We’ll be honest: UC PIQ 7 isn’t easy to answer.
For starters, most people’s school or community influence isn’t that large. When you’re at the ages of 18-22, it’s difficult to make any meaningful impact without sounding cheesy.
But, the hardest part about UC PIQ 7 is the competition you’ll face against other students. Compared to other PIQ prompts, prompt 7 is especially hard to stand out in due to the big-fish-little-pond effect (hideously abbreviated as: BFLPE).
We cover this phenomenon in more depth in our UC PIQ 7 guide, which if you haven’t read yet, we highly recommend you check it out here. It discusses this anomaly in detail.
That’s why we’ve provided you with a successful UC essay prompt 7 example essay from one of our clients! They worked with us using our UC essay editing services, and they were generous enough to share this with y’all too! And, don’t worry. It’s not written by some non-profit starter who cured cancer and shot rockets to Mars. Our client was a very regular, everyday person. They were also accepted into UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara.
You can find our other examples and guides in our site’s UC essay guide category.
Table of Contents
UC Essay Prompt 7 Example Essay
“Personal Insight Question 7: What have you done to make your school or your community a better place?”
Things to consider: Think of community as a term that can encompass a group, team or a place like your high school, hometown or home. You can define community as you see fit, just make sure you talk about your role in that community. Was there a problem that you wanted to fix in your community?
Why were you inspired to act? What did you learn from your effort? How did your actions benefit others, the wider community or both? Did you work alone or with others to initiate change in your community?
UC Essay Prompt 7 —University of California Official Website
“Refereeing in sports is a position that never wins. There is no room for error, and even when one is right, they are wrong to half the crowd. And there is no level in the career, from little kids to the world cup, where the audience gets any nicer.
Despite this, being an arbiter pays off. It’s a small career niche, so every referee is special and contributes greatly to the sport. They help keep the spirit of the game alive, and provide an opportunity for those who no longer play on the field to still take part in the sport.
I was fourteen when I started refereeing soccer games. Still playing recreationally myself, I began as a linesman for 8-9-year-olds who did not quite know how to play. While my fellow referees and I were not allowed to coach, we offered guidance and explain to kids that, “No, no matter how many times you do it, you are still not allowed to raise your foot on a throw-in,” and “No, please don’t tug on the other player’s shirt!”
Now, five years later, as the Fall 2019 season comes to a close, I have aged out of the youth recreational league. I do not have the time to practice for an adult team, as I focus my energies on school. But between August through November, every year, every Saturday, that playing spirit is awakened on the sidelines, and nothing is more rewarding than to take part in officiating soccer matches on a Saturday morning where the game runs smoothly, the players have a good time (winning or losing), and the parents can watch their kids with pride — even if they dislike the referee’s calls. I find joy in playing a part in contributing to the spirit of the game and that is my special role in the soccer community.”
Anonymous; Accepted to UC Davis + UC Santa Barbara
What Made Our Sample UC PIQ 7 Essay Strong?
There are 5 things that made this essay strong.
All 5 are important. But, the first, lateral contribution, is especially important. If there’s one takeaway you can get from this UC PIQ 7 example, it’s lateral contribution. Lateral contribution means finding ways your topic helps your community outside of conventional metrics. It’s a way of shifting metrics to stand out from highly competitive students.
Showing Lateral Contribution: the Antidote to the BFLPE Effect
If you’re reading this, you probably saw College Essay Guy’s strategy for approaching UC PIQ 7. Specifically, he endorses the Elon Musk strategy. For those who don’t know it’s something like this…
The Elon Musk Exercise
College Essay Guy, UC PIQ 7 Strategy
- Get a blank sheet of paper, turn it horizontally, and create these columns:
- 1: Identify problem
- 2: Why is the problem important? What if it goes unchecked?
- 3: What would your community look like if the problem were solved?
- 4: What did you do?
- 5: Specify your role.
- 6: What was your impact, lessons learned, or values gained?
- Turn paper vertical. These 6 columns are your essay structure.
- Write essay dedicating about one paragraph per column.
We really like College Essay Guy’s strategy.
However, this strategy works well for students who are already highly competitive. Average students with simple topics like refereeing or planting trees would still have no way of competing against the average “tryhard” student.
Again, it’s a matter of BFLPE. While you may have an impressive extracurricular, you’ll still look small if you’re put in another pond with other big fish.
That’s why, if you want to stand out from the cancer curers and rocket builders, your UC PIQ 7 essay must have creative community contributions. Think laterally. How would for example a referee contribute to the community in ways other than keeping score of points?
Take a look at this section for example
“Despite this, being an arbiter pays off. It’s a small career niche, so every referee is special and contributes greatly to the sport. They help keep the spirit of the game alive, and provide an opportunity for those who no longer play on the field to still take part in the sport.“
Normally, refereeing is a basic extracurricular. But, in this case, it becomes impressive because it focuses more on altruism. While other students may focus on how many people they helped or how impressive their titles are, this essay takes an emotionally supportive role. Do this with your own PIQ 7 essay if you’re not a rocket builder or cancer researcher. Think laterally in terms of how you contribute to your community. Chances are, you’ll be surprised what you come up with!
Having a “Melodic” Essay Structure
One of the things you may have noticed about this essay is the spacing of the paragraphs and sentences. The applicant had deliberately varied their sentence structure and varied the lengths of paragraphs.
This is important to ensuring the admissions officers are awake when reading your essays. Think of Terms of Service pages for instance. Ever bothered reading them? Of course not! They’re big scary blocks of text! Separate your paragraphs and very your sentence structure.
In fact, simply just changing the spacing can make drastic changes to the quality of your UC admissions essay.
Spacing serves as a visual cue for readers to consider a transition in context. The main idea of the content changes when you space your paragraphs, so you can have more control over what you say.
If you know how to space your paragraphs in relation to your topic and choice of diction, you can make drastic effects that significantly impress the UC admissions officers.
Doing so perfectly is rather difficult, though. As such, we would suggest having our editors make suggestions of your essay and how to best implement such techniques.
Change Over Time
The applicant in their final paragraph notes how things have changed five years later. The community’s excitement and enjoyment in soccer is highlighted in the ending of the essay. This shows how change over time had made the community a better place.
Keep in mind that you should follow a similar structure in your own essay. Remember that there is a past and a present. The past is when you conducted a project or journey. The present is the result that made your community or school a better place.
This is exactly what admissions officers want to see in an applicant. So long as you show that there is change over time, you can demonstrate to readers that you have what it takes to make change in the world.
They Still Focused on Themselves
This is important in just about every college application essay, but it’s probably especially so for the UC essay prompt 7.
Prompt 7 what you’ve done to “male your school or community a better place”, and there are many ways of answering that. Regardless of your way of helping your school or community, your action should say something about you.
This is something we felt that this essay example was not able to fulfill to its fullest potential.
In our provided UC essay prompt 7 sample essay, the applicant claims that they have refereed for soccer games. The implication of the third and fourth paragraph is that refereeing requires a lot of patience in a high-intensity game, especially with disagreeable parents and hard calls.
Our advice for this essay would be this:
First, make the third and fourth paragraph more concise to fit in some space.
Second, make another paragraph describing the difficulty of refereeing and add strong imagery to the amount of patience it requires to do the job properly. It would help to have described the stress of impolite parents during the job as well.
Ultimately, this would allow the admissions officers to understand just exactly how the work that the applicant did as a referee would reveal their positive character traits.
It is important for your essay to use details or strong imagery to describe just exactly how your experience helping the school or community reveals your positive attributes.
Strong Introduction
Remember: what kind of students are choosing UC PIQ 7?
Only students with strong community service or extracurricular activities will be answering this prompt. They wouldn’t be tackling this prompt if they weren’t otherwise competitive!
Think of it this way. By answering UC essay prompt 7, you’re squaring off against the average Bay Area “try hard” kid. And, these guys mean business. So, if you really want to stand out in the admissions game, you need to stand out in every way you can.
Fortunately, you can use this to your advantage.
Most students who answer UC essay prompt 7 presume their community service or EC experience can stand on their own. This leaves many UC PIQ 7 essays with strong topics but weak in linguistic excitement.
Leverage this dynamic by crafting a strong introduction. Often a strong introduction includes a severe or alarming statement that is left open to interpretation. Our example UC PIQ 7 essay does this well by starting with…
“Refereeing in sports is a position that never wins.“
This is quite a severe statement; and, it leaves admissions officers with more questions than answers: a great way of enticing interest which applies to all UC PIQs!
You can also check out how to write a solid college essay intro here.
Questions concerning the UC essay prompt 7? Unsure if you can write the essay and get accepted into your target or reach schools? We understand that many students struggle with that pressure, and that’s why we can help.
Contact us for a free admissions consultation and review: We will cover your admissions changes and provide you with the next steps needed to ensure your acceptance into your dream school.
