Four essays. 350 words each. Due in the fall. And your senior hasn't started.
If the UCs are on the list, your student owes four Personal Insight Questions. They are short, they are specific, and they do not work the way the Common App essay works. Most students find this out the hard way, in November, at eleven at night.
Book a free 20-minute intro call
The UC application is its own animal.
The University of California gives applicants eight prompts and asks them to answer four. Each response is capped at 350 words. That cap is the first thing students underestimate. Three hundred and fifty words is about one page double spaced. There is no room for a warm-up paragraph, no room for a scenic description of the gym at dawn, and no room to explain what the story means after telling it.
The second problem is that UC's readers are not looking for the same performance the Common App essay invites. UC's own guidance frames these as questions to answer directly rather than literary essays. Students who have spent all fall polishing a 650-word personal statement come to the PIQs and write four miniature versions of the same thing.
The third problem is the set. Four responses, chosen from eight prompts, should show four different sides of a person. Students routinely pick four prompts that all get answered with the same activity, the same two weeks, and the same lesson. A reader finishes all four knowing one thing about the applicant.
And all of this lands in the same weeks as everything else, since UC's filing window falls in the fall alongside Early Decision and Early Action deadlines. Check the UC admissions site for this year's exact dates, then look at your student's calendar, and you'll see the squeeze.
I start with which four, not with writing.
The first session is selection and inventory. What has this student actually done, cared about, fixed, quit, or gotten obsessed with? Which four prompts let those things breathe without overlapping? That decision determines most of the outcome, and it takes about an hour to get right.
Then I get the specifics on the page.
Each response needs one concrete anchor: a moment, a decision, a problem with a before and an after. My job is to ask the questions that surface it. Students are bad at knowing which of their own details are interesting, which is normal, because they've been living inside them.
Then real notes, round by round.
Every draft comes back with written notes in the document and a short summary of what to fix first, then a Zoom session to talk it through. The cutting happens here, and with a 350-word cap there is always cutting. Most first drafts run 500 words with 200 words of throat-clearing at the top.
Then a final pass across all four together.
Read as a set the way an admissions reader will read them. Any repetition, any two responses doing the same job, any gap where a whole side of the student is missing.
For more than a decade I interviewed applicants for the University of Pennsylvania as an alumni interviewer, which meant sitting across from hundreds of seventeen-year-olds and noticing which ones I still remembered a week later. I've also been a professional screenwriter and film director for twenty years. I wrote the 2008 feature The Rocker and directed This Is Happening, and I've sold projects to Fox, Warner Bros., Touchstone, ABC, TBS, Legendary, and YouTube Originals. I also wrote the Osbourne biopic Sharon, named to the 2018 Black List, the industry's annual survey of the most-liked unproduced screenplays.
A 350-word cap is a screenwriting problem. Screenwriters spend their careers being told that a scene is three pages and needs to be one, and that the audience understood the point two lines before the character explained it. Those instincts are what turn a bloated PIQ into a sharp one: find the moment the story actually starts, cut to it, show the thing instead of announcing it, and get out before the lesson gets stapled on.
Plenty of people can tell a student their response is "too general." Far fewer can sit with them and find the one specific beat that fixes it.
Questions I get
Twenty minutes will tell you where you stand.
Bring the school list and the deadline. I'll tell you what needs to happen and in what order, at no cost.
Book a free 20-minute intro call