Tulane Honors or UCLA? Please give advice!

carlman
Sun, 08 Apr 2012 19:12:47 +0000

I have a D graduating from UCLA and an S who will go to Tulane. UCLA is a great place but there are some things to know:


Freshman are packed 3 in a double room. It’s really tight and you may not like it.
The campus is nice but you will need a car to get anywhere fun or interesting in LA. Mass transit does not cut it. My D’s life changed greatly when she got a car there. If you can’t have one at some point, I would almost say don’t go for that reason alone.
Classes vary in size, but you will have a good number of really large ones where the prof might as well be on TV.
If you seek them out, opportunities to be involved in research (as a helper, anyway) are not that hard to find.
Have a thick skin. Something will go wrong and you will have to deal with a big bureaucracy.
Nobody cares how you are doing. Nobody. You can disappear from class for a month and no search team will be sent.
Most important point of all: Don’t assume that anything in particular will be available or accessible to you as a student unless you have asked really specific questions to verify this in advance (like now). My D found this out the hard way regarding art classes and studios (for majors only). Similarly, classes you need can disappear the quarter you need them, budget cuts can chop almost anything at random, and so on.


It’s still a great place. But go in there with eyes open.