The Role Noncognitive Skills Plays in the UC Personal Insight Questions

The UC Personal Insight Questions are not asking you for a narrative resume of what you did in your extracurricular activities. Most of the time, your academic record would have demonstrated, quantitatively, your capacity for academic success. What you want to showcase in the Personal Insight Questions, to distinguish yourself from everyone else who have demonstrated similar capacity for academic success, is how you have developed noncognitive skills associated with academic success through your personal experiences and/or extracurricular activities (by providing anecdotes/examples that describe how those skills were developed and, later, implemented to support your academic endeavors, as well as how you anticipate these skills will ensure your college success).

Find an explanation for noncognitive skills (character) associated with academic success here (relevant podcast segment is from 3:44 to 11:54; description of skills is from 10:11 to 11:11). For your Personal Insight Questions, reflect on how your experiences in school and in your activities have enabled you to develop and enhance noncognitive skills, how you have applied these skills to further your educational and personal goals, and how you foresee utilizing these skills to succeed in college and beyond.

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