<p>Is it looked down upon if an applicant recycled their personal talent/accomplishment/experience essay from high school and tweak a few details?</p>
<p>No, your essay, you can do whatever you want, unless somehow you can get a time machine to change some of the history in the past (grade 1-12) Just add some contents from CCC.</p>
<p>If they are still relevant it should only help. But if you say, for example, you were the number 1 swimmer in your area but haven’t swam competitively in a few years I don’t think it would do much good. Try to keep your EC’s to things you have done in CC. This of course is simply what I think, from doing a crazy amount of research on transferring.</p>
<p>After reading your question over again I realize that my previous answer makes absolutely no sense. My bad.</p>
<p>No, UCBHopefuly16 you’re absolutely right. I’m not saying you did hopingtoxfer but if your essays mentions or revolve on something you did in HS, it doesn’t make much sense to reuse them for transfer. Remember, you’re transferring as an incoming junior. The admissions want to read what kind of person you are as a college student. So talk about and list things in your application that is RELEVANT. I’ve talked to counselors from UCs that told me this straight out.</p>
<p>Of course there are exceptions, like a major events that greatly affected you during your HS years. That shouldn’t be avoided just because of the timing. Also if you are still involved with the activities you’ve done in HS then of course you can talk about that as it is still relevant.</p>
<p>Other than those, I see why not tweaking an older essay wouldn’t work out. If anything I’d use it as a base and have it looked at over and over. Believe it or not, it will turn out completely different the more you get it looked at by your English professors, writing center counselors, transfer counselors, students that have successfully transferred to their schools already, etc.</p>
<p>If you think it’s still relevant to you and it’s well written, why not? Most UC’s don’t even read the personal statement…</p>
<p>I thought they were all required now to take a holistic approach to admissions.</p>
<p>^ only cal and ucla.</p>
<p>Oh, wow. Well, how much can I get away with, then? I am going to apply to UCD, UCI, and UCR and have been stressing about my essays. Is it worthwhile to make them "good or “amazing” in the odd chance that they’ll read them? In a rough draft of my transfer prompt essay I’ve basically stated how I got interested in the first paragraph and then the second paragraph listed my “experience”.</p>
<p>Is an essay even relevant if you’re going to TAG? Like, if you wrote “I want to come to this school bc Stanford told me to go punch myself in the face and MIT only gave me $3k in grants”, would that even matter?</p>
<p>Caldud, you write two essays and all the ucs you apply to read the same two. So you should be making them as amazing as possible.</p>
<p>Honestly, I’m not going to put in much effort into an essay that no one will read. I’ve already decided on UCSB and I’m doing TAG.</p>