Berkeley Personal History Statement

For some reason the thread was deleted. Discuss.

I, for one, did not cave in to the "hurr talk about your gender / skin color cliche hardships", I actually wrote a personal statement.

Then you're not getting in, UCB can't set race quotas but they care more about diversity-related issues than having a school full of asians and whites.

I applied last year for the Astrophysics PhD program.
I am white, but I did write about hardships that I experienced growing up in a poor rural area.
I got through to the interview portion and my interviewer said that my application was "impressive", but that in the personal history statement I "may have revealed some information that perhaps I shouldn't have"
I guess because I mentioned that I came from a town full of poor people and drug addicts?
I ended up getting rejected.
Just one data point, but I came out of it wishing that I had just written a traditional personal statement.

What a retarded comparison. They should (and probably do) care more about academic aptitude than filling quotas.

That said, I never said I was white or asian, fucking racist asshole.

could you elaborate more? what exactly did you write?

it sounds like you called all people in your area poor drug addicts, and it might sounds terrible depending on how you said it.

happy for you user, good luck

I told a specific story of my father getting arrested while I was in high school
how the cops were total douchenozzles to the rest of my family
how I tried to escape it by sleeping in the afternoon after school to avoid my family and neighbors
and every night when everyone else was sleeping I would go out into the swamp and look at the sky and stars and connect with nature
how it motivated me to do well in school and advance myself out of the town I grew up in
then when I got to college I found an astronomy club with friendly people and started doing amateur astronomy where I learned how to use a real telescope
and then during my sophomore year I switched majors to physics to pursue my newfound passion, get a 3.96 GPA, and publish a first author paper while in undergrad

I got into 6/8 astronomy grad schools I applied to, including Cornell, Harvard, and Princeton. Did not get into Berkeley or UCSC, the two that I told that story.

Also, it was the UCSC interviewer that said what I put above, Berkeley did not interview me, just straight up rejection.

how weird. it sounds like a good story to me. it's a shame to know physics departments at top unis can be so political. I kinda hope math isn't the same, but that's naive of me.

It's a small sample bias, but at the end of the day if that's really why they rejected me I didn't want to go there anyway.
Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

What does this have to do with science or math? This is Veeky Forums - Science & Math not /uc/ - University & Colleges.

the PhD application is an important step in the life of a mathematics or science student. it includes issues that affect all of us as students, or as professors who have to serve on admissions committees and oversee the process.

There's a different section for your personal statement retard

Mathematics and science students have to eat too, does Veeky Forums stuff belong here?

no, this is the personal statement. the other one is the statement of purpose, retard.

if you can make the connection to issues that affect us specifically as a group, then sure. we have had threads about nutrition in general, nutrition to improve academic and studying performance, etc

this is a process unique to us
eating is not

PhD applications only exist for STEM students? Are you high?

serious ones do :^)

Yes, but

PhD applications for STEM students are unique to STEM students
PhD applications for humanities students are structured very differently, and perhaps could be discussed on Veeky Forums or Veeky Forums

Talking about things like this means that we will understand them better.
Understanding them better means that we will do better.
Learning about a process and understanding it is the foundation of science.

You should smoke some too and I'll see you around up here.

>using Veeky Forums while sober or not masturbating
fucking newfags are doing it wrong

Nah I think you guys are just doing mental gymnastics to justify shitty blog threads on Veeky Forums. OP doesn't even mention that he is STEM or anything specifically to do with the STEM PhD applications (I'm sure liberal arts applications have personal statements too).

I wouldn't mind university threads if they didn't usually take up half the board. Most of them should be moved to /adv/.

it's literally one thread. i'm clearly a science / math student (what the fuck makes you think engineering belongs here, anyway?) but I don't want to be too specific

Where should this go then smartass? /adv/ where it can get slid by a tfw no qt3.14 thread? Kill yourself autist

>OP doesn't even mention that he is STEM or anything specifically to do with the STEM PhD applications
This is the second thread.
First thread's OP said he was applying to the Berkeley Physics PhD program

> Most of them should be moved to /adv/.
The best advice comes from people who are in or have been in similar situations.
Asking the gp normies in /adv/ and hoping someone with relevant experience happens to see it probably won't end well

>it's literally one thread.
>i'm clearly a science / math student
Are you? Nothing you have written suggests as much.

>We should allow off-topic threads because it suits me
Fuck off.

not but,
>it's literally one thread
pretty sure by this he meant one thread about applying to universities, not one thread about universities in general.

Science happens at universities.
The current system mandates that science only get done concurrently with university bureaucracy.
To get rid of university threads is to reject a major part of the lives of the actual scientists on this board, not just people that are here to be entertained by kewl factz and ifls-tier bullshit
If this board is supposed to be a resource for people that do (or want to do) science, then there will and should be discussions about those aspects of a scientist's life and work.

It's hard to have an in depth conversation with strangers on the internet about specific details of scientific research and study.
We instead discuss things in a more abstract sense, and cling to our common, shared experiences.
Our common, shared experiences tend to revolve around the details of university life.

I wrote my personal statement for my university about writing personal statements and how bullshit most of them are and how that irritates me. I don't think the rest of my application was incredibly impressive or anything but I got in. My plan was just to write an interesting personal statement because I figure they read the same sob story bullshit over and over again constantly.