I disagree about staying in Hollywood. Nightmare traffic, though it all is in LA. Your colleges are spread all over. This is super boring, bit I recommend you stay at the Embassy Suites in Downey. It has a good centralized location to most of your colleges. If you don’t care about traffic, then Hollywood is more interesting of course. Again though, that traffic is going to be awful. Long Beach is more interesting and you can easily go south to Chapman, up the 710 to Occidental, up the 405 to all the others. Should be more affordable too. Apparently it is actually pretty cheap to stay in the Queen Mary.