If you’d have told me six months ago that I’d be going to UCBerkeley for the 2024-2025 academic year, I would have laughed in your face. Me? In the most competitive St Andrews Abroad placement, and at the fourth best university in the world? You’re having a laugh. But as of February 13th, that was the reality I now faced myself in. But in order to figure out the question weighing on my mind of “why me?”, we have to backtrack – right to the start of first year.
As my loyal readers (my mum and occasional forced friends) already know, I spent most of first year on another planet. I struggled to fit in and find my footing, and so any energy that could have been devoted to extracurricular activities was zapped out of me. I spent my days at my ex-best friend’s (now ex-) boyfriend’s flat, and my nights flitting between friendship groups and flat parties – oftentimes having triple or quadruple booked myself. I had no time for extracurriculars, and even those I wanted to do I failed at or was rejected by. Additionally, as an Anthropology and French student who could already speak French and could write (just about) literate English, the academia seemed to come easy enough (except PY1101; we do not, ever, talk about that).
Now we’ve set the scene, we can get down to business. Despite abominable grades in first year philosophy and a low but very deserved mark for my music improv class, I somehow managed to slip quietly onto the Dean’s List in first year. This meant that across all of my subjects, I had achieved a mean grade of 16.6 – my highest in SA1001 being 18.8 and my lowest, a rough 13.7 in PY1101.
Thus, when approaching second year, I knew I had the grades down. The schools we apply for take into consideration our first year and first semester second year grades, so I knew I had done what I could, and I could take my foot off the proverbial gas. But what needed a long-overdue resurgence was the CV. No longer could I spend my nights stumbling back from Macintosh attempting to sober up on the 20 minute walk home – I was a new woman (this mindset lasted a week). But what changed was my luck. The curse of failing at all my applications was graciously lifted, and suddenly I found myself with a choral scholarship and a brand-spanking new member of The Accidentals (don’t ask). Unbeknownst to me, the luck seemed never-ending – I got writer positions at HerCampus, The Saint and The Stand, content positions for BPM and Pulse, voted as Class Representative for Social Anthropology and finally, hired as Head of Marketing for student-run start-up Out N About. In summation, I think I joined nineteen societies across the university.
So, academics? Tick. Extracurriculars? Tick. Application? That was trickier. But I had an ace in my pocket. My academic dad, two years prior, had applied and subsequently been offered a place at the University of California for Maths – but had ended up rejecting the offer. This meant I had a man on the inside; I knew someone who had gotten an interview and succeeded in their application which was, to be completely honest, a god-send. He steered me through the application process – where and when to apply, and to what depth of research, which I can now relay to you.
What Finn’s advice led me to was a realisation that research trumps all. The “about me” section isn’t really about me, it’s about what I want to do and why I want to do it. The “extracurricular activities” section was about what I already do, and what I would continue during my expatriation. The key is that you have to evidence every choice you make. Want to study a specific subject? Find the module. Then find the module code. Make sure they’re balanced over the semesters. Like a specific campus? You’ve got to know which bus you’re going to take to class and which building you’re going to live in. The mistake I watched my friends make is that they approached it like a personal statement, which you’d think was the case, but it’s not. I had to show pure, unadulterated confidence, which was only possible through hard evidence of indefatigable research.
When it came to the interview, I was a nervous wreck. Finn couldn’t help me, and so for the first time in the process, I felt completely helpless to the application. But after a ten minute practice interview with my very patient mother, you quickly tap in to the head of the interviewer. What the university wants, and what I had to remind myself during every question thrown at me, is a good ambassador. Most of the questions I had predicted: “Why do you want to go abroad?”; “What are your academic reasons for going abroad?”; “Why is… your top choice?”; “What struggles do you foresee abroad?”; “Why do you think you’ll be a good ambassador?” – all of which I answered with unabashed confidence. I wanted to go abroad because I was an anthro student, and so it kind of came with the territory. I needed a change of pace from social anthropology, and I had done a lot of wider anthropological essay competitions in other anthropology branches. I had only applied to California – because go big or go home, right? Patriation struggles are just common sense – different cultures, different brands, different foods, different laws; same language. I used the “good ambassador question” to brag – regrettably I think my answer was “I think I already am one”, and I accepted the opportunity to list the societies I was in as well as my TikTok page (let’s hope they didn’t actually look me up). The only question I didn’t predict, and one to rehearse, was “What struggles do you foresee on repatriation?”. It was my chance to show off, and boy did I take it. What exactly I had to show off, I’m still trying to figure out.
My hypothesis is that if you’ve got the interview, you most likely have a place somewhere abroad. Enormous amounts of people were culled after the online applications, and almost everyone I know who got an interview got a place somewhere in their list of placements. Consequently, I think they use the interviews to decide where to, not if to place you. By beating out three hundred applicants, I became the first undergraduate anthropology student in fifteen years to be offered a place at UC, and one of a very few humanities students to be placed at UCBerkeley. But unique to UC, the placement was done by a secondary application I had to process through the UC portal, and one which I think I got because of the St Andrews name rather than anything off my own back – and so hopefully, those of you in a similar position in the future might have an easier time.
En fin, this article is not written to tell you how to apply, but instead to offer you hope that you can still get a year abroad placement with an essay grade of 10.5 (again, never take PY1101), and entirely too much money spent on tequila shots at the union bar. Believe me, if I somehow managed to do it, you can too.