<p>Hello there. I’m a community college student coming up on my third year, completing all the requirements for the UC system. I’d really like to go to UC Santa Cruz, at it was where I was born and used to live for the early years of my life.</p>
<p>Please give me some feedback on what I have so far. I think I have addressed the main points in the transfer prompt fairly well, but I know that I should be rewriting a lot.</p>
<p>Here is the transfer student prompt:</p>
<p>What is your intended major? Discuss how your interest in the subject developed and describe any experience you have had in the field such as volunteer work, internships and employment, participation in student organizations and activities and what you have gained from your involvement. </p>
<p>+++|Here is what I have so far|+++</p>
<p>I have always liked to write. One of my earliest memories is sitting at the kitchen table, writing a mock newspaper article from the perspective of the fisherman who first sees the metal colossus in the movie The Iron Giant, and is written off as insane. I was about five or six then. This love of writing was mostly a result of my parents, who read to me at every opportunity they could. My bedtime stories included Hound of the Baskervilles, Where the Red Fern Grows, and of course, Harry Potter. </p>
<p>Growing up I did not know a whole lot about the world around me. We didnt have cable TV, which was probably just as much a blessing as it was a curse. I spent most of my time in the backyard, playing in the dirt. Around the time I moved from Felton to Glendora, California I began to read more of the newspaper than just the funnies section. I took advantage of the subscriptions my grandfather had, Newsweek, Time, Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. I still didnt know much about world events, or what the people on the TV were arguing about, but at some point I began following the news cycle on a daily basis, mostly through online aggregators like Google News. It was like a big puzzle, and piece by piece, it became clearer to me.</p>
<p>I enjoy history because its the intersection of a lot of different topics that I find fascinating. Knowing history well is about practically applying economics, politics, geography, sociology and psychology. It is a field as much about the future as it is about the past, and as much about the slant of a given historians perspective as it is about the people that lived it.</p>
<p>I did not like the environment I found myself in when I reached high school. The people around me were just not motivated at all, and the more I hung around the high school crowd the more I found that I too was becoming unmotivated and tuning out important opportunities to participate in a social scene based around recreational drug use and partying. </p>
<p>I registered for the California High School Proficiency Examination and tested out at the soonest available opportunity, which was sophomore year. I started attending Citrus Community College in the fall of the same year. I enjoyed almost all of my classes, especially History, Politics, and Honors Macroeconomics, much more so than I had in high school. It was brought home to me that education didnt have to be monotonous, or a slog, I simply had to focus on what I was good at and subjects that I enjoyed.</p>
<p>During the spring semester of 2012 I signed up to be a part of the Citrus College Clarion news team, as a freelance writer. I hadnt the slightest idea what I was getting into, but the size of the bite I had just bitten off soon became apparent. I enjoyed talking current events around the news table, and I enjoyed navigating the incredibly diverse backgrounds of the people I worked with, but when it came time to get down to business I realized exactly how much toil being a freelancer involved. </p>
<p>Each article required a bare minimum of three sources, including at least one faculty and at least one student. For someone who marks time management as one of their weak points, the rolling deadlines hit me especially hard. Each issue had a total printing time of two weeks, and the stories were due for rewrites several days before that. I did not produce any content until the third or fourth issue, out of a total of eight for the semester. Despite this slow start I found my feet, and began volunteering for stories other people did not want, such as articles on tax policy and budgeting that required many hours of research before I felt confident enough to request interviews with administrators like Carol Horton, VP of Finance. There were also other, less rigorous assignments that convinced me I was making a difference, however small. I remember vividly sprinting through the rain to frantically jot down notes on how the accelerating extinction rate influenced an art student to create beautiful oil renderings of animals.</p>
<p>By the end of the year I had exceeded my inches requirement and was the one of two freelancers who actually saw the semester through to its conclusion. I had produced hard news of a caliber I didnt even know I had in me on a timeline that I never would have thought possible until my lovably cantankerous editor pushed me to aspire to a new standard.</p>
<p>My experiences with journalism and with college in general taught me that if I wanted something, nobody was going to light a fire under my rear except me. I would have to go and get it myself. Furthermore, I found that often I would have to be persistent if I wanted to scratch the surface of a project, instead of just writing something off when it got too hard or ambitious. When I no longer had the luxury of quitting or giving up, I exceeded my own expectations, which was exciting.</p>
<p>In my spare time I have published dozens of written works with a variety of different websites, from paid news and opinion content, to short fiction pieces, to uncompensated articles for a computer gaming website. </p>
<p>I am eager to continue my study of History at UC Santa Cruz, and I hope that eventually I can find a position that allows me to do what I love while making a scholarly contribution and a positive difference in the world.</p>
<p>+++++++</p>
<p>There is also a second, shorter prompt that I have to complete:</p>
<p>Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?</p>
<p>I have some ideas for this, but haven’t written anything yet. If you want to give me advice, or examples, that would be much appreciated.</p>
<p>Thanks in advance.</p>