Wait you say that “I’m not particularly impressed with the school, and it managed to destroy the passion I had for my major, and well, I’m not sure what I like about UCI” but revealed initially “UCI has totally ruined my chances at an education that I could have gotten had I not come to UCI because of my now large amount of loans, lower UCI gpa and general unhappiness in my major and with the school in general” you talk about issues in your GEs and transferable GEs, your inability to get into a lab for research. All this stuff leads me to believe quite frankly, that you are not that great of a student. How is it everyone else can get into labs, but you can’t? Why are YOU having issues with transferring courses or your GEs? You say you aren’t “impressed” with the school ??? I’m not very impressed by the student you portray yourself as. If so many other students are finding success, you are doing it wrong. No one goes to UCI thinking it’s going to be the same as Berkeley, and besides each UC has its strengths and weaknesses. You gotta research where you want to go and really get an idea of what you are getting into. I suggest though that you rethink your approach, be a lot more proactive, ask for and take advice from successful UCI students in the areas you are struggling, and remember that UCI for many students is just a stepping stone on the way to grad school. I assume if you got into UCI, and accepted admission, that it is the best school you got into. So embrace it, make the most of it, and don’t expect the school to conform to you, you conform to the school. Good luck.
OP - I didn’t read your rant thread, because it seems pretty one-sided. It’s not the school’s fault that you are struggling as a student. College is what you make out of it. How many students were waitlisted this year and how many didn’t even get into UCI? Yet you were offered a spot, and you made the decision to take it. I’m sure if UCI offered you a spot, a few other colleges did as well.
Research opportunities will always be few and far in between, as well as being competitive. That’s the nature of the business. Research labs have only so much space, they can’t take everyone that wants to do research just to ensure a few sensitive types don’t get heartbroken over being rejected. How proactive are you at getting to know the professors? Presenting yourself as a GENUINE student interested in their research - not just an opportunity to say you did “some research”? Were you expecting to transfer as a student in the Fall, open your email on the first day of the quarter and find multitudes of emails from professors begging you to come join their research team? It doesn’t work that way.
You have a really negative outlook on your education and seemingly, life in general. Perhaps take a look at the person you are right now and see if your personality is not isolating you from people. Who wants to work with someone on a research project who sees the glass half empty all the time?
I’m not even an official student yet until this coming Fall, yet I’ve made the effort to go out of my way to visit campus not only during Finals week for this past quarter, but a few times over the Summer as well - and in the process have managed to meet all sorts of wonderful UCI staff and students, who portray a much different demeanor than what you’re claiming in your posts. Perhaps it’s not the school, or the staff, or the students, or the opportunities, I know this might come hard to accept, but maybe the problem is you, OP.
I posted earlier in the thread back when it was first started in October, and now that I have a full year’s worth of experience under my belt from attending UCI as a transfer student in engineering, I would like to share my perspective.
I can certainly sympathize with OP regarding his complaints about large class sizes and a highly impersonal learning environment. Especially in my major, the university does not seem to place a lot of emphasis on good teaching at the undergraduate level, and there are more than a few courses that either are poorly structured in terms of content, or have professors assigned to teach them who don’t put much effort into the class at all. (There are a couple of posts by other UCI engineering students earlier in this thread that reflect my sentiments on this topic.)
Yet the area in which UCI truly shines is the research opportunities it offers - it is a research institution, after all. I cannot speak with regards to OP’s particular academic department as I have no firsthand personal experience with it, but at least in the sciences and engineering, research positions for students are abundant. I got my first research position in the fall by speaking with one of my professors after class and expressing interest in his work, and was invited to join his research team after emailing him a copy of my resume. I then worked on a mobile app development project for about two quarters, and due to the connections I made from that experience, I now have a paid summer research fellowship where I am working on a very exciting biomedical/electrical engineering project that is being funded by a local startup company in Irvine. Since I am interested in going on for a master’s degree in my field, the research experience I have gained and the relationships with potential mentors and recommendation letter writers I have developed will prove to be invaluable for graduate school preparation and admissions.
While it is true that attending a smaller liberal arts college might provide a better academic experience in terms of the classes, many employers and graduate school admissions committees have expressed that they overwhelmingly look for evidence of achievement outside the classroom, and to me this aspect of UCI ultimately outweighs what may be lackluster in-class experiences.
These are just my opinions on the matter, and anyone is free to agree or disagree. I simply wanted to offer my candid perspective after one year of being a student here.
I can’t speak for everyone, but every institution has its good teachers and bad teachers. Teachers that have been around for so long they don’t realize they are boring students to death. I have a lot of smart lectures and professors as a humanities major.
I was Invited to apply in the Honor’s humanities program, but turned it down because I don’t want to spend an additional year at UCI. You sound like most of the younger classmates I typically get. You do bad or fail a few classes and it’s the school’s fault because you didn’t realize that it was harder than you thought it was because you were probably “smarter” at your CC. That sucks for you and to be honest, you should have did the work. I have no sympathy for you because they preach from the beginning that the quarter system is NOT like the semester system, but a lot of people roll their eyes until they realize how much work gets dumped on them in a relatively short amount of time.
I graduated from my CC with a 3.8 and I have a 3.536 at UCI right now and I get offers up the a**. It’s all about the student. I know I would be successful regardless of where I attended because my work travels.
Plus if you are retaking classes with info you were previously exposed to in CC (this obviously only applies to transfers) and you don’t ace the class, your CC did you a disservice because obviously you weren’t as educated in your field as you thought you were.
Plus if you can’t even do well in the classes why would anybody want to waste their time mentoring you or doing research opportunities with you. You are one of the “just give them the degree in 2-4 years and wish them well students”.
They’re athletes . What you guys don’t understand is that athletes work very hard in with practice and games which us physically and mentally draining . All the other students do is go home and do homework . They are expected to do have better stats than athletes because that is all they are good for . So don’t hate on athletes having lower scores because sports are pretty much their job just like your job I’d homework .
I need to clarify a few things. First, in Psychology, there are a finite number of labs in general, even less – in fact nearly 0 – producing research in the area that I was interested in. In any case, every lab that interested me was full, except for one, and I didn’t get along with the graduate students in this lab. Perhaps this changes as people graduate.
Second, I wouldn’t call myself a bad student. However, if there is a subject that interests me tangentially, but is outside of my comfort zone, I expect to be able to take the class and rely on the institution to take care and facilitate learning in a supportive way. However, this is blatantly not the case. This is the first thing that really put me off.
Second, I found that the curriculum is not rigourous enough. Crude explanations are given carelessly and students are expected to mindlessly regurgitate without complete understanding – in fact, understanding is never the objective. I know this because when I express these concerns to faculty members during office hours they typically respond by saying that I might be among a rare 10% of the class that even cares enough to think this way, and therefore, it isn’t worth the extra effort. This is the truth. This is the second thing that put me off.
Thirdly, budget cuts and expansion kills off any hope of the university working towards resolving these issues. In fact, there is even an article written by a humanities professor expressing my very concerns back in 2012:
http://m.ocregister.com/articles/students-337671-irvine-cuts.html
But I suppose that argument is long dead now that it’s 2016 and things have presumably not improved.
Fourth, why would I only take classes within my comfort zone, where I know I could already succeed? This would lead to a very limmited education and worldview; even worse, it would limit my personal growth as an individual.
Fifth, the GE courses are the Psych 9a,b,c series – which is a weeder course that consits of nothing but 3 multiple choice scantron tests of 30 questions, for which 50% get a C or C+, 5% get an F, 10% get a D, 20% get a B and 10% get an A. This is sensless. And the test questions are not particularly clever or enlightening, they’re ussually biased towards the professor’s personal opinion, and often include unimportant factoids that test nothing more than an ability for rote memorization. We don’t even write papers – how sad. I took “Psych 1,” the standard class that every university on the planet accepts but UCI (Berkeley, Davis, UCLA etc would have all accepted it). And they force me to sit through classes that waste my time and money? And then knick students for stupid trivial things? Yeah, I’m going to he upset, and it’s fully justified.
Sixth, and perhaps the most off putting of all, UCI has a quota they intentionally enforce as to how many graduates there are in each major, showing that UCI intentionally tries to prevent students from majoring in what they want to study. This is disgusting.
To sum up, the University is a different beast. It is ranked 9th according to US News for public research universities as shown here: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/top-public
But, it’s cynical toward it’s students. It displays a lack of trust in their ability and doubts their potential. Faculty don’t inspire students, they tear them down. Administrators treat students like they wish they didn’t have to deal with them. Prerequisites are not guidelines, they will prevent your ability to enroll unless you take a prerequisite. Students are ignorant about how UCI treats them because they don’t know any better. Students are also ignorant to the fact that their education leaves them without deep understanding because they blindly trust that UCI knows what it’s doing.
And yet, UCI has potential. I’m convinced that administration has idiots in key places that they can’t get rid off because of bureaucracy. I’m also sure that there are tenured faculty who aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed since UCI is a young university, and needed faculty before it grew it’s reputation.
I’ve decided to take this year off and take classes at other institutions, and to return as a philosophy major in 2017. Partly because I think it might be one of the best departments at the university, and because it will enforce critical thinking, demand meaningful class discussion, essay writting, and I can puruse foundations and philisophy of mathematics at the level of understanding that the mathematics deprtment ignores, and hope that UCI can get their stuff together in the meantime.
Every department is different just like every individual. College is not for hand holding and it sounds like that’s what you wanted. You want someone to give you a lab that you want, with a grad student that you like and to do basically whatever you want to do, regardless of your qualifications.
If you are an older student you need to realize college in the traditional sense is made for recent high school graduates and those “weeder” courses are not catered to your needs but the down the middle foundational needs of a person majoring in your program.
You are the one that seems to have the issues and it could very well be an adjustment thing. I’m an older student and I see plenty of younger students who still think they are great when they don’t even understand the world. The more you learn you realize you don’t know anything because there is just so much more to learn.
I hope you take this year off and you realize that UCI really is a solid educational institution, it might just not be for you. The humanities program really at any research university doesn’t get any respect, it’s the sciences. You should have went to a liberal arts college if that’s what you were looking for.
I’m not particularly happy with certain things about my program, but I supplemented my education with an associate in something that gave me what I wanted so it’s fine. You aren’t going to like every job you work in your lifetime, at least until you buildup enough credibility to pick and choose what you want to do (and get paid for) and this shows me that you blame everyone instead of owning it and making the best out of a situation. I wouldn’t want someone working for me or on my team that I know as soon as something doesn’t go right they complain or say it’s someone else’s fault.
Play your own game or get out the way because someone else would gladly take your spot
It seems like Chancellor Gilman is working to move the University in a better direction. I’m sure you all saw this email:
"To the Anteater Community:
It’s an incredible time at UCI. Last year, we celebrated the close of our $1 billion Shaping the Future fundraising campaign, a huge philanthropic undertaking that will help usher our university into a new era of excellence in which our research and programs ascend to even greater heights and the impact of Orange County’s elite university will be felt around the world.
Instead of resting on our laurels and winding down our efforts, I’m thrilled to share that UCI has made impressive, historic strides in exceeding the philanthropic and research goals laid out in our strategic plan. In the 2015-16 fiscal year recently completed, our University Advancement team reported $132.5 million in private funds, breaking all of UCI’s previous philanthropic records. And our Office of Research reported a record $395 million in grants and contracts – a $100 million increase over the prior year. You can read more about our tremendous private fundraising and research efforts in the press release.
As we move forward, private donations and grants will continue to be foundational to our success. We are incredibly proud to receive support that will aid us in our worthy pursuit of life-enhancing research and academic programs that serve our community. These funds are a measure of our status not only as a globally preeminent research university, but also as an institution that is vitally important to the advancement of the region.
We have built momentum and can see a clear path toward our brilliant future. As key components of our strategic plan continue to come to fruition, I hope you will celebrate our achievements and share this phenomenal news with your colleagues, family and friends.
Fiat Lux,
Chancellor Howard Gillman"
__
Let’s see what UCI can do to turn itself around and fix some of it’s issues. I really am excited to see what it’s capable of doing.
I agree that I should have gone to a liberal arts college (I got one offer from a similar sort of college – which I turned down for UCI, which part of why I’m upset. Another contributing factor (besides the rest of the thread obviously) is that I pay full tuition for UCI ($30,000 per year including housing) and I don’t feel that I get my money’s worth at all. But, as it so happens, after next year I will be turning 24 that academic year, and my tuition will be free when I return. With free tuition perhaps I will see my education as more valuable.
You have a history of not thoroughly researching your college information until after the fact. Back in post #10, I asked you if you had visited UCI before before attending. You responded that you didn’t have time:
Now, you are saying you are turning 24 and will get free tuition.
From where? I don’t know of any full fee students at a UC suddenly being zero cost just for turning 24 years of age. UCI will not be free. Where will you get your funding from? (It has nothing to do with being financially independent.)
You need to research this before you get your bill. I’m telling you now so that you check the reality of this fact. You have to make time for this.
Playing fair, the young man is correct “if” his income is substantially lower than his parents combined income, which judging from the way he handles his business is safe to say.
He is a dependent student for financial aid purposes until he turns 24…which is what he is referring too. After 24 his financial aid is based solely on him thus making him eligible for things like the Blue and Gold opportunity plan which gives free tuition and fees, which he wouldn’t have qualified for earlier because it has an $80k ceiling.
It’s a federal policy for public colleges and universities that at age 24 students are considered independent students, it is also a UC policy that students within their first 2 years at a UC as a transfer who are below an $80,000 per year income receive free tuition through the blue and gold scholarship. I spoke with financial aid before deciding this path as well, they confirmed. They also suggested that the year after there would be substantial university aid money to finish up; I don’t have a problem getting the extra few thousands if I need too either.
Ironically, while this is beneficial to me personally, it is inefficient for the university in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention, who knows what sorts of policies will be introduced after the 2016 election (but these probably won’t get voted on for some time anyway, whatever they end up being).
Right now, you need to focus on schools with strong financial aid policies and strong biopsych or philosophy programs.
For philosophy, any Catholic college, especially Jesuit, school, will be good, but they typically have bad financial aid. Georgetown, Holy Cross, Notre Dame are an exception, and all have stellar academics. Reed, UChicago may be possibilities. Of course, they’ll want to see a 3.8+ from community college and strong grades (mostly A’s) from UCI. I think you’d love St John’s (MD /NM).
NYU is stellar for philosophy too but forget financial aid.
I don’t see how it’s “beneficial” to spend more time in college than you need. UC’s have $15k tuition and fees right now. Developing your skills in the market place is more important than saving $15k. taking a year off is a bad idea plus you would have to reapply and there is no guarantee that you will be readmitted.
They expect transfers to graduate in 3 and yes the B&G plan waives the first two years because really there is no excuse not to finish 90 quarter /60 semester units in 2 years if you are serious about graduating.
I transferred in 98.5 units and I completed 50 quarter units last year. I only need 31.5 units and I’m finishing that up by winter (taking 16 in the fall) and spring is an afterthought.
Look, continuing down my Psychology (cog sci) major was taking me nowhere fast. I didn’t realize that the department was full of would be engineers turned cartisian dualists. In my opinion, most of the research that is getting done is either misogynist evolutionary psychology garbage (Dr. Hoffman, I’m looking at you) or absurd cartisian mind body duality and consciousness research that many other departments across the nation scoff at (and I agree with them). Sure, there is some decent research on sensing and perception going on, but I’m not interested in this domain of psychology. And the PSB department is full of emotional wackos.
Furthermore, the classes sucked. Stupid memorization type tests, no papers, hundreds of students in upper division classes – no thanks. And to be frank, I got the impression some of my lecturers either didn’t completely understand what they were talking about or didn’t think to relate tangentially relevant material.
This is all very bad if my intention is graduate school, and it is. Fortunately, it’s not too late for me to reconcile my “academic portfolio” by switching to something I am equally passionate about, which actually has a good department with good faculty, and that is the Philosophy of Mathematics. And this is what I intend on doing. I know Psych well enough already to ace the GRE and apply to PHD programs if I still want too later.
Rutgers is very strong and would definitely offer a more personalized experience, but I don’t know whether it’d b affordable.
Rutgers is very strong and would definitely offer a more personalized experience, but I don’t know whether it’d b affordable.
It’s a common understanding that the undergrad level of courses at most universities are not about developing high functioning productive students to go out into the world…it’s a good talking point though.
College is not going to land you a job it just gets you into the room. You complain because you think the grass is greener…I understand where you are coming from. What I’m saying is don’t think you can just leave and come back when you feel like it (if you decide you want to come back).
UCI is not an easy school to get into and they might not be impressed by the work that you have done or will do where they were willing to take a chance on you the first time around.
Do what makes you happy, I’m a firm supporter/believer of that, but just realize the world doesn’t revolve around you and what you want either.
I think a lot of the colleges are failing to truly educate the younger generation (I’m in my early 30s). I sit in class and listen to the topics of discussion and during lectures they are on the laptops or surfing the Internet on their phone and then hiding it when the TAs come around.
The professors have to write and publish material/content as a part of their job, not want to…have too it’s a prestigious university after all and if they publish something good the school wants their name over it for publicity so that way your degree’s college name holds more credibility in the future. For that reason they can’t spend the time to educate students like they do at the community college level where they are actually paid more to do less. It’s not just about you…you are in a system that is built to mass produce higher thinking students (hopefully) than those straight out of high school with no clue. That’s why they like older students because we bringing in insights that they don’t have or can share that will make their job more interesting.
You are upset about research that most people don’t care about or have any clue what you are talking about…it’s better to become successful playing their game in your own way and then once you get where you are going then change things up…because right now you are just complaining…and nobody likes complainers because complaining alone means nothing without action…so transfer and see where it takes you and good luck.
I already have permission from the school of humanities to take a year off and reenter in 2017. I’ve spoken with change of major counselors and laid out a tentative plan of study.