Graduate / 'to be sympathetic to common people' - Personal History Statement UC Berkeley [10]

No problem. Can you somehow emphasize that after getting a degree (perhaps in the final paragraph) you will be able help not-so-good-people to succeed? Berkeley (as a public school) apparently has some kind of an affirmative action program: they work towards increasing the number of people from under-represented groups. They also want you describe how you can potentially help those people.

Graduate / 'to be sympathetic to common people' - Personal History Statement UC Berkeley [10]

I have one suggestion: make your essay more positive. Americans in general don't like negative statements. If you failed to enter such and such university, just don't say this! Say, that entering such and such university was hard, but you did it (actually I think that Zhejiang university wasn't easy to get it in!!! for people less clever than you). You should clearly outline the challenges that you had and how you overcame them. Talking about positive statements again. Don't say that you did not do well at math in high school! This is negative. It is better to say that studying at such and such university helped you to greatly improve your math skills.

You said that you missed that competition: forget about it and don't write. Just describe the insights and good feelings and all the nice things that accompanied that team work! Same true for the SOP. You should avoid any negative things there.

Graduate / 'to be sympathetic to common people' - Personal History Statement UC Berkeley [10]

I just looked through your SOP and the only word that came to my mind was "strong". Really impressed by your abundance of achievements and strong motivation for academics!

Thank you very much for the kind words. The only problem is that I am not quite young.

In fact, it turns out that I have to write a personal history statement as well :-((( I am not sure that I can prove that getting a degree on my side can help underrepresented groups. Sorry, but this might be a problem with you essay as well. And now I started to realize how hard it would be.

Graduate / 'to be sympathetic to common people' - Personal History Statement UC Berkeley [10]

Boren,

I see, thank you for explaining this. Yes, it is not something that is usually required.

Graduate / 'to be sympathetic to common people' - Personal History Statement UC Berkeley [10]

Sorry, I did not understand: is it a separate document other than an SOP? I thought one would have an SOP (where you don't describe BIO and focus only on your undergrad experiences, i.e., not high school projects unless it was serious research) and a CV, where you give a rather detailed description of your education, research/work experience. I may be wrong, though.