<p>I personally think that UCSD’s campus is very ugly. It’s in a beautiful part of San Diego by the beach, but they’ve made it really rather sprawling and full of roads. I like a nice, compact, walkable campus. I’ve also heard it’s super cut-throat, and know a few people that dropped out for the local CSU just to be around nicer people, though you might get this at all the UC’s, as they’re all pretty rigorous.</p>
<p>When I visited Berkeley I wasn’t a fan of the weather. I went in the summer and it was cold and dreary, and students there said it was almost always like that. And as mentioned above, its in a sort of sketchy part of town.</p>
<p>Davis is kind of in the middle of nowhere. You’ll have to go pretty far to get any kind of city life. Case in point: the only reason I visited was because it was in the middle of a trip across the CA central valley and we needed to break up the monotonous hours of driving on both sides of the campus.</p>
<p>The reputations of UC Riverside and Merced don’t even approach that of the other campuses.</p>
<p>Irvine has a reputation as a commuter school.</p>
<p>Don’t know much about Santa Cruz, and I don’t know of anything particularly bad about UCLA: It’s like a warmer Berkeley that doesn’t have quite the prestige.</p>