answering your questions about UCLA 🐻

[Music] hey guys today i'm going to be answering some of the questions about ucla that you guys sent me i'm not some sort of like authority on the school oh by the way i'm working on a crochet project so i'm gonna keep looking down at my lap but yeah i'm not in authority on the school by any means i'll just be you know sharing my thoughts based on my own experiences here at this mighty fine university so yeah that's this whole video let's get started first let's talk about academics first someone asked me are there a lot of ges required and can you place out of them with ap credit and um the amount of ges required is pretty standard i'd say like it's not incredibly overloading but it's also not one of those schools where there are basically none but you can place out of quite a few of them with ap credits they're just like a couple of different like categories of ge credit i guess where some can only be filled through classes at the university or community college classes that transfer over and some of them you can finish with in ap credit or even like your sat score additionally you can also have overlap between ge credit and credit for your major so like i find that most people don't really have to like plan out their year based on the ges they can just you know maybe pick i like i think i'm taking four classes that only apply as ges and nothing else next let's talk about the quarter system and basically like how it is so if you don't know ucla is not on a semester system um instead we're on this quarter thing which is basically wow surprise surprise you can divide the year into four sections and each quarter is named after the four seasons you enroll in new classes every quarter and basically every quarter is a 10-week compacted version of a semester-long class except you don't take as many classes per quarter as you would in a semester system it's usually three to four for most people this can have its pros and cons personally i kind of like it i don't know i have like loki a really short attention span when it comes to academic subjects and in a semester system by like week 10 i'd kind of be like burnt out and not really care at all about the class but in the quarter system you're a week 10 you're basically done you just take finals and then it's over but it can be kind of stressful to just like have to get through that sheer amount of information in such a short time like there really are no rest breaks you can't really afford to like slack off at any point in the quarter and it's like slightly more stressful depending on your perspective to go through three rounds of finals and midterms each year instead of two or maybe even more if you take summer quarter classes but that's that's another story and and for comparison we still like take the same amount of school year as a semester system school um semesters are 15 weeks long and you have two of them so it's still 30 weeks but it's just like divided up differently next someone asks if there is competition over grades and i think this like varies more by major um like i hear it's a little more competitive in the stem fields in the engineering school but it's not like we're like actively fighting other students over grades like no one really sees it like that not many classes at this school are based on a curve where like there are only a limited number of like good grades and you have to fight everyone else for them um except for a few that are called weeder courses where basically each major has like a super super hard course that you know isn't necessarily like graded on a curve but they just make it unnecessarily difficult to try to like weed people out of majors that are in high demand i don't really like that as a concept but that's pretty much the only case in which i can see there being like competition over grades but in general i feel like the students here are pretty friendly and collaborative it's more like us against the knowledge or us against the test versus like students against each other if this has been out of focus for the past like bit i'm really sorry i just got a new camera and i'm not really good at knowing how to operate it and also like i'm kind of just slapping this video together which is why it's going on my second channel because it's kind of a mess um but yeah let's get into the next question i put in my notes a lot of people asked me about like do they have such and such major here or what majors are available and i hope this doesn't come off as like mean or passive aggressive but just google it i physically do not have time to answer all of those questions or like read out a list of majors because you all have better things to do than to listen to like text to speech but it's just me talking and mispronouncing words one thing i guess to note is that ucla doesn't have undergraduate business degrees so if you want to be a bourgeoisie studies major maybe this isn't the right place to go although you can have like minors in the business school or where most of the business and finance grows go here at ucla is the business economics major a related question was what majors is ucla known for and i'd say probably the most famous or like esteemed notable major is the film school like we're in la right next to all the major hollywood studios and the ucla film school is known to be one of the most prestigious in the whole country i think nursing is also pretty like competitive and good here although it's kind of like not talked about as much because there just aren't as many like nursing students as compared to like the ratio of people in the general college which is called the college of letters and sciences that's where they have most of the like ba bs majors that are not like professional degrees the engineering school is also known to be pretty good and pretty much every academic department within the college of letters and sciences is known to be like really good that's why we're like a top research institution considered a very prestigious university so if the school has your major it's probably a pretty good academic department i think i mean you know maybe there are exceptions but generally like ucla faculty are super highly esteemed we've got a couple more questions about majors so bear with me here um somebody asked whether it is easy to change your major and that really depends on how you want to change your major so as i kind of mentioned earlier there are a couple different sub schools known as colleges within the overarching ucla university so if you want to change within the college of letters and sciences which is most majors it's pretty easy you just need to like is this out of focus again god damn okay well anyways within the college of letters and sciences it's pretty easy to change your major you just need to finish the pre-major requirements for that major which you can just find by googling like ucla insert major here and their registrar page will tell you what you need to do to get into the major and once you finish those requirements it's pretty smooth sailing to just switch your major switching into the college of letters and sciences or within it is not that hard but switching into another college is a lot harder for engineering it's a similar like finish the prereqs with a certain gpa and you'll be in but the gpa requirement is a lot harder to obtain and the classes are also pretty freaking difficult for the arts schools and the film schools you basically need to apply as if you were like a freshman applicant by submitting your portfolio and writing the essays and also adding in like taking a bunch of classes within their department so it's a little harder it's not impossible but it's also like not as guaranteed um last major related question is whether you can double major double minor et cetera et cetera and generally the answer is yes as long as you have enough room in your schedule to like actually finish everything you can dream it believe it and achieve it within four years graduating on time the ucla counseling and academic department will probably let you do it although do be warned like if you're majoring in any of the stem fields those majors are super long so it's very hard to add in a double major or like multiple minors and once again i note that you have to be able to do it within four years and graduate on time because the ucla counseling department is really strict about making sure everyone graduates on time the only exception to being able to double major i think is within the film school i don't think film and television allows for double majors there might be other exceptions i don't know about but you can just like google whether double majors are allowed for the majors that interest you next i talk about professors um how are the professors they're very smart they're like leading scholars in their field because once again ucla is a leading research institution a very prestigious in like every academic subject so far i've had about half like research professors who like do research as their main job and then teaching as like the side gig but i've also had about half of my instructors be these people called lecturers or like instructors who are not specializing in research but instead like hold an advanced degree but mostly do their work as a teacher research professors at pretty much every elite research institution are more known to be interested in their research and not so much in undergraduate education which like fair enough i guess you have your priorities straight so they're a great resource to just like learn a lot about the subject because they know so much about what they're teaching but at the same time you know they just don't place as much energy into lecturing or helping people which doesn't mean that they're bad teachers or that they're disorganized or that they're not nice or that you can't talk to them or go to office hours and ask for help like i've not had like a straight up bad professor in any of my classes so far part of why i've mostly had good professors though is because you can like optimize your schedule to have better professors you can just look up their reviews on this ucla specific version of rate my professors that is called bruinwalk and it's super helpful because you know you want to hear people's opinions and ratings about whether they're a good professor and you can also look at the grade distributions from the registrar of past versions of their class so you can know like oh this is a class where like most people fail so maybe i shouldn't take that class stuff like that someone submitted just like single statement academic rigor and i understand you want to ask like what is the academic rigor like so no worries i'm smart enough to fill in the blanks for you i'll answer that so the academic rigor is about the same as the average ap class that i took at my high school and the high school that i go to um although like i kind of crap on it all the time it's like known to be a pretty good public high school and like the classes there were definitely rigorous and like i always passed my ap tests with fives except for ap government because i submitted a blank document for half of the test on accident because it was an online ap test and i didn't know how to operate it properly yet and so i got a two but that is a side tangent for another day but yeah if you've never taken an ap class in high school or your high school like didn't really have rigorous ap classes you might be in for a little bit of an academic shock but for me coming from a fairly competitive and like rigorous high school i felt like it wasn't as hard as i was expecting or as hard as everyone who was like oh my god college is so difficult brace yourself was making it out to be don't be scared off because it's not as hard as like some adults might be trying to scare you into thinking and um if you're coming from a historically disadvantaged background there are quite some resources that i've heard about to like help you catch up to the rest of us like me who were lucky in the background we got from high school more about classes someone asked me what classes they have and to that and i invite you to check out the ucla registrar department and the ucla public schedule of courses both of these again are publicly available to anyone on the internet you don't need to be a ucla student or have a ucla account to sign into you can just literally google the words i told you and you will find a complete list of what's available generally and what's available during a specific quarter additionally someone asked like oh are there really 200 plus students in every class and once again i invite you to look at the schedule of classes not the registrar that doesn't say class numbers but every single quarterly posting of like the class schedule also includes the number of students in that class and to answer your question no not every class has 200 students because some of them have 400 no but um it really varies a lot based on what subject you're taking and what style of class you're taking like mine have ranged from the smallest being around 20 people i've had three classes that had around 20 people to the largest being just like those large lecture style classes with three to four hundred people and pretty much every possible number in between basically the difference i've noticed between like small schools and big schools is just that both have seminar small classes available and big lecture classes available but just the big lecture classes in like big schools are a lot bigger alrighty let's next talk about how do you choose your classes for freshmen enrollment happens at orientation and basically just enroll in all of your classes at once with the help of your new student advisor and you get to talk to your department counselor and the general college counselors that's only for fall quarter though but after that basically it's uh an enrollment free for all with the rest of the school but it's not like a real free-for-all it's not like the hunger games or anything where you have to wake up and just like make a mad dash to get the classes you want there's a fairly organized system in which people are assigned to their time slots for registering for classes it's by order of seniority from grad students to about to graduate seniors all the way down to freshmen and within each class of seniority you're randomly assigned two different time slots so people are staggered between first pass in which each student can enroll in 10 units which is like two classes maybe three if they're like really small classes or labs or something and then once everyone has gone through their first pass then everyone has a second pass in which you can just enroll in as many units as you like up to your unit maximum the enrollment time you get is kind of sort of just like based on luck or you can get a bit of an advantage if you take extra units and advance to the next class standing level before you're like in that year if that makes sense like it's my first year at ucla but i have enough units to be considered a sophomore another i guess less significant detail is that ap units don't count in determining your class standing for enrollment but they do count in determining your class standing when like you're trying to determine what classes you're eligible to enroll in like some are limited to juniors and seniors and some people wanted to know whether it's hard to get the classes you want since you know supply and demand baby but in my experience it's like kinda bad as a freshman but then once you get to start enrolling as a sophomore like i now get to it's not that bad of course it also helps to just like already be declared in the major that you're trying to finish because usually people who are a certain major have priority in enrolling in classes within that major because only people with a certain major or minor get first pass enrollment for certain classes it's also a lot harder just to get like certain prereq classes that are common in a lot of majors like the chemistry and physics series or statistics but overall i wouldn't say it's that bad in my experience like in my fall quarter things weren't so great because my internet speed was horrible and i couldn't enroll for the first 15 minutes of the one enrollment time that was shared by every single person in my orientation section but after that like winter quarter i got three of the classes i wanted and i had to take one of my second choices and then for this current spring quarter i got all four classes that i wanted one last thing that i like kind of touched on already is what are the most popular classes and i'd say the most like sought-after class that is hardest to enroll in is scandinavian 50w which if you don't know what that means at all it's basically like within the scandinavian culture studies department but it's known to be like an incredibly easy light workload class that also satisfies the writing two requirement which is normally a pretty tedious general education requirement to satisfy because it's like a writing class where you have to do surprise surprise a lot of writing besides that again certain classes are required by a lot of majors like year one of calc year one of physics year one of chemistry introductory statistics a couple of the film classes are also like very popular i hear because you know they're interesting like ucla film is like a great department and they also are not known to be particularly difficult at least the classes that are considered super popular are not known to be particularly difficult next let's talk about campus life someone asked what's the food like and uh just want to flex that ucla is ranked number one by niche.com oh my god a couple of months ago i think i made a tick tock and i like offhandedly remarked that ucla has like the number one dining halls in the country and like some i i don't remember the exact information about this person but they were like this is a lie ucla is not number one and they like started like straight up beef in my comment section and i was like jesus christ this is not that big a deal once again done anecdotes aside it is really good everyone who goes here will tell you that it is really good there are four like buffet style all you can eat dining halls which are mostly sit in although right now during the pandemic they're all take out and then there are four like carry out a la carte style dining halls where you get a certain amount of food per meal swipe on campus on a normal year it's not open right now there's a lot of food courts with like popular restaurants that people like like jamba juice man i wish i could go to jamba juice right now and there are also a lot of really good restaurants and boba shops and coffee places and just like pretty much anything you could want to eat in westwood village which for those of you who aren't familiar with like la geography it's to the east of santa monica at approximately the same northerness it's to the west of beverly hills and it's the direct southern neighbor of bel air and then if you're looking for something even more specific you can go just a little bit farther south to persian square or you can just like hop on an uber or a bird scooter and get to like the rest of metropolitan la which literally has any food that you could possibly want it's pretty great related to food someone asked what meal plan i recommend and it kind of depends on like how much you want to eat in the dining halls versus like eat out at restaurants or make your own breakfast in the dorms like i do but if you can afford it i definitely recommend one of the premiere plans so ucla has a lot of different meal plans one of the main criteria is like the number of meals you get on your plan per week but other criteria that's pretty important is whether it's premier or regular so basically premiere means that your swipes roll over from week to week throughout the quarter and you can use as many swipes as you like during one meal period which is like breakfast lunch dinner after dinner after after dinner etc i definitely recommend getting premiere just cause like i always find that i don't finish my meal swipes during the week or that i want a meal item that is considered two swipes or i want a coffee with my sandwich and that's considered two swipes but i'm like physically not allowed to do that because i have a regular meal plan but i have 14 regular and i find that that's more than enough food for the week especially because again i make breakfast for myself every morning next on campus life there's also the dorms someone asked like whether there are single rooms right now due to covid everyone lives in a single room but that's completely atypical normally literally nobody lives in a single room unless you're an r.a and almost everyone lives in a triple room especially freshmen there are not very many doubles next year plans aren't really set in stone because like it all depends on the state of the world but i think they've said that most of the dorm rooms will be doubles related what are the most sought after slash best housing options mostly on campus at least people want the deluxe halls which are sprout landing sproul cove and i think the new buildings that they are making will be also deluxe hulls but basically these are like a little bit more spacious and have air conditioning compared to the classic hulls but they're still like the shared bathroom traditional college experience and they're a lot cheaper than the fancier plaza and suite style rooms there's a lot that i could talk about again like let me know i guess if you like want to hear more about this at some point you could also just like google it and find on the ucla housing website and then off campus um like it varies based on what you're looking for but it is quite like in demand to live in a thing called a university apartment which are just apartment buildings in westwood or in the surrounding like western la area that are owned by the university so they're a lot cheaper and like you won't have to deal with a crappy landlord because the university is your landlord those are super popular and usually they fill up real fast how is the location so as i mentioned earlier ucla is located in westwood village it's in west la close to the beach it's about five to ten minutes by car away from santa monica it's considered a pretty affluent location like directly to the north of us is the fancy mansions of bel air i go to run there sometimes and like sheesh those are some fancy houses with some very high security westwood is known to be one of the safest areas in la although i guess if you come from not a city area it might be kind of like daunting to you to like oh my god there are homeless people oh my god there are a lot of people here oh my god some of the buildings look a little bit janky you do need to like take normal precautions as you would in any major city but like no one's gonna rob you at gunpoint or attack you with a machete unless something is going very horribly wrong honestly the most dangerous things there are probably the frat boys partying with no masks on and then as far as like you know good things not just like will you be stabbed to death on a street corner i mean there's always a lot to do in la you can go to west hollywood or santa monica beach or you can go to the hammer museum which is like a couple blocks away from the school which is an art museum and on a museum about like the tool you use to hammer um related to that i guess like security do you feel safe i definitely feel safe walking around basically everywhere on the campus during both the day and the night although the southern part where we have the ucla hospital and the part that like intersects with westwood village is a little bit like less safe during the night time but again i still feel like completely safe on any part that's on campus or within a few blocks of campus regardless of what time of day it is also i am so sweaty i can no longer keep wearing this jacket the north part of campus is like right along sunset boulevard real famous road and once you cross sunset boulevard you're in bel air basically the northern part of campus is a lot quieter and therefore it just feels safer to me also again it's like nestled up in bel air which is known to be a fairly safe neighborhood full of rich people who don't really commit their crimes in the streets it's usually at home and in the workplace and the last thing about the campus is whether it is big and hard to walk and ucla has a pretty small campus relative to schools of a similar population like it's the uc school with the largest student population yet the smallest campus by far it's like half the size of the next smallest campus like usually i go for a run around the entire perimeter of the campus and it's about four miles not very big and i can walk across the whole thing from like end to end in about like 20 to 30 minutes however even though everything is pretty compact and close together because like it's in la the land is expensive in that western area it's still like hard to walk around because it's really hilly like if you've ever done cross-country in a state that actually has hills it's basically as hilly as a cross-country course on like the average 20 to 30 minute walk to class additionally even though it is kind of tough to walk because it's so hilly the campus also isn't very conducive to like being on a bike or a scooter or a skateboard or whatever because most of the walking ways are like walking ways that are usually like jam-packed with students and so it'd be kind of dangerous to bike or scooter through there and there's a lot of stairs along the main routes through campus so it's again really not conducive to anything besides like difficult hilly walking but still i like it i did cross country i like my hills and i don't find it too bad but i guess if you're not used to it it can be a bit of a workout last but not least let's talk about student life a lot of people had questions about like the international student atmosphere and i don't know that much about it because like clearly i am not an international student i mean i guess not clearly because like if you wanted to like racial stereotype me you could ask me like where are you really from but where i'm really from is california like i'm an in-state student but yeah weird micro questions aside um i think international students are usually from china like all of the international students i've met have been from east asia and i don't think that's a product of like oh just like ucla doesn't like other countries it's more like the chinese academic system is super competitive as a result tends to produce some you know pretty talented scholars that and like economically china's doing a lot better than a lot of countries so people can actually like afford to pay out of state tuition at an american university other people also wanted to know whether a lot of students are transfers and yes ucla and like the uc's in general have a pretty strong transfer culture because the uc system has like a i don't know what it's called exactly but there are a lot of like programs in which um transfers from california community colleges are given priority in being admitted to the school like i think the admission rate for freshmen was somewhere around 12 whereas the admission rate for transfers is around 22 which like i think is great we love our community college transfer students here and in regards to the general social atmosphere it's hard for me to like perfectly sum it up so i'll do my best through these other questions that people ask one area is greek life like whether it's big on campus and it's definitely not as big a thing as at a lot of other public schools i think around 10 of the student body is in greek life which is not small but it's also not massive and there are definitely a lot of parties that are not frat parties to go to although i guess like right now i don't think there are any parties to go to at least there better not be because frick i want to go to school in person next fall somewhat related i guess like is there a big party culture and i think the culture of ucla is really known for being work hard play hard where there are a lot of opportunities to like do fun things like game days and events and like big parties if you want to but people are still like pretty academically good like you know it's a freaking hard school to get into and academics are pretty demanding as far as events and traditions i don't actually know as much as i wish i did because you know a lot of things have been cancelled due to the world situation but one thing i do know about and i have kind of sort of participated in i mean not really because like i just sleep through it most of the time but there's this thing called like final screaming that you might have seen videos of on tick tock i've seen a couple of those go pretty viral basically during finals week at midnight basically every day people open their windows in the dorm buildings in westwood in the apartments and just yell for like a minute there's also the legend of the inverted fountain which is one of the fountains on the campus when you go to orientation on a normal year when it's in person you get bruin ties which is like being baptized in the inverted fountain and then after that you cannot touch the fountain again until you graduate otherwise the legend says that you'll have to stay an extra quarter it was also asked whether there's a lot of diversity and yeah i think so not only in like racial characteristics but there's diversity in gender expression and sexuality and like country of origin and like what background story you have there's like out of everyone i've met here like there's no two who are alike in you know their story which sounds cheesy as frick but like genuinely it's cool there's a lot of divers and lastly just like the general competitiveness i know it's a very competitive school to get into i went through the freaking application process like the rest of y'all um but once you get there the atmosphere is not really particularly competitive in my experience i hear a lot that people at cal are pretty cut through although like my friends who go to cal berkeley are not like competitive towards me but maybe it's just because like i'm not really their competition because i go to a completely different school as i kind of mentioned in the academic section it doesn't feel like you're fighting other students for like access to opportunities and resources and like jobs and stuff it just feels like people are friendly and people want to work together but one thing to know is that extracurriculars can be a bit more competitive i think i answered this on one of my instagram stories but some clubs and organizations like you have to apply to get into but and i know that some of the pre-med clubs or like being in consulting or like investment those clubs are a little or a lot more competitive like some of them are like genuinely harder to get into than the school itself but for most interests there's such a wide range of opportunities and groups and clubs and all that stuff available that there is probably a niche for everyone and even if you want to get into like a higher level group but you haven't gotten in because like you don't have that much background experience there's also like organizations that are made for beginners to learn not to flex again but like i know i'm already good at the things that interest me so i haven't had any sort of like particularly difficult time getting into the clubs and organizations i want to be a part of anyways i hope you found this interesting or helpful in some way i know it's disorganized as hell and i'm kind of just rambling on to myself but you know i want this to be like talking to a friend who goes to the school and i'm just going to give you my stream of consciousness advice and experience and i hope you enjoyed it i upload new videos on this channel like whenever not very regularly as you can see but you can also visit my main channel my instagram and my tic talk for like student life related content thanks for watching see you next time

Channel: jazzy doesn't study

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Id: MXGYpVjZpn4

Length: 31min 26sec (1886 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021