<p>I’m a military child living overseas and won’t be able to visit any college campuses before applying or committing. A good friend highly recommends UC Davis, but I’m uneasy about deciding only based on what she tells me and also nervous about living in the US for the first time in my life. How does Davis treat people that aren’t from California? Or from the States at all? Is it a very liberal school? How high is the cost of living?</p>
<p>Like any large public school, Davis has a student body that is very politically mixed. The culture of the area in general is the same way; the farming culture immediately outside the metro Sacramento area tends to be more conservative, while the city culture in Sacramento and Davis tends to be more liberal. Faculty and staff are similar. Individual departments may lean more to one side or the other. The city of Davis itself is very liberal.</p>
<p>Most students at UC Davis will be from California. I would hope that few students would ever treat a fellow student poorly based on having been raised in a foreign country. But someone who has spent some time at Davis in a similar situation would be the best to answer that question.</p>
<p>You should be uneasy about deciding based only on other people’s recommendations. There is a lot more to choosing a college, and usually no-one else will have the same exact priorities as you. I recommend three steps for deciding where to apply:
- Identify your priorities (what you want in a school) and try to order them from the most to least important.
- Make a list of all the schools you can find that meet your very most important priorities. An example of a common most important priority is knowing what area you want to study, so you know whether to look at liberal arts colleges or institutes of technology, which only offer a limited selection of majors.
- Starting with your next highest priority, research all the schools on your list, keep the ones that satisfy this priority and eliminate the ones that don’t. Then move on to the next highest priority and eliminate more schools. And so on, narrowing down the list until it’s the size you want it to be (I recommend three to six schools).</p>
<p>You may be surprised by what your final list looks like. There are a lot of really, really good schools out there that many people have never heard of. Especially if you are interested in a very specific field that is particularly specialized or uncommon.</p>
<p>The student body is very diverse. While the large majority of students are from in-state, remember that in order to be considered in state for admissions purposed, you just have to have lived in the state for a year or two. Many of the students are foreign born, and have accents. Many others are the parents of immigrants. If anything, I think people will think its cool that your from out of the country, since it makes you more interesting. </p>
<p>Heres a look at the breakdown by ethnicity: [UC</a> Davis News & Information :: UC Davis Facts: Student Headcount by Ethnicity](<a href=“http://facts.ucdavis.edu/student_headcount_ethnicity.lasso]UC”>http://facts.ucdavis.edu/student_headcount_ethnicity.lasso)</p>
<p>A girl on my floor freshman year was from Singapore, but originally from California. She wasn’t treated differently in any negative way - if anything it was an interesting conversation piece. You should be fine</p>