I was recently accepted to UCLA aerospace engineering and, while UCLA is high on my list, I am a little apprehensive and have a few questions that weren’t really answered when on Engineering day.
How does UCLA engineering compare to other top engineering schools, specifically aerospace schools (Umich, UIUC, Berkeley, GaTech, etc)? Are there similar research opportunities for undergrad students at UCLA? Are engineering undergrad students “lost in the crowd” in the sense that there are just too many to be able to develop relationships with professors and get help on a personal level? Is the engineering student culture friendly and collaborative, or is it competitive? How competitive are UCLA graduates in industry?
If you could answer any of these or just offer your own insight, I would appreciate it immensely.
Any insight on gay life at UCLA would also be appreciated.
UCLA generally doesn’t like to answer the “compare UCLA to school X” questions because no one at UCLA is really qualified to speak about another school unless they happened to have gone there or worked there before. Any answer you’d get from them would probably not be entirely accurate. What you should do instead is to ask questions you are wondering about to each campus you’re considering and compare each school’s answer. That’s probably the only fair way to do it.
Research is very available. Every faculty member does research, and every faculty member has undergrads working for them. You need to reach out to get research (it usually doesn’t drop into your lap), but as long as you reach out to a number of faculty, you should be able to get something once you have taken some relevant coursework.
Aerospace Engineering is one of the smaller majors, so you’ll definitely get to know your professors once you start taking Aerospace classes (a lot of your early classes are Mechanical & Aerospace, so you’ll have a lot of MechE majors around). Every student is assigned a faculty mentor that you have to meet with regularly, so there is definitely an avenue for you to develop meaningful relationships with your professors.
Sorry, can’t answer your other questions, so hopefully someone will chime in here.