Bad-Smelling Lagoon and No Need to be Greek

Introduction
I would say that this is one of the schools where you don’t need to be in the Greek system to have a party scene or a social life or whatever. DP is a huge party scene every Friday/Saturday night you go down there – a big downtown scene for 21 year olds – the thing I like about being in a sorority and that whole thing is that there are organized events and it doesn’t get like you have to walk down and go to house parties all the time – we themes and stuff, it’s more fun that way, I think.

DP, Del Playa, is where – it’s along the ocean. I’d say that’s the biggest party street. Like, you can walk down, there are hundreds of people walking out and it’s all ages – Freshman I would say, when I was a freshman I was down there a lot more during the weekend and stuff like that. But, I still like going down there once in a while. Around the bars, I’m not 21 yet, so I’ve been like once but everybody goes – it’s packed down there. There’s supposed to be like 10 really good bars slash clubs. People can go dance and stuff. Isla Vista is like a square mile, so all the college students live right here. I’d say DP is like, and then the frats and stuff around here, which a lot of people have houses on DP, senior houses, and they throw parties there.

I think everyone here is really smart and that’s refreshing because you know, in high school, you have all your friends and stuff, but here everyone really is smart but they still like to party and they still like to get their shit done. There’s so much to do around here – there’s such a wide variety of interests through out people – cause like there’s people who surf, there’s people who ski, like 4 hours away at Mammoth. I think it’s very diverse.

I think the thing that sucks about UCSB students is a lot of people are very cocky cause they just think they’re really cool – cause they go here and this has been called the “beautiful school” before by people, but I don’t know, I feel like people conform when they get here and stuff and everyone’s great, it s fabulous, but I feel like people, a lot of people get too conceited when they get here.

Campus Life and Social Life
There’s less guys here than girls, so that makes it like really – a guy you would’ve never dated in high school or something, is like so cool now. I don’t know, but, they’re all right, some are cool, I think college men in general are not the most reliable, they say it’s supposed to get better, right? But I haven’t experienced that.

I lived in Manzanita the first year it opened, it’s the new dorm, well, it’s three years old now, but I was a freshman and the first person who lived in the room. And it was nice. It was really nice, but the rooms aren’t that big, like not any bigger than any other ones. The food was awesome because that’s when Corea was brand new too and they had Ortega which like, sucked, but now both of the cafeterias are pretty good, I think. I liked it, I did really like it.

I literally could see the ocean from my room. I don’t know if I’ll ever get, because it’s so expensive to do that anywhere, right? So, I think it’s pretty cool experience. I’m living on the ocean again next year too.

Living in the dorms was awesome because you could see the ocean stuff, but at night I would complain because of the waves, I could hear the waves and it would keep me up. It literally did, my freshman year. My parents thought I was crazy, because you could see the ocean and that never happens, how often do people get to live on the ocean without paying a billion dollars to do so. But, running on the beach and stuff, just being able to look out, the sunsets – the sunsets on the ocean are unbelievable. Advertisement
Academics
The lagoon smells so bad. It’s disgusting, it is. It’s like always irrigating water, I don’t really know exactly what that means, but it’s disgusting – it smells really bad. But you can’t really smell it in the dorms – not that often. Just when you walk down there to go to class or something.

People in the spring have Barbecues and stuff, there’s always people surfing year round, the beach is usually full if it’s nice out. I don’t know – foot patrol and police are usually out to get everyone, so that’s typical in Isla Vista. I don’t know, people just walk around and chill, it’s so nice out so much that a lot of people are outside, sports and working out and sun tanning.

Student Body
The thing I don’t like about it actually is that I want more of the business aspect and there’s really only 1 class which is writing 109 EC, that goes over business writing and like, more realistic things, where as all the other classes are macro and micro economics and if you want to be an accountant, which I don’t, there’s an accounting emphasis, which obviously you learn accounting stuff in that, but all the other ones are theory – Econ theory and they’re hard, they’re really hard. And it’s competitive and it’s hard to get into.

I try to keep on top of my stuff, like I would say I try to put in at least an hour aside a day to go over stuff in my classes because that’s how I’ve always been and I don’t like to fall behind. I like to do well in school. I don’t know how much other people do. You go to the library though and I do, do the reading so that stuff, people are always like, you don’t have to read – you do have to read and you have to study and go to CLAS, which is the free tutoring thought the school you can get.

In Closing...
I don’t know exactly how many, but like, I know there’s six writing requirement classes where you have to like fulfill a certain amount of words for like essays and that kind of stuff, and you have to take math and science classes – you can take easy one though. It’s not that hard to fulfill. I took too many GE’s because I didn’t know what major I wanted to do last year, so I’m pretty knowledgeable in the GE area, but you do have to take a bunch.

There’s some really cool ones like I got Psych 1 for example, I never would have taken – I never wanted to be a Psychology major or anything, but taking Psych 1, you learn just like “general education”, GE knowledge about certain classes that you would have otherwise not have gotten a chance to learn about. So some of them suck – some of them do suck – like if you’re not going to go into math and if you have to take calculus or something you’d take in high school, that sucks.