University of California - Berkeley Undergraduate College Application Essays

Hiding and peeking from behind my father’s chair, I saw his clients come and go. Most of them did the same routine: queue in a line, read documents, sign, and swipe cards. At the same time, my father would skim through the lines, sign, stamp, seal...

My award winning app, Cappable, built to help people with disabilities find employment had just made a record of sorts. We had faced our 100th rejection.

Cramped into my bedroom, the four members of our team stared at the dashboard. After months...

Reverberating voices. Flying spit. Clinking shot glasses. A gaggle of grandpas in furry trapper hats, perched on potato crates, pontificating about Soviet politics in a farm shed. They agreed, yet still managed to yell. As a routine observer of...

Bylo, jest, bedzie. These words were stitched into my six-year-old mind as Babushka’s deft fingers stitched hems into shirtsleeves, needle pausing in midair to conjugate Polish verbs for me, to translate them into my native Russian and Ukrainian....

History is a bad driver. It rarely ever indicates when it’s about to take a turn. But on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, I saw it shift gears. “Can I get the afternoon off, ma’am?” our housekeeper Kavita asked my mom. Despite my offer of a Netflix...

“How did you fix it akka?” asked Bhavani. I had spent the last three afternoons inside a small room at their school with Bhavani and eleven other underserved students. We had spent hours debugging a section of the code to no avail. Four mugs of...

I was waiting at the dinner table for the right moment and decided to serve it just before dessert, “I need 10,000 rupees to start a venture.” As my parents lost their appetite, their faces flashed curious amusement at a 15-year-old’s odd request....

I search “how to grieve properly” in the naive but hopeful belief Google knows the answer. An article tells me “broken crayons still color.” This strikes me as not only condescending but false. I am in pain and I am healing, but I am not broken....

I’m at Chinese school listening to my Laoshi, or teacher, Qian, berate me about my behavior: I brag about cheating on and failing tests, throw school supplies and generally wreak havoc. “Why do you even bother to show up?!” Feeling guilty, I...

My life in poetry didn't begin with the slam sessions or political activism I know today. Instead, in first grade, I wrote a haiku about my bunny, Brownie. I can’t remember the gory details, but I know it contained the adjective ‘fluffy’ at least...

The final notes of Tchaikovsky’s overture fade. The curtain creeps upward, revealing rows of watching eyes—toddlers in tutus and married couples on date night—all gathered for the same purpose. I begin shaking fake presents and twirling across the...

Monday morning. I wake up to the birds singing and the sun radiating brightly, ready to conquer the day. I get ready, dressed in leggings and a long-sleeve t-shirt despite the 90º weather. I jog out the door, hop in my car, and speed away.

Once I...

The room is spinning. The lights seem to burn straight into my skull. I look around, seeing nothing but eyes watching my every move. I feel as if I’m weightless, floating in the abyss of space. Suddenly, the white tile on the floor gets closer.

...

I jolt up, my head rapidly whipping around. I angrily slam my hand down, snoozing the alarm. I’m all ready to head back to sleep, concluding I accidentally left my school alarm on last night, but then I jolt up yet again.

Debate! Today is the...

Sitting down in the authentic-looking Japanese restaurant, rated 4.5/5 stars on TripAdvisor, I find that my hopes are up. I sip my matcha latte and my mind buffers. After another sip, I ask myself, Do I taste the authentic matcha magic? Or does...

Light, clear and ephemeral. A bubble is easy to pop. An onion on the other hand, has layers of tough, pungent membranes - breaking them brings tears to your eyes.

When asked where I was from, I would unthinkingly say ‘Karachi’. As I grew older, I...

Snowflakes, soft and silver in the dark, drift past the window, casting shadows on the floor. The door creaks open as my mother peeks into the room to check on my brand new baby sister. She finds me crouched besides the tiny swaddled figure,...

I could feel the creative energy growing, pushing restlessly against the silence as they waited for me to finish reading the brief. As soon as I did, it released itself in an outburst; voices grew loud as they struggled to make themselves heard,...

I possess superpowers that I inherited from my namesake, Geraldine, my dad’s late mother. Grandma Jeri was the daughter of Portuguese immigrants who worked on the pineapple plantations of Hawaii and the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard (during the 1941...

Metal. Glass. A camera is made up of a few simple elements, but photographers can use it to stir a large emotional response. I wind the film and look through the lens. I’ve carefully composed my shot. I envision the finished photo in my mind, the...

When I first stumbled across machine learning in 11th grade, I had no idea the challenges that lay before me in seeking to conquer it. To begin developing my understanding, I scoured the internet, read textbooks from my school, and sought help...

The first beats of the tabla played, and my body relaxed. I closed my eyes to absorb the rhythm, then I started to sing. The interweaving of melodies and micro-tunes required deep focus; I needed to block out all distractions. The tensions from my...

Biology. Cellular research. Diagnosing neurological diseases. These are my passions. I was eight years-old when my mother gave me a small but very real microscope. I first used it to examine the cellular structure of my father’s hair. A field...

I attempted my first back handspring during Cheer tryouts my freshman year. My legs clumsily guided me across the mat, the momentum of the trick promptly knocking me off-center and, by extension, onto the ground.

When I received a congratulatory...