ClaireL
ClaireL,
UCLA
B.S., Mathematics
UCLA Class of 2020. Orange County native.
Features Included
6
Essays
12
Schools
18
Scores
7
Advice
6
ECs
2
Sports

Background

Hometown Foothill Ranch, CA, California
GenderFemale
EthnicityAsian
AdmissionRegular Decision
Class of2020
First Gen College StudentYes
English First Language Yes
Other Language(s) Spoken Cantonese

Results, Essays, and Advice

Accepted
Waitlisted or Withdrew
Denied
  • University of California - Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA)
  • Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)
  • Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA)
  • University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA)
  • University of California - San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
  • University of California - Davis (Davis, CA)
  • Stanford University (Stanford, CA)
  • Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
  • Columbia University (New York, NY)
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA)
  • University of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
  • University of California - Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
Tap/click a school logo above to view essays and advice specific to that school.

University of California - Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA)

Applied for a B.S. in Mathematics

Accepted and Enrolled Legacy: No

School Specific Essays

School Specific Advice

How to increase chances at my school
316 Words
I'm writing this for UCLA, but this really applies to any school, in my opinion. Particularly for large schools, I think it is crucial to make yourself stand out in some way. In your application, try to demonstrate a passion, something you're really, really interested in. Starting in high school, try to find a particular something you enjoy and keep working on it. I've heard it said before that colleges aren't looking for well-rounded individuals, but rather a well-rounded student body; I very much believe this to be true. Especially for a school as large as UCLA, there will be...
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More Essays

These essays haven't been tagged by school. Click school logos above to see tagged essays.

Personal Statement
649 Words
Overcoming personal struggle
I was eight years old and my parents could take no more. They were out of options. I was going to get some help. Why? I was never a classroom insurgent, or a budding James Dean. It was actually the complete opposite-- I was, in essence, scared of everything. I mean everything in the most literal sense. I stayed awake crying until 3AM nightly because I was afraid of 1) the dark 2) robots in my closet 3) falling asleep and having nightmares,...
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Supplemental Essay Issue of personal significance
387 Words
UC "Describe the world you come from" It was my fault. I had chosen this topic for my math exploration, armed with only the feeblest grasp of the actual concept. Music, math, and the harmonic series… I sighed. In the time-honored tradition of all students, I had turned to Google for succor. The words on the screen blurred together hazily. “Pythagoras discovered that a string exactly 1/nth its length produces a frequency n times the original frequency…” It just didn...
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Supplemental Essay Scholarship application
256 Words
A tragic lack of athleticism brought me to cross country—the only no-cut sport— in freshman year. Upon joining, I dutifully attended all the practices and meets, running more miles per day than I had fingers. I tried my best to improve. Really. I stuck with it for two whole years, but finally, I quit. The reason was simple. As I ran laps around the track, I realized how rote it had become. If I was to be honest with...
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Supplemental Essay Scholarship application
194 Words
Describe an extracurricular activity. "Music Therapist" is a pretty fancy title for a volunteer who gets to wander around a hospital with a viola in tow but hey, I'll take it. Job description: the aforementioned wandering, playing everything from Bruch to the Beatles in the ICU, lobbies, cancer treatment centers, and more. In my time as a volunteer, I have met people with the most fascinating life stories, have played for bedridden patients undergoing chemotherapy, and, once, was offered $500 on...
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Supplemental Essay “Why us” school essay
457 Words
Why Carnegie Mellon? Music and math have been a part of my life since, well, forever. I love music for its sheer beauty and poignancy; I love math for its complexities and challenges. Together, they form an inextinguishable aspect of my character. It is oddly fitting, then, that music showed me the beauty of mathematics. Immersing myself in musical pursuits, I began to notice math’s unmistakable handiwork. It was everywhere. I saw it in the patterns of notes called...
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Supplemental Essay Other
79 Words
My main essay was about a fairly common topic (orchestra) in the college application world, which may have hurt me. I attempted to balance this out by putting my own spin on all of my essays and letting my voice show, and you can see the results of this above. In retrospect, my essays seem a little vague and general; if I had to write them over again (gah), I would try to narrow down to more specific subjects.
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General Admissions Advice

My advice about getting recommenders
286 Words
Choose your recommenders carefully, taking into account the recommender's position, your personal relationship with the recommender, and what you hope the recommender can add to your application. The teacher I had the closest relationship with in high school was my calculus teacher: she wrote me a very kind letter that spoke to my strengths in math, as well as adding personal touches that showed that she truly knew me as a person. I think that really gave my application a boost, especially as a prospective math...
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What I’d change about my application process
221 Words
I would have started much earlier with the essays. So, so many essays- during winter break of my senior year, I ended up having to write 18 essays/short-responses in 12 days. It was miserable. I had begun writing some of them as a class assignment in June of my junior year, and it still wasn't early enough for me, since I spent a good deal of that...
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How I chose schools to apply to
147 Words
I applied to 12 schools total, and tried to do around 6 target schools, 3 reaches, and 3 safeties (although I believe I ended up with a few more reach schools than that). I'd been touring schools since middle school but found it difficult to choose based on...
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What I now know about my school that I never would have known prior to enrolling
132 Words
People always told me UCLA was a big school. I thought my high school was a big school. But UCLA is a BIG school. One of the most overwhelming aspects of the experience thus far is the sheer amount of...
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Recommended summer activities during high school and college
153 Words
I regret that I spent most of my summers in high school not doing anything truly productive or original. I usually go out of the country for a few weeks each summer; in addition to cross country training my first two summers and a lot of...
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List of schools I interviewed with and my interview experience
747 Words
Interviews are really not my strong suit but I had read that you should always do them, even if they're optional, so I ended up having to do a few (MIT, Cornell, UChicago, and Harvard). First was MIT, at a local Starbucks by an alumnus. He started off right away asking, "Why do you want to go to MIT?". From there he started asking about my classes, my extracurriculars, etc. There were a few awkward pauses, but he kept the conversation going with questions on different things. At one point, he asked me if I knew this one math concept,...
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High School Performance

GPA
4.00
(no specification of weighting)
Rank
Top 1%
 
High School TypePublic
Academic Performance in High School Steady

Test Scores

Highest SAT
2400
 
SAT Score Details
 
Converted SAT Score1600
Other SAT Scores
SAT Prep
SAT IIs
PSAT Scores

AP / IB Classes and Scores

Details13 classes and scores

Sports

SportsCross Country, Track & Field

Extracurriculars

ActivitiesLocal Orchestra / Symphony / Band, Key Club, National Honor Society, School Jazz / Orchestra, French Club, Hospital Volunteer
Elaborate on Extracurriculars or Work

Experience & Awards

How Spent Summers
Volunteer Experiences
Awards Received
Application Additional Materials

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"Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier." - Albert Schweitzer