By Rick Yang · UC Berkeley EECS + Math, c/o ’29
November 1, 2026 6 min read
I didn’t know what I was doing.
I still don’t. Most people don’t either.
But I can talk about my experiences and what I would do differently, looking back on past rejections.
When I applied to college, I thought the formula for a STEM application was pretty simple: stack on as much STEM as possible. That meant more coding projects, more math competitions, and more Decathlon. If I was applying for EECS, my entire application should scream EECS, right?
Now I’m an EECS major and math minor at Berkeley, so I guess I did at least some of it right. Looking back, though, I realize that most STEM applications don’t fail because they are weak. They fail because they are identical. Admissions readers go through thousands of files from students who code, compete, and “want to change the world.” After a while, those files blur together.
I still remember comparing portfolios with one of my high school friends. On paper, we had the exact same competitions, projects, and even very similar extracurriculars. Yet I got into completely different schools than he did. What mattered most was how cohesive my portfolio was, or at least how cohesive I made it look. I tied everything that felt scattered and disorganized across my application into one story through the only instrument we students can really control: essays. Tennis taught me patience and how not to fumble under pressure. Handling pressure helped me in band performances, which also taught me leadership as first chair. That leadership changed how I led the Decathlon club as president. And somehow it all came full circle when I learned to be myself while leading, and to mold my tennis strategy to my own game instead of playing a really traditional way.
Two nearly identical activity lists, Applicant A and Applicant B. A line runs through Applicant B’s list, turning it into one story.
Same résumé, different story.
If I were applying as a technical major again, I’d do four things differently. I’d make my application prove more than technical skill. I’d show what real growth looks like. I’d make sure there was one concrete thing a reader would remember. And I’d run the whole thing through what I call the friend test. Here’s what each of those looks like.
Here’s the counterintuitive part: if your application is for STEM, it shouldn’t necessarily scream STEM at all. Colleges already assume you like science or math. That’s the whole reason you’re applying in the first place. What they’re trying to figure out is everything else. Your personality. Can you lead? What happens when you fail? Would you really be a good fit for that specific college?
So instead of asking, “How much technical skill does my application prove?” I would split my application evenly across major-aligned depth, leadership, time commitment, creativity, roadblocks, community, real responsibility, and curiosity.
The trick is that you don’t need a separate activity for each one. Three years on a robotics team can show time commitment, roadblocks if your robot died at regionals, leadership if you held an officer position, and major-aligned depth, all at once.
Diagram: tennis, band and Decathlon in a loop around the words “play my own game,” joined by arrows labeled pressure, leadership and being myself.
Three activities, one thread.
The “spike vs. well-rounded” debate you’ll see all over the internet is also more nuanced than it looks. I mostly agree that selective schools want you to show something you are really, really good at. Just don’t let the spike be the only thing your readers see about you. The opposite is just as bad: ten unrelated clubs you each did for a year sound like box-ticking, not like a person.
The bottom line: diversify what your activities prove, not necessarily what they’re about.
Every admissions reader wants to see how you changed, not that you “worked hard.” They want to see concrete befores and afters. This is what people mean when they tell you to “show, don’t tell” in your essays. Show the concrete actions you took, using specific verbs. What exactly did you feel when you acted? Why did you act in the first place? What did you believe or do at the start that you don’t anymore?
STEM applicants have one of their biggest advantages here, because technical failures make great stories. Each one is specific to you, which makes it believable and makes you memorable. Most importantly, it shows growth and what you do when things collapse under pressure.
Where most people mess up is thinking they need a tragedy. You don’t. There’s a lot of pressure to compete in the hardship Olympics, but picking the biggest obstacle you ever faced, or inflating a small one, usually backfires. A small, true obstacle that is personal to you beats a grand, exaggerated one every time.
Screenshot of four of my GitHub commits, three marked with a red X for failed checks.
My own small, messy GitHub failures. Even something this small can be a specific obstacle that reveals a lot about you, if it’s personal.
Which brings me to the “real” part. Assume someone will check your claims: titles, user counts, hours per week, the club you “founded” that had three members, the research project you were on for two weeks. Colleges do take this seriously. The easy fix is to keep receipts as you go: GitHub repos, competition results, contact info. If it’s real, you never have to worry about it.
This is easily the most important part of your application, and easily the hardest. Picture the person reading it. They’ve read 100 applications in the past few hours, they’re exhausted from hearing the same thing over and over, and over half of those applications start with “I’ve loved building ever since…” or “I want to use technology to innovate and…”
The biggest thing I would change, even in my own application: being specific beats being grand. A reader is more likely to remember a weird, exact detail than a big, generic accomplishment. CS plus something unexpected, like music or a sport, is more memorable than CS plus CS.
A good goal: the reader should be able to pitch you to someone completely random in one sentence. You should be able to fill in this sentence using only your application: “The kid who built ___ for ___.” If you can’t write that sentence yourself from what’s in your application, the admissions officer probably can’t either.
The biggest takeaway here is to let your voice in. An application that reads like an actual person beats one that reads like a list of accomplishments. You’re allowed (even encouraged) to be funny, and to be honest about what you know and don’t know yet.
If you take away one thing from this post, make it this: if someone close to you read your whole application with your name blacked out, they should easily be able to tell it’s you.
There are a few ways to run this:
This is about the whole application, not just your extracurriculars or essays. Your letters of recommendation should point to you. Your activities and additional information should do the same. Each piece should add something the others don’t.
The fastest fix is to swap adjectives for specifics. “Passionate about coding” tells the reader nothing. What did you build? Who was it for? What did you learn? Answering those questions in a few sentences beats any application that just tells the reader you are “extremely passionate.”
The short version: if I were applying as a technical major again, I would stop trying to look like the most STEM-like applicant in the stack and start looking like the most me version of myself. Show them you are a real person with a real personality. Make sure nobody else could have written your application.
Someone who got in reads your essay.
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