Transfer from UCLA to UCI after fall quarter

badgolfer
Tue, 20 Oct 2015 00:29:50 +0000

Obviously I’m inferring a lot by reading your last post, but my impression is you are not happy with the social pressures and demands of living in the dorm. And sitting quietly at home studying and showing up on campus just for classes and maybe office hours seems like a way to “fix” things. That’s one point of view.

Let me offer another perspective. While you’re still a ucla student I suggest you set up a meeting with a career counselor (not one of the peer advisors and not the quickie drop-in, but a bona-fide 30 minute chat with a real counselor). I think they’ll tell you the same think I’m about to, which is that the “lone-wolf” quietly getting all the things done their manager asks and being rewarded for doing so isn’t how the world works. The people that are out in the workforce don’t come from some other planet but are the kids around you, some who recently graduated & some that graduated decades ago.

College classes are not reflective of the workforce in many ways. In class you are given assigments that can be completed in a week or two for the most part, the occasional 10-week term assignment, and working too close with others is called “cheating”. In the workforce you may be working on a project with dozens or even hundreds of people when its all added up, the project started well before you got there, and may run months or even years (even if they release a version they keep tinkering, adding features, fixing bugs, etc). Which means that employers expect you to be able to work well and closely with others, that in order to get your job done you’ll need to use social skills to persuade others to explain things they’re doing that you need to understand, to accomodate the work you’re doing in the stuff they are doing. And even getting thru the CSE classes past the frosh/soph year is going to involve a lot of working with others as they help you on stuff they understand but you don’t and vice-versa.

So maybe I’m completely off base here, but I get the sense that you are frustrated/unhappy with the “colllege experience” and think you can make it go away. You can, but in the larger sense you’ll be back into the milieu once you graduate college. Some may have a bit more struggle in college socially than others, but it does serve as a valuable learning and testing ground to see what works for you and what doesn’t.