Reflections on college visits
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As I mentioned we visited:
UBC Vancouver
UC Berkeley
UCLA
USC
UCSDFirst some general comments.
I had no idea the percentage of new enrollees that are transfer students. I don’t remember seeing the figure for UBC so it might just be a US thing but the numbers were in the 25-35% range. I don’t know how much of that is people saving money by doing a two year degree first, or if it’s people who were rejected from their first choice, went to a Cal state school for a year or two, and tried again, vs people who just decided their original choice was not for them. I’m guessing #2 is the major portion.
The language of ‘‘freshman, sophomore, junior, senior’ seems to have been largely superseded by ‘first year, second year…’. ChatGPT suggests that it started to change in the early woke era when someone noticed that the word “freshman” ended with ‘man’ and erroneously concluded that it therefore didn’t include women or any of the other 56 genders. You’d think a university would know better. Don’t they have a linguistics department?
Land acknowledgements - we were spared these at UCSD and USC. UCLA was a short verbal one, Berkeley had a slide about it, and UBC is a giant continuous land acknowledgment with a small side business in education. O Canada!
They even had a segregated building just for natives that was a modern take on first (sic) nation design. And they had street signs in English and - not French - some lab-grown transliterated native language made up of Latin letters, typewriter symbols , and child-like drawings. It was all I could do not to ask ‘is this purely performative or is there even a single non-academic that uses this’. But I already knew the answer so I spared the boy the embarrassment. .
Having said that, UBC was lovely. I’ve never seen a more beautiful campus setting.
Berkeley I had been to recruiting for Credit Suisse but it was great to do the tour.
(Will post this and continue later - we’re about to land and I’ll lose WiFi)
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The boy was impressed by some of the history of Berkeley. When you walk down a hallway and there’s a plaque that says ‘J. Robert Oppenheimer’s office was here’ it’s pretty cool. That same building had multiple reserved parking spots that said ‘NL Reserved’ - just for Nobel laureates (sorry Donny!)
UCLA seems to be his top choice. He loved the campus and the setting and really likes Los Angeles for some reason (my fault probably for always staying with him in Santa Monica instead of Compton). It’s the only university hoodie he bought.
USC is probably his second. Another lovely place, and the film school (which is not his thing) is pretty damn impressive. You walk out of the George Lucas building, pass the Stephen Spielberg building , and enter the John Williams Scoring center. Of course they get celebrities there a lot and get to screen most new films before they hit theatres.
Finally UCSD. Neither he nor I liked it. The vibe was just different. Of course I knew going into it that it’s not on the same level as the other three CA schools we visited. Still glad we went. I was starting to suspect he liked anything he saw, so it was good to see he is more particular than that.
