How I Got Accepted to UC Berkeley
Hi everyone! First off, I am very excited to be writing my first Medium article! I want to share the things I have done to get accepted to UC Berkeley, with those of you who are considering to apply to Cal. Please keep in mind that this was my experience with the whole application process, and I believe that everyone’s experience might be different.
As many of you might know, Berkeley is one of the top universities in the US and in the world. However, I didn’t know about Cal until after I got accepted. I moved to the US from Turkey in the beginning of my senior year of high school, and I decided to repeat my junior year here in the US, this way I can have some time to prepare and study for the SAT/ACT and increase my GPA! I had no intention of going to university in the US until September of my senior year. (I will share with you guys how I moved to the US literally within a week of deciding to go to college in the US in another post!)
When I was in Turkey, I went to a private high school in Ankara called Ted Ankara College which is located in the capital, and I was an average student mainly because I didn’t study! (I had no idea that I will need to submit my grades when I was applying to schools in the US!) I always had great scores in math and sciences, especially biology but that was pretty much it! English and French are the two classes where I had the most difficulty! So, when I moved to the US, I decided to try both ACT and SAT, and I ended up going with ACT because I was always better in science and math, and ACT’s math and science sections really helped me out with my overall scores! I believe my overall ACT score was 29 or 30, my best section being math which I got 33!
When you look at the Berkeley’s admission stats, ACT score of 30 is the lowest score for the 50th percentile, and my GPA when I was in Turkey was around B+/B average I would say. When I moved to the US, I knew that I had to study very seriously to get into the top universities, however, I also realized that my chances were slim considering my GPA and test scores.
Luckily, my hard work paid off and I believe my GPA in my junior year in my LA high school was around 3.7/3.8 unweighted. During my junior year, I took AP Calculus I, and during my senior year, I took AP Calculus II, AP English Literature, AP Biology (I took it through an online course since it was not offered in my high school).
As I mentioned before, until I got accepted to Berkeley, I had no intention of going to Cal since I haven’t heard much about it. When I was checking the boxes of which UCs to apply on the application portal, right before submitting my applications, I decided to check the UC Berkeley box as well. As a side story, right before moving to Los Angeles for high school, I went to see a college counselor agency in Ankara who placed students to top universities in the world, and they basically told me that I don’t stand a chance of getting accepted to any of the top 40 or so universities in the US. And funny enough, I was the only one who got accepted to UC Berkeley from my high school, even though I was not one of the students who had the highest GPA and test scores. However, I still believed that deep down I was going to get accepted to a top ranked school if I worked hard on my essays and extracurriculars. I still believe that my extracurricular activities and essays helped me a lot with my acceptance!
I will be writing a more detailed post about my application essays, but if I needed to summarize: I basically mentioned the hardship and challenges I faced in my life and how I overcame them! One of the hardships that I faced in my life was essentially moving to Los Angeles all by myself at the age of 16 just to be able to get a better education in the US. This meant that I was away from my family majority of the time, and I was homesick especially in the beginning! For the second essay, I believe I wrote about why I wanted to major in biology. I think it is essential to show the admissions committee that you have a strong interest in the subject that you want to major in even you are in high school! For me, it was biology!
I knew that my chances were slim to get accepted to a highly ranked school, so to make my application more competitive, I decided that I wanted to do a summer research in a neuroscience or genetics lab (top 2 topics of biology that I was mostly interested in). So, the November of my junior year, I LITERALLY cold emailed 30 or so professors who do research in neuroscience or genetics and have their own labs at Stanford, USC, and UCLA. I found their email addresses from the schools department websites, and I emailed them mentioning who I was, and I stated my interest in working as a research assistant in their labs over the summer.
Out of all those emails I sent, only one of them got back to me, who is still a professor at Stanford University, writing that his team is looking for a research assistant who can help them with the behavioral training they will be doing on chickens over the summer! I flew to Stanford within a week of him inviting me to the interview while trying to play it cool! Couple days later, I got an email from him saying that I got the position! So, to connect it back to my Cal application, I believed that my summer research was what truly differentiated me from other candidates, and also my essays!
I am not sure how it works now but when I was applying to UCs, they didn’t accept recommendation letters, but I still decided to mail a recommendation letter to the admissions office that I got from the professor that I worked under at Stanford over the summer. To this date, I am not sure if they read the letter but all I know is the letter he wrote for me was just AMAZING! So, my advice for those of you who are thinking of going to college, is to do a summer internship or research in a subject that you are interested in, and get to know your recommender extremely well! I believe that recommendation letters you get will make a big difference in your applications!
In addition to the summer research experience, I have taught English classes in a library during the winter breaks in my hometown, Eskisehir, Turkey. I also organized fundraising events for cleft-lip children. I was also in the seasonal varsity basketball team in my high school in LA.
So, I think the essays and my summer research experience made the biggest difference in my application, and main main advice to you is not to give up and still apply no matter what your grades or test scores are. Don’t listen to what other admission counselors or your teachers say! I did listen to them, and until I heard back from the schools, I was very anxious. You should try to improve your application as much as you can, and just apply! :) UC Berkeley has a holistic admissions process, and they look at every single piece in your application, not only to your GPA and test scores! Just be yourself and try to show the unique side of you, then you will be fine! :)
Please comment below or email me (senercansu@berkeley.edu) if you have any questions, and I will make sure to answer them! Also, if you enjoyed reading this article please don’t forget to clap! Thank you for reading! :)
