An admissions officer from UC Berkeley said he was dumbfounded by the number of times students made the same mistakes on their applications.

Ken Gonsalves, a UC Berkeley admissions officer, gave a presentation on the UC admission process in the Writing ad Reading Center at De Anza College. He gave students tips and advice on what it takes to impress admission officers. His focus was on personal statements.

“A good personal statement is one that answers the prompt and at the same time projects a unique personality, a voice,” Gonsalves said. He encouraged students to be expressive and said that if they used buzz words to describe themselves, like “leader” or “team player,” they must cite examples. If they didn’t , they would be “flying too close to clichè”

“Do not write more than the 1,000 words asked of you. You run the risk of half of it not being read by anybody, ” Gonsalves told students. He said that if filled out correctly, every application will be weighed and measured with the utmost care.

Every year UC admissions committees are trained for three weeks on how to correctly assess an application, he said. Then, they spend weeks on the admission process for freshman applicants before they get to the transfer applicants. “By the end time the freshman applications are all done with, we are as familiar with the red flags as we will ever be, so you need to be very careful about what you write in a transfer application.” He said the committee is expert at detecting falsities and exaggeration on applications, so if one is on the fence about how bold of a personality they are going to be in the statement, they should “try to not to make it pretentious.”

Over 110 students packed into the WRC to see Gonsalves speak, many of them unable to find seats. Julie Pesano, WRC co-director, said she was surprised to see that more students showed up this time than during previous times when an admission officer spoke at De Anza. “It looks like most of them found the workshop very helpful, both on the personal statements side of things and the clarification of other parts in the application,” she said.

Tommy Augustina said he particularly found useful the time Gonsalves’ spent discussing the comment box portion of the UC application. In comment boxes, students have the option of writing 500 words to explain an answer the put on the application.

The boxes are useful, for instance, if a student’s transcript shows a bad quarter or if the student took time off from school for a year and didn’t explain it on the application.

Gonsalves told of one freshman applicant who was almost not admitted to UC Berkeley because she had Cs in her foreign language courses, which dramatically lowered her GPA. Once the admissions committee read the comment box, the reason became clear: the student was hearing impaired and could only understand people by reading their lips. “In her Spanish class, she was reading people’s lips in Spanish! What a feat, what an amazing girl,” said Gonsalves of how the girl was then perceived. That student was admitted into UC Berkeley despite her few bad grades because the comment box showed her dedication to hard work

“Nobody I had ever spoken to knew exactly what the purpose of that comment box is,” Augustina said, “but [Gonsalves] cleared it up in a flash.”