S o I am finally get­ting around to fin­ish­ing up the last of the four col­leges that I vis­ited over break. This one is none other than UCLA.

After mak­ing a dra­matic escape from LMU with­out hav­ing to pay for park­ing, our next and final des­ti­na­tion for the day was UCLA. For me, UCLA is a school that is near and dear to my heart. My mother attended the school, my aunts and uncles attended the school, my cousin attended the school, and heck Thomas’ sis­ter was cur­rently attend­ing the school.  I guess one could say that it was the school that “ran in the fam­ily”. After Thomas whipped out his GPS and nav­i­gated us to the land of West­wood, we decided to grab some lunch.

West­wood is essen­tially a small town located right next to UCLA whose econ­omy is solely reliant on the stu­dents and vis­i­tors who go to UCLA. As such, the town houses a com­bi­na­tion of pop­u­lar, well known, cor­po­rate busi­nesses, and small, fam­ily run, niche busi­nesses.  The dynamic between the two is seam­less as the big busi­nesses and the small busi­nesses har­mo­nize per­fectly within West­wood, pro­vid­ing a great over­all expe­ri­ence for con­sumers and vis­i­tors.  Given the abun­dance of great restau­rants, both small, and large, we decided to eat some­where in West­wood. Now when I say West­wood is small, I do mean small. Think of at least fifty dif­fer­ent full on busi­nesses housed in at most four blocks of area, prob­a­bly no larger than a cou­ple of miles. Or for a bet­ter visu­al­iza­tion think of try­ing to fit an 18 wheeler into a com­pact park­ing spot, that’s how cramped and small West­wood is for what it is try­ing to con­tain. As manda­tory for every col­lege on the face of this earth, UCLA had hor­ri­ble park­ing accom­mo­da­tions, forc­ing us to park in West­wood.  Of course West­wood wasn’t much bet­ter, which in turn caused me to cir­cle end­lessly around the cramped Pasadena foothills for park­ing. Now please real­ize that I was starv­ing at this point in time, forc­ing me to enter my PMS mode and go bat­shit insane. To the relief of every­one in a twenty five mile radius of me, I even­tu­ally found a park­ing spot and we made our way to lunch.

We decided to eat at Cal­i­for­nia Pizza Kitchen because I had a gift card, and it seemed like it would pro­vide a sat­is­fy­ing meal. I would have pre­ferred to try the one of the smaller restau­rants at West­wood, but I think my party saw the hunger in my eyes and they real­ized that I needed some food as soon as pos­si­ble and CPK just hap­pened to be the clos­est restau­rant to our park­ing spot.  After devour­ing my bar­beque chicken pizza, and some of Rebeca’s cheese pizza, my hor­monal bal­ance was restored and all was well with the world. We departed CPK and made our way to UCLA.

UCLA is the small­est cam­pus within the UC sys­tem, how­ever in com­par­i­son to the cramped­ness of West­wood and see­ing as how the cam­pus eas­ily encom­passed a large por­tion of city space, it felt quite big. As we made our way to where we thought the vis­i­tor cen­ter was, we walked pass a gaunt­let of med­ical cen­ters, research build­ings, and other major struc­tures, which were all affil­i­ated with UCLA. This was all quite impres­sive see­ing as how these build­ings weren’t even class­rooms, or labs for that mat­ter, but just sophis­ti­cated estab­lish­ments con­nected with the school for the sake of being awe­some. After mak­ing our way to the vis­i­tor cen­ter, we slyly inte­grated our­selves into a tour group. As far as tour groups were con­cerned, UCLA had by far the largest amount of peo­ple, eas­ily num­ber­ing well into two hun­dred or three hun­dred peo­ple. Unlike Santa Bar­bara, UCLA was well pre­pared, pro­vid­ing a sub­stan­tial amount of tour guides to accom­mo­date such a huge crowd. Within a few min­utes we were divvied up, and off we went.

UCLA had the longest tour of the four col­leges we vis­ited, last­ing for two hours, but it was also the best tour of the four col­leges. Our tour guide, Steven Chu, was well spo­ken, had a great pres­ence to him, was knowl­edge­able, and had a well bal­anced per­son­al­ity. I would eas­ily say that he was the best of our tour guides, due to his sim­ple bal­ance in com­par­i­son to our three other tour guides who were either too ener­getic, too stu­pid, or too con­ser­v­a­tive to make our tours one hun­dred per­cent enjoy­able.   What I thought was par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing, was the fact that UCLA had the small­est cam­pus, but the longest tour, and on top of that, our tour guide was lit­er­ally walk­ing back­wards speak­ing to us the whole time, whereas other col­leges had their guides turn their backs to us as they lead us to from point A to point B. As one could imag­ine, this meant that the tour was com­pre­hen­sive, but for the most part it had all the points that our other col­lege tours pre­sented. A major por­tion of the tour was spent explain­ing the admis­sion process, and hous­ing accom­mo­da­tions in detail. This was some­thing that no other tour went out of their way to do, but since we went on so many col­lege tours we were already experts on the points addressed as far as hous­ing and admis­sions were con­cerned. Aside from that though, it was a nice touch and I think more col­leges should try to do that. Prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing point within the whole tour was the fact that UCLA’s med­ical facil­i­ties where so good, that if Pres­i­dent Obama where to have a med­ical issue at a col­lege cam­pus even remotely close to UCLA. He would be rushed to UCLA’s med­ical cen­ter as soon as pos­si­ble, as opposed to the one at the near­est col­lege cam­pus, sim­ply because UCLA’s med­ical cen­ter was one of the best in the world. As far as the food was con­cerned, West­wood pro­vided a great abun­dance of options, and it was eas­ily within walk­ing range. On top of that UCLA’s din­ing halls where buf­fet style, all you can eat, and some of the best in the coun­try, los­ing only to Uni­ver­si­ties that had top culi­nary arts pro­grams. The biggest plus, is that the cost of food is  fac­tored into the hous­ing cost, mean­ing that I won’t ever have to worry about pay­ing six dol­lars for another veg­e­tar­ian sand­wich again.

The cam­pus itself was beau­ti­ful but it this was a dif­fer­ent kind of beauty. It wasn’t the impres­sive futur­is­tic archi­tec­ture of UCSD, nor was it the pris­tine seren­ity of LMU, it was a beauty of tra­di­tion. What I mean, is that the build­ings, and scenery weren’t par­tic­u­larly astound­ing (although they could still hold their own as far as impress­ing peo­ple) but their was a cer­tain feel­ing of tra­di­tion, accom­plish­ment, and legacy that sim­ply made the school feel like it was more than it actu­ally was.  This cer­tainly isn’t a bad thing in the least bit, but if I had to describe the feel of UCLA’s cam­pus all I could I say was that it was rich in tra­di­tion, and this is com­ing from some­body who isn’t even a UCLA lore buff. After our tour con­cluded we had to rush home to get Rebeca to swim prac­tice on time, and beat the five O’Clock down­town traf­fic. We failed on both counts, but that’s how our day ended.

All in all, UCLA felt like the per­fect school. It had the raw aca­d­e­mic power, rich tra­di­tion, and sur­pris­ingly close knit feel to make it just a great all around school. I felt very com­fort­able in UCLA’s sur­round­ing area, and if I didn’t have a car, I would love fre­quent­ing West­wood. UCLA was the only school that we vis­ited which had an estab­lished ath­letic pro­gram, so that was a big plus for me.  On top of all that, UCLA’s film school is cited as one of the best, and due to it’s prox­im­ity to Hol­ly­wood, the tran­si­tion from grad­u­at­ing UCLA’s film school and going to Hol­ly­wood would be logis­ti­cally seam­less.  Of course, all of this comes at a great price of an eight thou­sand dol­lar tuition. UCLA is good, very good, but it’s actu­ally too good. What I mean of course is that UCLA is one of the most applied to Uni­ver­si­ties in the coun­try, mak­ing it a very dif­fi­cult school to get into. The aver­age Fresh­men GPA is a 4.3 with most other accepted Fresh­men not being too far below that. On top of all this, UCLA’s film school is so com­pet­i­tive that only thirty spots are avail­able each quar­ter. Mean­ing that if I planned to major in film, I’d have to be the next Steven Spiel­berg to even stand a chance of get­ting a spot. I can’t really say that I’m sur­prised by the amount of appli­ca­tions that the school receives, because the school is just so darn good, but they will be what prob­a­bly pre­vents me from going there.

Likes:

- Great Academics

- Close to home

- Rich Tradition

- Nice Campus

- West­wood

- Real ath­letic teams

- Great food

- Excel­lent feel

- A strong sense of community

- World leader in quite a few areas

Dis­likes:

- Park­ing sucks

- Very com­pet­i­tive to get in

Over­all: 95/100

Will apply, prob­a­bly won’t get in, but if I do I’ll be there in a heartbeat.

On our final day of col­lege excur­sions we had two stops to make. The first was Loy­ola Mary­mount Uni­ver­sity, and the sec­ond was UCLA.

We met at the ren­dezvous point  this time bear­ing a party of four. Thomas, Kevin McDon­ald, Rebeca, and Me. An inter­est­ing fact that I noticed was that we lost one per­son each day of our col­lege excur­sions. The first day we started with a party of six, the sec­ond day a party of five, and the final day a party of four. The drive up to LMU, wasn’t too spe­cial but that’s mainly because I’ve been up Los Ange­les tons of times and so the area was familiar. 

As cus­tom­ary for arriv­ing at a col­lege, we were imme­di­ately con­fused as to where to park. LMU had one mul­ti­story park­ing lot (which was full), and an abun­dance of smaller park­ing lots by var­i­ous build­ings and hous­ing areas. With all this in mind, we had no idea which park­ing lot to go to. To add to our con­fu­sion, we real­ized that we were with­out a per­mit of any form, which meant that we ran the risk for get­ting towed, fined, or oth­er­wise rep­ri­manded. Being the bal­lzy dri­ver that I am, I decided to park at the park­ing lot near the rear entrance of the cam­pus. Not only was this park­ing lot quite full, which less­ened our chances of being caught, but we could also make for a quick get­away using the rear entrance if we had to.

We didn’t sched­ule a tour, and we arrived a few min­utes late, this meant that we wouldn’t be able to catch the tour groups as they were leav­ing the vis­i­tor cen­ter. Unal­tered by this chal­lenge, we art­fully snuck into a tour group a few min­utes into their tour, feel­ing quite proud of our ninja skills in the process. Our tour guide was a nice, blonde haired girl, whose name we did not know. As far as I am con­cerned she was the hottest tour guide we had yet, and I was quite pleased.  Con­tent wise, the tour was pretty stan­dard with LMU offer­ing most points that the other col­leges we vis­ited had. Aside from that though, our tour guide eas­ily out­classed the one we had at UCSB, and she seemed to be an ideal rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the school as she had a strong sense of indi­vid­u­al­ism but also rec­og­nized her community.

Eas­ily the most notice­able facet of LMU is the fact that the cam­pus is pris­tine. I kid you not, every build­ing on that cam­pus is beau­ti­ful, and clean look­ing. Heck, the grass was so vibrantly green that we didn’t want to step on it due to the pos­si­bil­ity that we might ruin the purity of the grass’ color. Of course, it was a beau­ti­ful sunny day with a nice breeze, which just made the expe­ri­ence all the bet­ter. Prob­a­bly the coolest build­ing in the whole cam­pus was a build­ing called “Uni­ver­sity Hall” which was essen­tially a mall like inte­rior, with class­rooms instead of stores. How­ever, the build­ing was car­peted, and had win­dows for a roof, let­ting the vibrant sun rays from that day spec­tac­u­larly illu­mi­nate the inte­rior. The best way I could describe it was a breath­tak­ing, met­ro­pol­i­tan feel, which I have never expe­ri­enced before. Another very nice build­ing was LMU’s chapel. The chapel had beau­ti­ful stained glassed win­dows, large wooden pews, and a sim­plis­tic, yet lux­u­ri­ous altar. The chapel por­trayed a very serene and peace­ful feel to it, and is cer­tainly a place that I would enjoy going to Church at.

Aca­d­e­mic wise, LMU has offer­ings that are right up my alley. One of the school’s most suc­cess­ful and pop­u­lar majors is Film and Tele­vi­sion, which is what I want to major in at the moment. Of course, given the school’s prox­im­ity to the media capi­tol of the world, L.A., this is very advan­ta­geous in terms of get­ting work and intern­ships. Another pos­i­tive is that the school offers music lessons with­out any require­ment to major or minor in music. This will allow me to con­tinue study­ing and learn­ing the piano, or per­haps move on to a dif­fer­ent instru­ment if I so choose to. The one draw back of LMU’s aca­d­e­mic offer­ings is the fact that the school doesn’t seem to offer too much as far as research, and engi­neer­ing pro­grams are con­cerned. This was a deal breaker for Kevin and Thomas, who both want to major in engi­neer­ing.  LMU sim­ply couldn’t com­pete with the research might of the UC schools that we visited.

As far as food was con­cerned, we walked through the cafe­te­ria and it looked tasty, but was incred­i­bly expen­sive. Another draw­back is that Sodex-ho is LMU’s food provider, and sim­ply put it, they suck. The major­ity of the hous­ing on the cam­pus looked very nice, with one draw back being that some of the older dorms didn’t have air con­di­tion­ing. This of course shocked the par­ents on the tour, but I don’t fore­see this being  too big of a deal for me. Ath­letic wise, I do not believe they have a men’s swim team nor do they appear to have a dom­i­nant ath­letic pro­gram, which is a bit of a neg­a­tive. How­ever, the school does have a vari­ety of intra­mural and club sports, as well as a state of the art gym, which I am sure I would use extensively.

All in all, I felt very com­fort­able at LMU. The school’s edu­ca­tional philoso­phies are pretty much the same as the Catholic edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions that I have attended in the past. The archi­tec­ture, and scenery where beau­ti­ful while the aca­d­e­mic offer­ings where right up my alley. With this in mind though, there are a few draw­backs to LMU. The first draw­back is that the school costs a ton. Forty thou­sand dol­lars a year is the ask­ing price to attend, which is five times the tuition of UC schools. As much as I love the feel of the cam­pus, the Catholic edu­ca­tion it offers, and gen­eral aca­d­e­mic oppor­tu­nity in the  Film and Tele­vi­sion major, I am not sure if it is all worth forty thou­sand dol­lars. Another draw­back was that the school felt like it was Mater Dei on crack. I can eas­ily see LMU just being Mater Dei with dorms, which may not be so bad, but I almost feel as if I want to break away from the high school atmos­phere. Most of the stu­dents are rich, and come from Catholic high schools, and while this does present the chance for an abun­dance of beau­ti­ful females. The douchebag sense of enti­tle­ment that these kinds of peo­ple often pos­sess is some­thing that I don’t want to do deal with all over again.

Likes:

–Beau­ti­ful Campus

- Enjoyed the experience

- Com­fort­able in sur­round­ing area

- Got away with­out hav­ing to pay parking

- Film and Tele­vi­sion major seems reputable

- Small class size

- The cam­pus is easy to navigate

- A new library is under construction

- Music classes are offered

- Hot females

- Catholic Education

- Beau­ti­ful Chapel

- High chance of admis­sion given my academics.

Dis­likes:

- Costs a ton

- Lacks the research might of UC Schools

- Has too much of a high school feel to it

- Will have to deal with more annoy­ing rich people

- Costs a ton

- Lacks ath­letic dominance

- Costs a ton

- Had to attend a lame pre­sen­ta­tion after the tour

–Costs a ton

Over­all:

90/100

Will apply, must seri­ously con­sider attending.

Today was the sec­ond day of our col­lege excur­sions, our des­ti­na­tion… Santa Barbara.

We met once again at the ren­dezvous point, eight O’Clock my house. We had five mem­bers in the party Mike, Thomas, Kim, her boyfriend Kevin, and me.  As far as the jour­ney to the col­lege was con­cerned, it wasn’t any­thing too excit­ing. The drive to Santa Bar­bara was about two and a half hours long and through a rather bland por­tion of high­way. Since we only had five peo­ple we opted to take Thomas’ car and given Thomas’ crazy dri­ving style,  it felt like we were in some high speed pur­suit the whole time. The ride was also a tad bit awk­ward since Kim and her boyfriend where kissing/ flirt­ing the whole time on the way up. I had to sit next to them in the back­seat, and Mike is Kim’s ex, so that was all rather awk­ward. Aside from that though, the jour­ney to Santa Bar­bara wasn’t too exciting.

We arrived at Santa Barbara’s cam­pus and were quite con­fused.  Unlike UCSD, which is one big ass vol­ume of cam­pus, UCSB is rather con­densed. How­ever, this  den­sity meant that UCSB slacked off as far as giv­ing ade­quate direc­tions for cars, and thus we found our­selves con­fus­edly dri­ving through­out the cam­pus. After ten min­utes of dri­ving, we found our way to the vis­i­tor park­ing lot, paid another park­ing fee (this time it was only five bucks) and slipped into a tour group as it was leav­ing the vis­i­tor center.

Our tour guide was a mildly attrac­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tions major, whose name we did not catch.  For a com­mu­ni­ca­tions major she was inex­cus­ably bad at com­mu­ni­cat­ing. Her speech was stud­ded with the word “umm” every other sen­tence, her pos­ture was bad, she didn’t wear a tour guide or other offi­cial look­ing  polo, and her over­all energy was par­tic­u­larly weak in com­par­i­son to Dex­ter at UCSD. On top of all this, as the tour groups were being assem­bled there was obvi­ous con­fu­sion amongst the tour guides, and the peo­ple who were vis­it­ing. This was inex­cus­able see­ing as how the UCSB tour group was smaller then that of the one at UCSD, and UCSD had no prob­lem man­ag­ing the group that came to visit them.

The tour itself was bland. We heard a lot of points that were pretty much the same thing as what UCSD said, although this is prob­a­bly due to the fact that both schools are UC Schools. The good thing was that it didn’t feel nearly as tir­ing as the one at UCSD, but I couldn’t help but get the feel­ing that the tour we were given failed to show­case quite a few of UCSB’s poten­tial points of inter­est.  Of the few inter­est­ing things showed to us  was the  “Cre­ative Col­lege” which was essen­tially a grad­u­ate col­lege for under­grad­u­ate stu­dents. The “Cre­ative Col­lege” offered majors in Biol­ogy, Bio­engi­neer­ing, Music Com­po­si­tion, Lit­er­a­ture, Cre­ative Writ­ing, and a few oth­ers.  This was appeal­ing since it felt as if it was the per­fect place to begin my jour­ney as a col­le­giate writer, plus it would offer me an  under­grad­u­ate edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence equiv­a­lent to none.  Another inter­est­ing prospect for engi­neer­ing stu­dents is the fact that UCSB has a pro­gram that allows engi­neer­ing stu­dents to get a master’s degree in five years, which is some­thing that pretty much can’t be beat. Aside from these two fea­tures, the school was run in the mill.

After our tour we ate in the stu­dent cen­ter, which was equipped with a Jamba Juice, Panda Express, Domi­noes Pizza, Mex­i­can Restau­rant, Wendy’s, a book­store, post office, kinkos and a few other things. Within the stu­dent cen­ter, a forum was going on for the school’s pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, which was quite inter­est­ing and notice­ably deeper then the stu­dent coun­cil elec­tions of high school. A large group of stu­dents were also watch­ing a soc­cer game, on a few plasma T.V.‘s  in a beau­ti­ful look­ing lounge area. I opted to try out the Mex­i­can Restau­rant as it was the only non-chain restau­rant in the stu­dent cen­ter. I ordered an enchi­lada combo with rice and beans, which came to a grand total of five dol­lars. See­ing as how it wasn’t the crappy veg­e­tar­ian sand­wich at UCSD, and it cost less also, I was quite pleased with the pur­chase. I also noticed that the din­ning halls looked amaz­ing as we passed by them for the tour, so I am going to pre­emp­tively give UCSB a high rat­ing as far as food qual­ity is concerned.

Upon fin­ish­ing lunch we went to explore the cam­pus. In gen­eral, UCSB was notice­ably aged in com­par­i­son to UCSD. The archi­tec­ture wasn’t as new, nor was it as inter­est­ing, the pave­ment was also mostly cracked, and worn. There were a ton of bikes on cam­pus,  and I believe the tour guide said that there was around 17,000 reg­is­tered bikes, out of the 20,000 stu­dents attend­ing. Need­less to say there were quite a few bikes in front of each build­ing. There were a ton of bike paths, which I actu­ally thought was pretty cool since I plan to ride a bike regard­less of which col­lege I attend, and it is obvi­ous that UCSB  more than accom­mo­dates bik­ing.  Sur­round­ing UCSB is a small town called Isle Vista (or some­thing to that extent) which had an abun­dance of small shops, and large apart­ment com­plexes, which essen­tially lived off the stu­dents of UCSB. I thought Isle Vista was a nice accent to the cam­pus, and I def­i­nitely felt that I would enjoy vis­it­ing the area if I went to UCSB. After explor­ing Isle Vista, and walk­ing around some more of the cam­pus we left.

To be hon­est, I truly had some really high expec­ta­tions for UC Santa Bar­bara. I went to Santa Bar­bara for a swim meet two years ago,  and absolutely fell in love with the beauty of the city. Two of my biggest heroes Jason Lezak, and Kazu Kibuishi attended UCSB and in addi­tion to that, Thomas is incred­i­bly inter­ested in the school due to the engi­neer­ing pro­gram. Con­sid­er­ing all of these fac­tors, I was really hop­ing that UCSB would be the school that knocked me off of my feet and made my col­lege deci­sion clear cut for me. Instead, I found a school that looked com­par­a­tively old, seemed dis­or­ga­nized, and gave off a less then expected  vibe.  As I took my first steps on cam­pus, I was under­whelmed, and  felt dis­ap­pointed because there was so much that I wanted for this school to be, but I sim­ply did not get the feel­ing that it could deliver. With that being said, I did warm up to the place as I spent more time on cam­pus, and I will admit that it does have an abun­dance of pos­i­tives to it. Though it is pretty appar­ent that in com­par­i­son to UCSD, the over­all expe­ri­ence was far less then I expected it to be.

Likes:

–Beau­ti­ful Area

–Small town feel sur­round­ing campus

–Bike ready

- High aca­d­e­mic pres­tige espe­cially in lib­eral arts and my prospec­tive majors

- Cre­ative College

- Jason Lezak and Kazu Kibuishi went there

- Thomas might go there

- Film School

- Swim Team

- High Qual­ity Food

- Easy to navigate

- Close to beaches

- Cool stu­dent center

Dis­likes:

- Not as mod­ern as I would like it to be

- An obvi­ous sense of disorganization

- Stu­dents did not give off as “ener­getic” of a vibe as UCSD did

- Library isn’t as cool as UCSD’s

- Over­all feel of the cam­pus doesn’t appeal to me as much as UCSD

- Pos­si­bil­ity of not being able to get into the Cre­ative College

- Only one year of guran­teed housing

- Hous­ing doesn’t look as modern

- Dis­ap­pointed me

Over­all I’d rate UCSB at a

75/100

I might apply there, and I might go there, but the school cer­tainly doesn’t appeal to me as much as UCSD.

The biggest asset of my Spring Break this year, is the fact that Thomas and I have decided to embark on a series of mini road­trips to visit all of the col­leges that we are inter­ested in. On the list of col­leges that we are plan­ning to visit are UC San Diego, UCLA, UC Santa Bar­bara, Loy­ola Mary­mount, and Cal Tech. I plan to write a post about each of these schools as we vis­ited them. Today was the firs of our planned trips, our destination…San Diego.
The ren­dezvous point was my house at eight A.M. in the morn­ing. At a few min­utes past eight Thomas arrived with Kim and her boyfriend Kevin. The four of us talked casu­ally as we waited for Kevin McDon­ald to arrive (he was run­ning late since he had to drop his sis­ter off at school), and upon Kevin’s arrival we left. Now we had to make a stop to pick up a final mem­ber of our party, Lau­ren, who lived south of my house in the Mis­sion Viejo/Lake For­est area.  This was a slight prob­lem as we had six peo­ple in our party, but both Thomas’ and my car could only seat five.  So we decided to split our party up into a four-two for­ma­tion. Four peo­ple, Lau­ren, Thomas, Kim, and Kevin went in Thomas’ car. While Kevin McDon­ald and I tra­versed in my car.

After pick­ing up Lau­ren, we began our lengthy jour­ney down the five south towards San Diego. Since I did not have a GPS nav­i­ga­tion device like Thomas did, I allowed him to be the lead car.  Unfor­tu­nately, Thomas is per­haps the most erratic, aggres­sive, and over­all dan­ger­ous dri­ver on the face of the earth, and thus fol­low­ing him was very much like keep­ing in touch with a cer­tain date I had after home­com­ing (if you know what I mean). What I mean is it was damn near impos­si­ble and after a few min­utes on the free­way, Thomas had a siz­able lead over me.  Fear­ing that I might lose Thomas, and thus not know how to get to the Uni­ver­sity, I had to turn to my racer instincts from Swim­ming, in tan­dem with my exten­sive Gran Tur­ismo expe­ri­ence, as well as my newly devel­oped park­our­ing senses in order to close the gap.  After shat­ter­ing the speed limit, weav­ing in and out of lanes like a girl I’m try­ing to date,  and push­ing my car dev­il­ishly close to its’  max­i­mum speed limit of One Hun­dred and Eight Miles Per Hours,  safely merg­ing lanes and cau­tiously pass­ing nearby traf­fic, I closed the gap between Thomas and I.  A few moments after clos­ing the gap, Thomas decided it would be cute to try to shake me, and thus he took an unex­pected exit from the five south onto Pacific Coast High­way.  Know­ing that Pacific Coast High­way was always a crappy alter­na­tive in com­par­i­son to the five south, and see­ing how I would have killed myself try­ing to mimic Thomas’ volatile dri­ving style, I opted not to fol­low suit. A few moments later Thomas called ask­ing for me to pull over so that he could be my lead car again, but I refused to fall for such a ploy, and thus Kevin McDon­ald and I were dri­ving blind, and fly­ing solo.   The drive was rel­a­tively calm after that, the traf­fic was lib­eral as far as con­ges­tion was con­cerned, and the scenery was beau­ti­ful and inter­est­ing to look at. 

After con­tact­ing my mother to affirm the proper exit for UC San Diego, Kevin and I  exited the  five south and quickly found our way to the school’s mas­sive cam­pus. Now there’s a good thing and a bad thing when it comes to a school with a mas­sive cam­pus. The good thing was that UCSD was easy to find, the bad thing was that the size of the school made it con­fus­ing as hell to nav­i­gate through. After fol­low­ing  some direc­tional signs to the visitor’s park­ing lot  for a few miles,  we finally arrived at what felt like an almost unal­lo­ca­ble loca­tion due to the shear vol­ume of the cam­pus.  Kevin paid for the seven dol­lar visitor’s park­ing lot fee, a fee that I was not amused by, might I add. We parked, and within a few min­utes met up with Thomas and the rest of the party.

There was prob­a­bly around two hun­dred peo­ple vis­it­ing the school that day, at least for the elven O’Clock tour that we were going on. Thus, there was a siz­able line for the shut­tle from the park­ing lot to the visitor’s cen­ter. After about fif­teen min­utes of wait­ing for a shut­tle,  we made it to the visitor’s  cen­ter and were quickly instructed to pick up a few brochures and take a seat  within the center’s audi­to­rium. See­ing as how we had spent a good hour and a half dri­ving, we opted to pick up the brochures, but not take a seat within the audi­to­rium since we didn’t feel like sit­ting. The audi­to­rium quickly filled up to capac­ity, the stu­dent tour guides seemed a lit­tle uneasy about the size of the group, but they were enjoy­able, friendly, and a few of them were hot.  We viewed a pretty cheesy pro­mo­tional video, the tour guides intro­duced them­selves, we were split up into groups, and our tour began.

Our tour guide was a hilar­i­ously accented, poten­tially gay, Asian guy by the name of Dex­ter. Dex­ter was flam­boy­ant and ener­getic, but unfor­tu­nately he didn’t seem to have com­plete mas­tery of the Eng­lish lan­guage, and he wasn’t one of the hot tour guides that I was gun­ning for. Regard­less, Dex­ter was a lik­able fel­low and as good of a tour guide as any­one could ask for. Plus he kept me laugh­ing because of his accent.

The tour itself was long. The cam­pus is about 1,000 acres in vol­ume with key fea­tures under­stand­ably dis­tanced from one another. The shear vol­ume of the cam­pus, paired with Dexter’s spiel , and  audi­ence ques­tions at each stop made the tour last for a solid hour and a half. With that being said,  I thought the tour was quite enjoy­able, but it did feel a bit tedious towards the end. Con­tent wise, a bunch of sta­tis­tics and names, a few mod­er­ately inter­est­ing “stu­dent” icons, and a whole lot of  build­ings where pre­sented to us.  Gen­er­ally speak­ing it was noth­ing out of the ordi­nary from the tra­di­tional col­lege tour.

Per­haps the one thing that is unique about UCSD is that it has a pecu­liar  “Col­lege Sys­tem”. Now this sys­tem has a sep­a­rate mean­ing from the tra­di­tional “United Col­lege Sys­tem” that defines Uni­ver­si­ties. At UCSD, stu­dents apply to one of six col­leges. Each of these col­leges a has a unique phi­los­o­phy which dic­tates the gen­eral edu­ca­tion  require­ments, and hous­ing area for the stu­dents when they attend UCSD. For instance one col­lege has an empha­sis on social ser­vice, another on well round­ed­ness, another on world affairs and so on.  Once again, each of these col­leges have edu­ca­tional require­ments tai­lored to their par­tic­u­lar philoso­phies. These col­leges, only effect where the stu­dents live, and their gen­eral  edu­ca­tion require­ments, mean­ing that they have no impact on where the stu­dent takes classes or what they major in. The best com­par­i­son that I can think of is the house sys­tem from Harry Pot­ter. Each house has a par­tic­u­lar trait to it, but all of the stu­dents within the four dif­fer­ent houses all equally attend and uti­lize Hogwarts.

After the tour we decided to try the school’s din­ing facil­i­ties, an essen­tial test for any school to pass in order for me to attend. Now UCSD had a ton of fast food places, but see­ing as how we could get fast food pretty much any­where, at any time, we tried a din­ing hall called “Sierra Sum­mit”. The Sierra Sum­mit was very much akin to Pizza Port on crack, in the sense that it had a sim­i­lar struc­ture to Pizza Port, but had a larger selec­tion, and even larger prices when it came to food.  The place offered sushi, yogurt, boba, pizza, burg­ers, cold cut sandwhiches/subs, and stir fry. It all looked quite good but I was greatly intim­i­dated by the prices, and thus opted for a slice of pizza, a really big prepack­aged sand­which, and  an iced tea.  My grand total was  $14 and that included pay­ing for Kevin McDonald’s pizza, and iced tea as well. The food tasted pretty good, and was def­i­nitely on par with restau­rant qual­ity.  The only draw back was that I acci­den­tally pur­chased a veg­e­tar­ian sand­wich, which was very plain and unsat­is­fy­ing.  Dis­re­gard­ing the price and bad selec­tion in the sand­which, the food at UCSD is def­i­nitely top notch.

We departed from Sierra Sum­mit, and headed for the library. UCSD’s library is prob­a­bly the coolest look­ing library in the world. It looks very much like a citadel, and upon view­ing it in per­son for the first time, I almost thought it was CGI it was so sur­real. Obvi­ously I won’t go into describ­ing the build­ing, as you can clearly see I have a pic­ture of it. But one inter­est­ing fact that I would like to point out is that the build­ing has mir­rored win­dows in the day, in which the out­side can’t view the inside, but the inside can view the out­side. At night though, the win­dows reverse, so the inside is mir­rored, while peo­ple on the out­side can clearly look inside. That’s  just pure badassery right there. The library is named after Dr. Seuss’ real last name, Giesel due to the fact that Dr. Seuss lived near UCSD, and donated an abun­dance of his work before and after his death. As such, the school is the mecca for all things Seuss related includ­ing orig­i­nal art­work,  man­u­scripts, and the largest Dr. Seuss col­lec­tion in the world. Plus there’s a statue of the man, with the cat in the hat, just out­side the library.

The library itself has a ridicu­lous amount of books, rang­ing upwards of two mil­lion vol­umes. It is stud­ded with com­put­ers, and also has a ton of study desks at every pos­si­bly loca­tion. As you progress upward, each floor gets pro­gres­sively qui­eter and more seri­ous with the top floor hav­ing absolutely no sound, or talk­ing. Upon going up to the top floor, we even saw peo­ple wear­ing noise can­cel­ing ear­muffs akin to the kind worn by flight deck crews, that’s how intense peo­ple took their silence. I per­son­ally thought the library was very cool, as I looked through­out the book aisles, I couldn’t help but feel the urge to read just about every book I passed by.

We left the library and decided to explore some more of the cam­pus. We made our way to the Engi­neer­ing por­tion of the cam­pus.  As well as the newly built, tech­nol­ogy ori­ented, “Col­lege Six”, which is newest of the six col­leges described pre­vi­ously. These two areas felt like an archi­tec­tural play­ground. Each build­ing looked beau­ti­ful, futur­is­tic, and inher­ently effi­cient in design. The only way I could describe it would be tomor­row land’s  archi­tec­ture accept big­ger, bet­ter, and use­ful. To sum­ma­rize, the  archi­tec­ture was awe inspir­ing. After check­ing out those areas, we walked for a few miles back to the park­ing lot and left for home.

Over­all, I truly enjoyed the expe­ri­ence.  The stu­dents  pre­sented a nice vibe, they seemed con­tent, and gen­er­ally happy with their school. The cam­pus was beau­ti­ful, the food could more than sup­port me, and the archi­tec­ture was just amaz­ing. I also liked the idea of the six col­lege sys­tem that the school pre­sented. I feel that it is a nice way of giv­ing stu­dents a gen­eral path and iden­tity in col­lege, while still giv­ing them more than enough edu­ca­tional inde­pen­dence. Plus the col­lege sys­tem is a great way of build­ing com­mu­nity, some­thing that most col­leges sourly lack.  I felt quite com­fort­able on the cam­pus, whereas at UCI I felt repulsed, and at Cal State Long Beach I felt under­whelmed. So this is def­i­nitely a step in the right direc­tion as far as my tastes are con­cerned. To sum­ma­rize it all up here’s a list of things that I liked and I didn’t like.

Likes:

–Archi­tec­ture

–Food

–Beauty of Campus

–Six Col­leges

–Vibe

–Library

- Appar­ent Edu­ca­tional Success

- Rel­a­tively low cost of attendence

- Nice sur­round­ing area

- Close to home, and sim­i­lar cli­mate to home

- Just far enough away from home

- Abun­dance of Stu­dent Resources

- Com­fort on Campus

Dis­likes:

–Big (but I’m not com­plain­ing too much since I like to get my exercise)

- Not sure about Film School

- Poten­tially Costly Food

- Lack of strong Athletics

- Lack of known pres­tige as far as Film, Eng­lish, and other lib­eral arts are concerned.

Total rat­ing: 88/100

Would go there, prob­a­bly will apply.