How to write the UC challenge personal insight question

UUCLA's admissions office has read applications with hardship in view for decades. Around the turn of the century its readers gave a separate rating for life challenges, alongside one for personal achievement, and later the office moved to a single comprehensive score per reader that folds academics, achievement and circumstance together.

The format changed, but the question readers ask about difficulty has stayed remarkably steady, and many students writing about a hard year answer a different question entirely. They give the reader vivid, heartfelt pages that earn less credit than the family expects, and nobody tells them why. In 2003 the staff explained exactly what they were looking for.