UC additional comments: what to write and what to leave out

FFormer UCLA and UC Berkeley admissions readers agree that two boxes on the UC application, the academic comments space and Additional Comments, can change how a reader interprets the rest of a file. Most students fill them badly or not at all. One sits with the academic history and asks about coursework and grades, while the other takes anything else you want readers to know.

Used well, a few lines can lead a reader to see a hard year in a kinder light. Used badly, they can do the opposite, and a family rarely learns which one happened. The two boxes do different jobs, and the first is the one that sits beside your grades.