peachy on the beach

Introduction
I picked to come to come to come to UCSD because it’s very strong academically and also because of location. It was only 2 hours away from my home so it wasn’t that far, but it wasn’t close enough that I’d have to live at home. It’s a nice location, I like the fact that it’s by the beach, it’s really nice, but it’s not exactly like as easily accessible as I thought it would be. TJ’s nice too but that’s also not very easily accessible, like it takes a lot of effort and money to get there. I’m not really impressed with the amount of things you can do around here. I’m more of a city person and this place doesn’t really offer that. I’ve been into downtown San Diego and it just seemed to be a lot of restaurants and like basically the only place I could go to was the mall, like to other friend’s dorms or apartments, like just to hang out.

Campus Life and Social Life
I know there’s that stigma of how there’s a really bad social life here. If you just find the right people, you’ll be fine, you’ll have a good time. I met most of my friends through the dorms. Like I became like close with one of my suitemates and we just try to find other people on the floor who had a lot in common. Like I was very lucky to live on the floor with lively outgoing people.
I haven’t really met that many people through classes like I thought I would be, but no. I’m a pharmacological chemistry major and yeah it’s really tough. I was basically like a straight A student in high school, and now it’s really competitive here. I’ve been getting like straight C’s and it’s just really tough. And so you really have to put a lot of effort, it’s a lot different from high school. I like to take a lot of naps during the day, so I’m usually up till 3 in the morning studying.
Most of the classes have curves, especially I think like math ones. Writing classes, they’re really hard with grading and I think the grading is really what like hurts me here, cause I know in high school I was used to having like lots of tests and here you have 2 and a final and that’s you’re grade so you better like study then or else you’re going to fail. I like the quarter system because you always have like a wide variety of classes and it’s not monotonous. At Warren, it’s really like flexible with your GE’s, but right now Warren writing is killing me, it’s really hard and it’s like if you get a C, you’re a really good writer. So I don’t know what I would have to do to get an A, it’s really that hard. Advertisement
Academics
Chemistry classes they probably have like 200 students or something like that. They’re always big lecture halls, people sitting on the steps. The professors are really cool about you asking them questions and stuff. It’s not really a problem for me. I’ve had several TA’s with really heavy accents and they’re just really bad at explaining things like I had a math TA who had to draw 5 pictures for every problem and it’s like dude this isn’t art class. I do my studying in my room, but sometimes I get easily distracted and so luckily we have a study lounge across the hall, so I usually study in there and usually during finals and midterms I go to the library.

Student Body
Here at USCD the different colleges have different dorms and here at Warren the people who built this place decided to put a lot of singles here for the freshman. And in our suites we have six rooms and four of them are singles and 2 doubles, so there’s a really high likelihood of you getting a single room, it’s just that you would have to pay an additional $500.

I think there are a good amount of good looking guys here, but they’re not exactly my type actually. The majority of UCSD people are like they’re very laidback and casual and they all listen to alternative and pop-punk music and stuff like radio music you know. I guess I kind of like the more artsy kind of guy. Like city guy and I just don’t really find that around here.

I would say that this is a science school, like I think maybe 7 out of 8 people in my suite are all bio majors except for me, but the rest are bio majors. And other than that it’s either I hear bio major, engineering major, and occasionally I’ll hear like a poly sci major, but it generally feels like this is a science school.

In Closing...
I think the gym here is pretty nice but I kind of expected it to be bigger. Because it’s basically the size of a gym I would find like a LA fitness or 24 hr fitness and it gets pretty crowded at night which kind of sucks.

There’s nice weather here, it’s very quiet and I like that. UCSD is definitely more of a suburb, it’s actually in La Jolla, and it’s a rich, beachfront, older suburban neighborhood. Everyone here is either Asian or white and most people tend to dress the same and like the same type of things, so I don’t really think it’s that diverse.
Coming to college I expected to meet a lot more different types of people that I wouldn’t meet at home and I don’t find that here. The typical USCD student looks like they walked straight out of an Abercrombie store or like Pac Sun or Tilly’s. I would say that there are a lot of surfer people here. If not, a lot of people who are trying to be surfer’s and they’re buying long boards and skating around. It’s cool. I actually want to learn too.

The cafeteria is right below my window. When I first came here I was so excited. I’m getting tired of the food here now, even though I think in comparison to other colleges we have a lot of options. There aren’t too many vegetarian selections here, but there are always a lot of salads and sandwiches you can get. And if you get tired of the dining hall in your particular colleges you could go to another.

The dating scene here is virtually none existent. If you want to date someone you have to have pretty much known them for a very long time.