University of California (UC) Essay Prompt Guide 2025-26

How to approach the UC Personal Insight Questions (PIQs) for 2025-26

The University of California has its own application process, which is different from the one used by most colleges in the US. So if you’re seeking admission to UC’s ten campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, you’ll need to write four UC essays, or as they’re officially known, “personal insight questions” (PIQs).

As it happens, we come from the UC system ourselves — we received our PhDs from the UC Berkeley History Department — so we’re deeply familiar with the University of California’s distinctive culture. With that in mind, we’ve created a guide for navigating the UC application essays, covering both general strategy and the prompts themselves.

But before we get started, here’s a quick tip: if you’re applying to the UCs, we highly recommend that you write these essays first, before attempting your essays for other schools. Why? Because whereas most American colleges place a lot of weight on a single 650-word essay, the UC supplemental essays are relatively short at 350 words each. The UC prompts therefore give you the chance to reflect on four distinct elements of your personality before you have to write a longer, more daunting essay. If you take the UC PIQs seriously and use them to reflect on your background, you’ll be at a distinct advantage when the time comes for you to pick the topic for your 650-word personal statement

We hope you get started early enough to take advantage of this tip, but if not, it’s okay! We’re sure you’ll still benefit from our guide below. We’ll begin with four key tips on strategy and then move onto the prompts themselves.

Tip One: Pick your UC prompts strategically before you start

The UC PIQs cover a wide range of topics including leadership, community service, academics, and creativity — to name a few. The UCs are interested in multiple aspects of your personality, not just a single factor. We’re aware that college counselors often urge students to create a single, unified narrative to make their candidacy more distinctive, but this can lead students to make a big mistake when answering the PIQs.

For example, we met one applicant interested in environmental engineering who, for the PIQ on academic interests, bragged about his achievements in environmental engineering; for leadership he wrote about how he was head of his school’s environmental engineering group; and for community service he talked about how he had participated in a project related to environmental engineering that benefited his high school. What do you think he wrote about for the “creativity” prompt? Environmental engineering, of course!

We’d urge you not to make the same mistake. If you have a specific focus, by all means highlight it in your PIQs, but do your best to show the other sides to your personality as well (ideally one side per PIQ). Believe it or not, the UC admissions officers reading your file actually want to get to know you, and you risk rubbing them the wrong way if you submit something overly strategic.

We recommend that you start by going through the UC application questions and asking yourself how you would respond to each one. Try your best to come up with something to say for all eight prompts, but if a PIQ clearly doesn’t apply to you (e.g. you’ve never done any community service), it’s fine to say “Pass.” Jot your ideas down, and at the end of the exercise, look over what you’ve written. 

Chances are, you’ll have two or three topics that you should obviously write about. You should then go over the others and spend some time finalizing your list, making sure that each response is interesting and there is no overlap of subject matter among your four responses.

Tip Two: Get straight to the point when writing your UC essays

As we’ve already noted, the PIQs are short: 350 words, as opposed to 650 words. That means you’ll need to get to the point as soon as you start writing.

We’ve noticed that many college counselors and college essay coaches advise students to begin their essays with “vivid descriptions” to draw the reader in. This is almost always bad advice, but nowhere more so than with the PIQs, where it takes up so much space that candidates don’t end up responding to the question. For example, if a PIQ is asking for an example of leadership experience, a candidate might begin like this:

“The wind whispered through the tall grass as I stood alone, the world spinning slowly around me like a carousel of thoughts. My shoes were soaked from the morning dew, and a single leaf drifted lazily to the ground beside me. In that moment, I felt a shift in the universe — something was about to happen.”

What on earth does this have to do with leadership? Nothing. The student who wrote this might have thought they were being creative, but this opening reads like bad high school creative writing, and it just takes up space (51 words, to be exact, which isn’t even that bad — we’ve seen opening paragraphs that take up 200).

Instead of beginning a PIQ like this, ignore the other college essay advice out there and just answer the question. Your response doesn’t have to be fancy, and in fact it probably shouldn’t; it should be direct. The UC admissions officer reading your response will breathe a sigh of relief upon reading your first sentence, and they’ll be rooting for you because your response actually makes sense. And if you follow the next piece of advice, they’ll likely read all the way to the end…

Tip Three: Provide specific detail for your PIQs

This is what ultimately separates a good PIQ response from a bad one. Most candidates PIQs are packed with general statements that sound like they’re what admissions officers are looking for, but actually turn out to be cliches. Here’s an example of a high schooler explaining why playing the oboe makes them creative:

“Ever since I started playing the oboe, I realized I had a creative mind. The oboe is a very unique instrument and not many people play it, which makes me stand out. When I perform, I let the music flow through me and into the audience. It’s not just about the notes — it’s about showing who I am as a person through my sound.”

This is a very poor response because it doesn’t provide any detail about the student’s actual experience; instead, it dwells on generalities that anyone could have written (including ChatGPT). As a result, it is riddled with cliches and makes no impact on the reader.

How do you avoid falling into this trap? Just be honest! Spend some time remembering your experience playing the oboe, and jot down all the details you can remember. You might think these details are boring and of no interest to the reader, but the opposite is true: these details are exactly what the reader needs to hear to be convinced that your narrative is real. The more you stop and reflect on your own experience playing the oboe, the more you’ll see that you have your own specific story to tell — and this is what will make your response stand out.

In other words: your specific experiences are precisely what will help you tell an engaging story. The more time you spend remembering these experiences, the stronger your responses will be.

Tip Four: Use an effective structure for your UC essays

As we’ve already noted, you’re limited to 350 words for each of your UC PIQs. This not only means that you need to get straight to the point when you draft your responses; you also need to come up with an structure that helps you communicate everything you want to say quickly and efficiently.

What do we mean when we use the term structure? Essentially we’re talking about paragraphs. Most failed attempts at PIQs either don’t use paragraphs at all, or use so many that the reader is left confused. But most successful PIQs use a specific number of paragraphs — and we’ve found the magic number to be three or four.

So when you’re plotting out your responses to the PIQs, we recommend that you think about 1) the main points you want to make, and 2) the order in which you want to make these points. If you’ve spent enough time planning your response, you’ll probably be able to summarize your main points, one after the next — and these points will be your paragraphs.

Of course, the points you’ll make depend heavily on the wording of each of the UC essay prompts, so you’ll need to read the prompts carefully before you plan your responses. With that in mind, let’s shift away from strategy now and turn instead to the best way to approach the prompts themselves.

Our advice for each of the UC personal insight questions

Before you start writing, you’ll need to read all eight of the UC application prompts and pick the four that best allow you to showcase your background and experiences. As we’ve said above, we recommend that you go down the list and give serious thought to each one before making your final selection.

The UC website provides some useful tips underneath each prompt, and you should of course read those — but after years of working with students, we also have some observations to make ourselves. So here are our tips for each of the University of California Personal Insight Questions for 2025-2026.

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.

The University of California points out that leadership can be broadly defined, and we agree: you don’t have to be the president of a club to answer this prompt. In fact, being in this kind of leadership position can work against you, because you’ll probably be tempted to list all your achievements — and that isn’t what admissions officers are looking for. Remember that the person reading your file has access to your extracurriculars list (which is quite lengthy for the UCs), and you shouldn’t simply regurgitate that material.

Whatever leadership role you choose, the important thing is to describe what it was like to be in a position of leadership — not only what you did, but also what challenges you encountered and how you felt in the role. Also note the wording of the question: it asks for an example of your leadership experience. That means you should focus on a single episode, not multiple examples (again, the UCs are trying to prevent you from simply listing your experiences). 

So pick an example that allows you to tell the best story you can, being as specific as possible so you make your experience come to life — and then reflect on what you learned. Whatever you do, don’t say that you’re a “natural born leader” and you didn’t encounter any challenges along the way; that not only sounds like boasting, but (even worse) it will make your response boring.

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.

This is the most difficult of the UC essay prompts, but if you get it right, you can really impress the reader. Most students trip up when they respond to it, because they spend all their time trying to convince the reader how creative they are. But the prompt isn’t “Are you creative?”; it’s “How do you express your creative side” — and that requires a completely different approach.

Just as you might be at a disadvantage in the previous PIQ if you have official leadership experience, you might have trouble with this prompt if you’re creative in a commonly accepted way. Remember the oboe example above? That student gave a cliched response because it’s not easy to describe how you express your creativity when you’re doing something as obvious as playing an instrument. Here’s another excerpt from their response:

"When I press the reed to my lips and blow, I’m not just making sound—I’m expressing my soul. The breath I use becomes music, and that music becomes a reflection of who I am. Playing my instrument allows me to turn my emotions into notes and share them with the world. Each time I play, it’s like painting a picture with air."

Hopefully you can see why this doesn’t work: it’s totally cliched and reveals nothing specific about the candidate at all.

Of course it’s possible to write a good response to this prompt if you do something commonly accepted as creative — but it’s easier to write a good response if you express your creativity in a more unusual way. For example, one of our former students has been journaling all her life, and she’s filled dozens of books not only with words but also with pictures, boarding passes, stickers, and random bits of her life. We also have a lot of scientifically minded students who’ve written fascinating explanations of how their work is creative.

Think about how refreshing it would be to read these responses if you were a college admissions officer; you’d probably be thrilled not to be reading yet another PIQ about music, painting, or dance.

3. What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time?

If you have a talent or skill that really stands out, that’s great — you should definitely consider answering this question. But identifying your greatest talent or skill is the easy part, and it will probably only take up a few words of your response. The important part of this PIQ is the second half, i.e. “How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time?”

This prompt, in other words, is asking you to discuss how your talent has changed, and that means you’ll need to tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Remember how we emphasized the importance of a tight structure when writing your PIQs? That will be especially important as you respond to this PIQ, because each paragraph will serve a different purpose.

One possible structure could involve 1) a paragraph on discovering your talent 2) a paragraph on developing your talent through hard work 3) a paragraph on what you have accomplished by continuing to hone your talent. Or maybe your relationship with your talent is a bit more complex and you encountered unexpected challenges later on as you proceeded to a higher level. Whatever the case, you’ll need to provide specific detail as you tell a compelling story about how your relationship with your talent has changed over time.

Someone who simply boasts about how they’re really, really good at something won’t perform well on this PIQ. Why? Because the personal insight questions (UC) aren’t an opportunity to show how great you are — you’ll have plenty of opportunity to do that in the rest of your application (your grades, standardized test scores, and extracurriculars list). To do well on the PIQs — and this one in particular — you’ll need to spend considerable time self-reflecting so you come up with a narrative that explains how your talent or skill has developed over time.

4. Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.

This is the first PIQ that focuses entirely on your education, and if you read it closely, you’ll notice that it gives you a clear choice: you can write either about a significant educational opportunity or about an educational barrier, but not both. So if you’ve completed an internship or an academic program outside school, you should consider writing about an opportunity; and if you’ve struggled in school due to your background or intellectual disability you should consider writing about a barrier.

Once again, however, it’s one thing to identify the issue you’re writing about, and it’s quite another to come up with a structure that conveys a meaningful narrative to the reader. So once you’ve identified what you want to write about, you need to come up with a three- or four-paragraph structure that sets up how you took advantage of an opportunity or how you overcame a barrier.

If you select the first option, you’ll probably need to explain 1) why you were interested in the class or internship in the first place 2) what you did 3) how you took advantage of the opportunity, and 4) how this changed you in the long term. 

If you select the second option, you’ll need to come up with a different kind of story in which you explain 1) your educational barrier 2) how you tried to overcome this barrier 3) the impact of your efforts, and 4) what you learned in the process.

Hopefully you’re beginning to see why we emphasized the importance of coming up with a structure for your PIQs. As we keep saying, you only have 350 words to cover a lot of ground, so working out a structure that encapsulates all your points is essential.

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?

This is a shortened version of the classic “challenge” prompt that you may respond to in your other college applications. But it’s 350 words instead of 650, so you can’t muck about! You’ll need to get straight to the point and communicate your experience clearly and succinctly.

Luckily, the wording of the prompt provides an obvious three-paragraph structure that you can follow. It’s perfectly acceptable to 1) describe the challenge itself 2) explain how you overcame it, and 3) reflect on how it affected your academic achievement. Of course, you can come up with a different structure if you like, but you’ll still need to respond to all three parts of the prompt.

As you come up with your response, however, try not to fall into the trap of saying that you triumphed over adversity. Why? Because it’s a cliche and almost everyone says it. You’ll be guaranteed to get the equivalent of a “B” if you put this in your response.

If you want to stand out in this PIQ, you’ll need to come up with an explanation that reflects your actual experience. So stop and think carefully about your challenge and reflect on how it impacted you emotionally and intellectually. The people who put this kind of hard work into their responses are the ones who succeed.

6. Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom.

This is the least personal of the PIQs, and we’ve noticed that students generally find it easier to respond to. Of all the prompts, it’s the only one that doesn’t require you to do any soul searching; you can succeed simply by conveying your passion for an academic subject. But you still need to tell a story about how you first became interested in the subject and how your interest developed over time, and you probably want to hint at how you will pursue this interest at the UCs.

An important note about the wording of this PIQ: it’s perfectly fine to discuss how you furthered your interest for this subject inside the classroom, outside the classroom, or both — but we always recommend mentioning something outside the classroom if at all possible. This is because work outside the classroom usually conveys genuine passion for the subject. Also, if you’ve done a lot of work outside the classroom, you’ll probably make more of an impression on the reader by not mentioning any classroom-based learning at all (this is especially the case for subjects like computer science and engineering, which are not always formal subjects in high school). As usual, try not to brag; instead communicate your genuine passion for the subject in your response.

Finally, the subject that you pick doesn’t have to be your proposed major, but it should at least relate to your proposed area of study at the UCs. 

7. What have you done to make your school or your community a better place?

This is the most straightforward PIQ of all, and if you’ve engaged in any kind of community service, you’ll probably want to answer it. The wording of the prompt is extremely direct: it simply asks you to outline what you’ve done. And unlike the PIQ on leadership, you don’t need to restrict yourself to a single example; you can break your response into three paragraphs and discuss a different example of service in each one.

Still, you won’t succeed if you simply list your accomplishments, because, as always, the admissions officer reading your file will already have access to your extracurriculars list. As we keep saying, the point of the PIQs isn’t to regurgitate what you’ve already included there, but to engage in deeper self-reflection. So you’ll need to outline your motivations for engaging in community service in the first place, and you’ll of course want to shy away from cliched explanations like this one:

“Every month, I volunteer at my church to help organize food drives and distribute meals to people in need. It feels good to give back and make a difference in my community. Through this service, I’ve learned the importance of kindness, compassion, and helping others whenever I can.”

Instead, you’ll need to reflect on why you were drawn to your particular type of community service and come up with an explanation that applies only to you. Similarly, you’ll need to describe the impact of your actions without simply listing a few benefits to the community.

As always, you do this by thinking before you write and drawing on specific examples to give an authentic account of your experience.

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?

As we’ve said multiple times before, we’re not fans of prompts that allow you to write whatever you want. The previous seven prompts provide direction on what the UCs are looking for; this one doesn’t, so it’s easy for students to mess up. If you’re able to pick four prompts to respond to from the seven above, we suggest you do that. If not — and if you genuinely have something to add that doesn’t connect to any of the other prompts — then respond to this one, but make sure you don’t deviate from the structure of your other PIQs.