Kristina Arutyunyan, a senior at Hoover High School, recently found out that she has been accepted into UCLA. According to UCLA statistics, the acceptance rate for this school is only 8.6%.

Arutyunyan applied to 10 schools: UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, CSU Los Angeles, CSU Long Beach, Loyola Marymount University, Pepperdine, USC, and CSUN. She got waitlisted for three of them, UC San Diego, UC Irvine and USC, but she got accepted into the other seven.

“I’m committing to UCLA because it’s always been a dream school and has an amazing pre-med program that allows undergraduates to work with medical students. I’m most excited about being in a completely new environment,” Arutyunyan said when asked about why she picked UCLA. “I think that being in ECA and having so many community service hours helped my application stand out, but it was based more on my personal insight questions.”

The one piece of advice that Arutyunyan gave in her interview was, “Write about and do things that interest you. It’s gotten so easy to list every club you’re a part of, but you can only put so much on your applications. You want to do a lot to stand out but also do things that are unique to you so universities see what you have to offer.” 

It took Arutyunyan almost four months to complete her application along with her college essay. 

“Anyone who is close to me knows I love formulas. With one of my essays, I talked about the races and how they have helped me over time. In another essay, I wrote about how my thoughts about the future pushed me to want to make a difference,” she said.

Lastly, Arutyunyan talked about the day she found out she got in.

 “I remember that day perfectly,” she recalled. “I was sitting down doing stats homework and my friend texted me to check what UC schools I got into. I checked UCSD and UCI first and started crying because I got waitlisted and I was worried I wouldn’t get in anywhere else. At 5, I went to check UCLA and I was accepted. I was pretty much hysterically crying because of how shocked I was since I didn’t even see it as a possibility anymore.”