봄.