UC Personal Insights Revise
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UCPersonalStatement.docxRequired question
Please describe how you have prepared for your intended major, including your readiness to succeed in your upper-division courses once you enroll at the university. Things to consider: How did your interest in your major develop? Do you have any experience related to your major outside the classroom — such as volunteer work, internships and employment, or participation in student organizations and activities? If you haven’t had experience in the field, consider including experience in the classroom. This may include working with faculty or doing research projects.
If you’re applying to multiple campuses with a different major at each campus, think about approaching the topic from a broader perspective, or find a common thread among the majors you’ve chosen.
I chose economics/business as my major because I thought they cover all aspects of people's lives, not only interesting but also practical. By studying the economy and business, I gained insight into many economic phenomena and were able to make well-informed decisions about consumption and investment.
When I started the child daycare business, I encountered many economic and commercial problems, such as how to promote a new daycare, where to place advertisements, and how to control various costs, including advertising costs, labor costs, utilities, teaching aids, and so on. It was also necessary to determine the custody fees for children of different ages according to market conditions. Considering the needs of parents, should daycare provide any other services, such as servicing lunch? If yes, how to price? From the perspective of risk avoidance, what kind of insurance needed to be purchased for the school, and what was the amount of insurance? I needed to carefully consider every detail to ensure that my daycare could last a long time and be profitable.
Later, when we needed to hire part-time teachers due to the daycare business development, more questions were placed in front of me: how much would be the teacher's salary rate, and the teacher's working hours must be controlled within how many hours ensure the maximum benefit of the daycare. The problems that needed to be solved in these operations made me having a keen interest in economic and business knowledge; therefore, I started to take some economic and business courses at the college.
I believe that learning this knowledge guided me on how to effectively manage a daycare. It not only taught me how to ensure the good operation of a daycare but also helped me to create financial awareness. Furthermore, since the economy and business cover business operations, marketing, management, and other content, they cultivated my ability to solve problems, make decisions, and cultivate personal business skills. No matter what my future career aspirations will be, I believe that learning the knowledge of economic/business will play a critical role in any of my future careers.
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. Things to consider: A leadership role can mean more than just a title. It can mean being a mentor to others, acting as the person in charge of a specific task, or taking lead role in organizing an event or project. Think about your accomplishments and what you learned from the experience. What were your responsibilities?
Did you lead a team? How did your experience change your perspective on leading others? Did you help to resolve an important dispute at your school, church in your community or an organization? And your leadership role doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to school activities. For example, do you help out or take care of your family?
I used to cooperate with my friend to run a daycare, which developed from only two of us to four teachers and ten children. Throughout the process of operation, my leadership has been greatly exercised and improved.
Starting a child care business was not easy, which involved a series of steps. My friends and I were not only responsible for applying for licenses, decorating venues, purchasing toys and teaching utensils, making lesson plans, but also promoting and recruiting students.
It was very difficult at the beginning. We had a hard time to gain the trust of parents and to appeal them to enroll into our program. Later, when more and more children were enrolled, two teachers could no longer meet the needs. Therefore, we hired two part-time teachers. Training new teachers and arranging their work became my responsibility. My role had changed from an ordinary teacher to teachers’ leader. In addition to performing my own duties, I also need to arrange their work contents and responsibilities according to the needs of the daycare.
Working as a daycare teacher was very exhausting, and the teacher’s income is also very low compared to the high cost of living in the Bay Area. Because of work pressure and unequal income, teachers can easily give up their jobs. Therefore, I also need to have strong interpersonal and communication skills and to deal with teachers’ negative emotions while working. One of the teachers told me after only two days of work that the job was completely different from her imagination. She thought working in a daycare was like playing with children but did not expect to include so many responsibilities. After an effectively communication and motivation with her, she gave up the idea of resigning.
Although we decided to close the daycare due to my friend’s pregnancy and my decision to transfer to a four-year university, my leadership in managing a childcare gave me successful experience working as a leader and taught me planning, training, problem solving, interpersonal communication, and many other skills, which would be the wealth in my lifetime.
4. Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced. Things to consider: An educational opportunity can be anything that has added value to your educational experience and better prepared you for college. For example, participation in an honors or academic enrichment program, or enrollment in an academy that’s geared toward an occupation or a major, or taking advanced courses that interest you — just to name a few.
If you choose to write about educational barriers you’ve faced, how did you overcome or strived to overcome them? What personal characteristics or skills did you call on to overcome this challenge? How did overcoming this barrier help shape who are you today?
Before I came to the United States, I obtained the college diploma in China through the self-taught higher education examinations. Different from the ordinary higher education model, this model relies on self-study, and by passing all the examinations of specific subjects as required, candidates could obtain the college diploma.
In 2014, I registered several courses at College of San Mateo because of professional needs and started my study journey in the United States. Due to the best higher education in the world, school life at CSM opened a new world for me. For the first time in my life, I realized what truly the high quality higher education was. I decided to continue my studies and transfer to a four-year university to pursue my bachelor's degree.
In the learning process, I encountered a lot of difficulties. The first one was the language. There are often group discussions and personal presentation in class, and every student needed to express their own opinions. I was afraid to make mistakes and dared not speak in public at first. Later, I realized it was impossible to continue this way in the long run, so I tried to talk to native speakers as much as possible, and with continuous practice, I was no longer afraid to do the presentation in front of my professor and classmates.
The second difficulty was balancing the studying and work. Since I had a full-time job I could only go to school after work, and only had time to write homework and review at night and on weekends, which brought me lots of pressure. Therefore, I learned how to manage the limited time efficiently, sorted from high to low priority on the to-do list, and set a strict deadline, which greatly improved my learning efficiency and quality. When I overcame these difficulties one by one and obtained and achieved good academic results, I learned that I should be confident and never doubt myself, instead, setting goals and working hard to achieve them shaped me as a person who never gives up and always tries the best.
6. 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?
Many years ago, when computers became popular, my family began to study how to use computers, but they encountered a big obstacle: they could not enter their native language - Chinese on the computer. The reason was that they did not speak Mandarin; therefore, they could not use the most popular Pinyin input method, which was a typing method based on the pronunciation of Mandarin. In China, there were many middle-aged people like my family mostly spoke local dialects and did not speak Mandarin at all.
The inability to input Chinese characters caused great inconvenience to their usages of computers. I wanted to help them change this situation and help them to learn a typing method and connect to the world like young people. Therefore, I started to learn another method, the five-stroke input method, which was more efficient and did not rely on pronunciation but relied on structures and strokes of Chinese characters. Since most young people at the time chose a simpler Pinyin input method, few people were willing to learn the difficult five-stroke input method, so I was one of the few people who used the five-stroke input method.
Initially, the purpose of learning five-stroke method was to help my family, but later, I realized that popularize this method could help middle-aged people and even older people living in my community to use computers, so I started to set up training classes at my house and provided free tutoring to anyone who had difficulty typing characters, especially middle-aged and the old, to learn five strokes, so that they could finally overcome the barrier of inputting characters and freely use computers.
