How overblown is the UCLA name???

beyphy
Sun, 19 Jun 2011 18:56:01 +0000

I didn’t start UCLA with your negative attitude, but here’s a rule i’ve made within my one year of attending UCLA:

don’t underestimate UCLA.

I can’t tell you how many times i keep doing this, and how many times the university, it’s students, and its faculty continue to surprise me.



The professors who used to make this university worthy of its name are starting to move to privates where they receive more deserving salaries, and we are left with whatever can be salvaged.



[The Highest-Paying Colleges: American Association of University Professors Study](The Highest-Paying Colleges: American Association of University Professors Study | HuffPost College)

[The Daily Bruin :: The University of California aims to retain its faculty with merit-based raises and competitive salaries](http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2011/03/the_university_of_california_aims_to_retain_its_faculty_with_meritbased_raises_and_competitive_salar)

it seems like UCLA is one of the highest paying universities in the world. Sure, other schools might pay more, but some people love living in the city/the faculty members so they wouldn’t want to leave anyway. The world isn’t completely driven by money.

UCLA’s biggest competition in terms of salary is probably Caltech, but given their ridiculously small amount of students, i doubt they go out actively and steal professors from UCLA.



Like Northwestern and UChicago, Cornell is one of the worst places for pre-med. Why am I still going to UCLA? Because CC is not even an option for me, and Berkeley is as bad as Cornell when it comes to grading (and Berkeley will be in the same hole as UCLA in the future). UCLA has a slight advantage.



i’ve seen you make plenty of unsourced seemingly anecdotal comments like ‘UChicago is where dreams go to die’ and so on. The truth is if you’re meant to go to med school, you’ll get in no matter what institution you’re coming from. And there’s probably statistics on individuals from certain institutions. If the avg GPA at UCLA for pre-med students is a 3.6, whereas at UChicago it’s a 3.4, i doubt that’s something that med schools wouldn’t take into account. It would seem absurd to me that schools just look at the GPA without considering the rigor of the workload.

my advice is if you’re going there so negatively, you might want to apply to another university on the beginning of your sophmore year. If you end up hating UCLA, you might want to transfer out. But remember what i’ve said above, more often than not, you’ll find UCLA surprises you.