Hi everyone, I have a bit of a situation - I’m so indecisive.
I was accepted to UCLA for Fall 2015 and USC for Spring 2016. I recently went to UCLA for orientation and I loved the campus and everything, but my student advisor gave me a really bad impression of the school that almost made me want to withdraw then and there. He basically ignored me most of the day in our small group of six students and I know he had rules to follow, but he didn’t allow me to register for a single course I wanted to take. I basically have a schedule with classes I have no interest in; we were told that we can take an elective course and that it can be from any field, so I wanted to take a computer science course in the hopes of getting a specialization in computing or setting up the prep for the joint ling/cs major. Anyway, maybe I’m looking too much into it. It just makes me think that I’ll never be able to get into the classes I want to take. I even wanted to enroll in a Spanish class (I need some more language for ling), but my advisor said we were not to enroll in classes with a waitlist as nobody ever gets in from a waitlist - yikes.
I’m starting to wonder if UCLA is the school for me. I’m a non-traditional student. I’m 21 and the highest level of school I completed prior to CC was the 8th grade. I live in East Los Angeles and one of the several community colleges I attended was Los Angeles Trade Tech (which is located in the “bad” area near USC). I often hear that USC isn’t the best place to attend because of its surroundings, but they honestly don’t bother me as I already don’t live in the best area and I went to school in this so-called “bad” area. Prior to transferring, I had been at CC a total of 4 years (went part-time for 2 years because I couldn’t afford to pay for my class fees and wasn’t given financial aid for the longest time). My overall GPA was in the 3.9 range and I had about 100 semester units total by the time I was finished with the spring 2015 semester.
I’m going to be a linguistics major at either school, but I’m not sure which would be best. I’ve been told on here previously that UCLA does indeed have one of the top ranking graduate programs in the field, but that the undergraduate program should be comparable to what is offered at USC. I do honestly like some of the ling offerings at USC just a little bit better than at UCLA. I see that USC has multiple courses such as “Human Language Technology” that seem like they could be decent prep for my dream career (I want to be a computational linguist). I was also told by the ling advisor that a new major (a computational linguistics one) is going to be introduced very soon (although, maybe he was just saying that? and soon could also be a longer time than I expect).
Thanks for reading all of this and if anybody can offer any advice. As pretty as UCLA was, I somehow started to think I didn’t “fit” there as the day went on. I have no idea if USC’s environment is the same (I’ve only visited once), but I wonder if I’d do any better there. Thanks again.
