<p>What are the best groups to join for discussions, inquiry, challenges etc.? Sciences are great but want to know where the humanities crowd hangs out.</p>
<p>the mandeville stairwells come to mind.</p>
<p>Write for a newspaper?</p>
<p>Despite my handle and major, I am coming from a performing arts charter school and plan to meet people throught the theatre department. I found their list of courses to be pretty inspiring. Check it out - (copy and paste, for some reason it won’t hyperlink and I’m too lazy to figure out why)</p>
<p>[UCSD</a> Theatre & Dance: Undergraduate Course Descriptions](<a href=“http://theatre.ucsd.edu/academics/undergraduate/course_descriptions.html]UCSD”>http://theatre.ucsd.edu/academics/undergraduate/course_descriptions.html)</p>
<p>Okay, the hyperlink fairy fixed it for me.</p>
<p>Thx Comp Si Guy …</p>
<p>The first two responses were not too encouraging. Glad to see you exist. I am a parent of a D considering the school and so far I am not seeing lots of maturity … a bit discouraging for a school that is suppose to be so good. </p>
<p>Hopefully she will find the mature crowd in theater;)</p>
<p>I live in Silicon Valley and there is lots of talk about the decline of innovation/creativity, a key component for entrepreneurship … Minds are becoming too narrowly focused and inflexible and lack the curiosity/nimbleness necessary for unique thought. Good engineers need to be creative or they are just technicians.</p>
<p>I can see you are going to a good engineer … </p>
<p>Please pass on any other hints I can send on to my DD in boarding school. We walked about campus this weekend and she is warming to the idea but if she can not find any other broad minded folks … maybe she should take a gap year and try for another campus.</p>
<p>No offense, but if you are labeling the UCSD student body as immature, you aren’t too perceptive.</p>
<p>^Agreed. Our La Jolla Playhouse is a Tony Award-winning theater, and our graduate programs consistently rank in the top three graduate programs in the country. Our humanities programs are well-respected, and anyone would be hardpressed to cite lack of maturity as a downside to UCSD, regardless of the discipline or area of study.</p>
<p>MQD,</p>
<p>Thanks for the encouragement. I do think Astrina was serious in suggesting an actual place to hang out since she is a very enthusiastic supporter of UCSD. Her answer was just more concrete than your question. All I can say to your D is that these boards are a good place to see what incoming freshmen worry about but not a good place to get a feel for the student body at large. First of all, we are all works in progress and teenage boys in particular are not known for maturity. Even me, I recognize that it is my own anxiety about going to college that keeps me checking this site. Also, the internet does bring out trollish behavior in people who would not be so off-putting if they had to show their faces. Just looking at the “tell us who’s going to UCSD” threads shows that people here do not for the most part want their names and high schools associated with their postings. Most of the contented UCSD students are not on the boards, they are living their lives and hanging out with the other creative, or outdoorsy, or intellectual (etc) people they meet at UCSD. I was very lucky in my applications and could have gone almost anywhere. The only place I would have taken over UCSD was Stanford where I got deferred and even then they would have had to offer bigtime financial aid. I know 87 people on the boards here will now tell me I was foolish to give up other big name schools (including CAL and UCLA as well as four privates) in favor of UCSD but for a wide variety of reasons, this feels like the right place for me. I think it is a place where I can get the education I need to blend the arts and technology, where I can make connections into my chosen career field (which doesn’t happen at the smaller exclusive private colleges), where I can have a balanced life between social, rec sports, and academics, and where I can transition from being my parents’ kid to steering my own life. Yeah, I know I sound like a greeting card - back in your cages, ■■■■■■. My point is that as many have said, college is what you make it and everything you need to build what you want is offered at UCSD if you just go find it. And it’s there in gorgeous weather so the snow doesn’t keep you in your dorm for a third of the year.</p>