UCLA vs. Wake Forest - need help

Parent Cafe
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<p>My son has a big decision to make. He needs to decide between UCLA and Wake Forest. You can’t find two more different schools - [Urban West Coast - suburban Southeast] [Incredibly diverse - Not diverse] [Huge - Small] [Large classes - Small Classes].</p>

<p>My son has visited both and both have some appeal to him. He’s planning to major in one of the Biological Sciences. </p>

<p>They are both great schools - I think UCLA has a better academic reputation but is not as focused on undergraduates as Wake Forest. </p>

<p>Without knowing my son - I’d just like your gut/visceral reaction to this choice? What would you do? What would you recommend to your child?</p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

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<p>I’m going to assume you’re out of state for UCLA and thus will be paying about the same cost. If I take money out of the equation, I think I might lean towards Wake Forest for undergraduate. But I prefer smaller schools for undergrad in general. But, of course, it all depends on which school your SON prefers. Has he visited both?</p>

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<p>Go Hawkeyes:</p>

<p>one thing the large state U’s have is massive competition in the pre-med classes, such as Bio. That competition also creates mistrust, tampering, cheating, et al. However, from what I’ve heard, WF is a very southern preppy school, so fit would be critical. </p>

<p>What does his gut tell him?</p>

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<p>I have a client on the Bio faculty at UCLA and if he’s an example, I’m impressed. TheMom says that the Life Sciences majors in general benefit from the presence of the UCLA Medical Center, which is <em>huge</em>.</p>

<p>Despite my warm feelings for UCLA, my feeling about it depends on the major and the kid. Even if it weren’t far too close to home (15 minutes) for our D, I’m not sure that it would have been a good fit for her, for instance. Of course, we’re LAC converts too.</p>

<p>As far as the focus on undergrads, I think it’s much better at UCLA than many large research uni’s.</p>

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<p>TheDad et al.: Thanks for your posts. (By the way, I’m a father who lives in New Jersey - my son and wife have been using this username and I think my son was fooling around with the profile - we do have family in Iowa, so Go Hawkeyes)
Also, my condolences to you. I also lost my Dad last month.
I feel a bit better about UCLA now after your post. My son is a real self-starter and I’m not too worried about the size of UCLA. He has a four-year Army ROTC scholarship offer (and he actually wants to serve as an officer for awhile, maybe not a career) and UCLA has a great club hockey team - so I think he’d have an immediate smaller social group around him as soon as he arrives. Son’s biggest worry is social life - which surprised me - on his two-day visit to UCLA he said that the campus seemed very quiet and he got the impression that a lot of kids leave on the weekends. He was also surprised at the size of the Asian-American population - not a problem for him - we live in a very diverse town - but just a surprise. As an East Coaster who hasn’t been to the UCLA campus in 25 years, I thought UCLA would be a big party school. I’m not pushing my son but I do like the diversity of UCLA - both ethnically and socioeconomically. Wake Forest is a great school but very small and not very diverse.</p>

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<p>UCLA’s population does go down during weekends simply because so many kids are local; TheMom notes that this is more pronounced for undergrad students than grad. However, I was on campus during the past two Saturdays and it wasn’t like the middle of the desert…for instance, there was a massive Ultimate Frisbee competition on the intramural grounds this last Saturday (I’d never seen the game before…wow, it was interesting). I’d guess your son would connect with enough people that he’ll never be an island…the Westside has so much to do on weekends anyway.</p>

<p>But social connections are about the <em>last</em> thing I’d worry about at UCLA. There are so many people, so many activities, that the trick is to find balance and not neglect your studies.</p>

<p>UCLA (and Berkeley, Irvine) do have high numbers of Asians…lots of high-achieving kids. (My D once remarked that I was hard [demanding] for a parent with respect to academics but that if we were Jewish I’d be normal and if we were Asian I’d be easy…LOL.) I like the cosmopolitan feel of both UCLA and Los Angeles as a whole but I have had a couple of clients, relocating in from other parts of the country, who have, umm, freaked. And promptly headed for the suburb of Simi Valley, which is probably the closest you can get to small-town Ohio or Tennessee around here.</p>

<p>I’m sorry to hear about your Dad as well. It happens to most all of us sooner or later but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier.</p>

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<p>In a former life I worked for the City of Simi Valley and started development of the Civic Center there. That was way back in the 70’s. Then it was known as the city where the most cops lived.</p>

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<p>GoUSA:</p>

<p>the other reason that the campus appears less than full after hours is that local housing is extremely expensive, given the upscale mansions in neighboring BelAir. Thus, many upper classmen move off campus and head to the beach towns to share an apartment or house; with limited bus service, many drive. As a result, UCLA has a more of a commuter feel than you would expect, even for non-local kids who “move” to campus. </p>

<p>Since your kid has some obvious interests, you might e-mail the Commandant (Gen?) of ROTC and the hockey club manager and ask to speak (or e-mail) with some kids in thier programs.</p>

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<p>Uh, thedad, [and all coastal livers], there are differences between areas in the vast wastelands of the center of the country, believe it or not. I’ve lived in both Ohio and Tennessee and they are very, very different states, so different, in fact, that is very possible to hate one and really enjoy the other. I’ve literally never seen them lumped together.</p>

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<p>Wait a sec, thedad, someone gave you a hard time on “the schools you tried to like” thread and I can’t pick on you here, too! Sorry! I’d delete that last post if I could. I’ve just lived both places and hated one so much - they are so different!- that it struck a personal bad chord. Sorry again.</p>

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<p>Heidi, no offense taken. I picked Tennessee and Ohio deliberately, though there are other pairings I could have chosen as well, because <em>despite</em> their differences–about which I agree–small town life in both places have an awful lot of similarities. We have good friends who come from a place called Rural Retreat, Virginia, population 300…it could be thrown into the mix, too.</p>

<p>Barrons, it still seems as if every third white male in Simi is a retired police officer, according to those who live there. The population is still mostly comprised of 97 different shades of white and diversity tends to mean shopping at K-Mart rather than Target. One man’s homogeneity is another’s stifling narrowness. Going to Simi makes me want to wear an earring just to shake things up and I’m pretty far from the counter-cultural end of the spectrum and I don’t believe that my name and the word “hip” has ever been used seriously in the same sentence.</p>

<p>Add to Heidi: If I wasn’t clear, I was thinking of the small towns specifically and both states have quite a few. Certainly, even a Left Coast Yankee like me can make distinctions among Memphis/Nashville/Knoxville and Cleveland/Columbus/Canton. At a guess, probably the closest pairing of cities might be Canton/Knoxville but that’s a gut feel based on abstracted data.</p>

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<p>well, thedad, my sister, who lives in Dayton, just called and though she seemed to be puzzled as to why I would be discussing this over the internet, we decided that the only way to get this into your head was to say… well, isn’t Santa Monica the same as Bakersfield? Sacramento like Portland? Aren’t all the cities out there on the west coast basically similar? [because thedad, canton is.not.like.knoxville.]</p>

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<p>Heidi, neither SM nor Bakersfield are small towns. That’s the point. The Canton/Knoxville thing was an acknowledgement that the two aren’t all that similar…they’re just the closest pairing of the ones offered, imo.
I.e., they’re closer than Cleveland and Nashville.</p>

<p>However, small towns, regardless of where they are, tend to be less cosmopolitan, more ruthless about enforcing social norms, and offer a heck of a lot less privacy…regardless of state or local accent.
Moose Dropping, Oregon and Broken Condom, New Mexico have much more in common that you might think from external appearances.</p>

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<p>Now you are picking on Oregon, TheDAd? Shame on you. I am gonna have you banned from Gallegos Brothers!</p>

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<p>thedad, I wrote this overly long post that everyone else can skip because it is frustrating to me, as a middle-of-the-country dweller, that some east and west coast residents continue to view everyone and every state, city and town in the middle of the country as interchangeable. </p>

<p>FYI, Canton is a blue collar, Democratic-voting, struggling industrial town close to Cleveland and Akron with a high unemployment rate, settled by Eastern and Southern European immigrants. Knoxville is a fairly prosperous Southern college town in a highly Republican area of Tennessee, primarily settled by immigrants from the British Isles, and especially by the Scots-Irish. </p>

<p>Nashville, with Vanderbilt’s medical center, its pro sports teams and affluent suburbs, has more in common with Cleveland than Canton does with Knoxville. [And Nashville has significant differences with Cleveland in their corporate/industrial backgrounds, etc.] </p>

<p>I also disagree categorically with your original assertion that small towns in Ohio and Tennessee and indeed, all over the middle of the country, are interchangeable. The small towns in the agricultural powerhouse states of the Midwest are different from the small towns of the less traditionally economically successful rural South. Just check out the statistics for Southern vs. Midwestern states in any category: money spent per pupil on education, medical facilities, infant mortality, etc, etc and you will begin to see the differences that still exist between the Northern and Southern states. </p>

<p>If you meant to say in your original post that small towns can be ruthless socially, and equally so in northern and southern small towns, I would disagree with those assertions, too. It’s my opinion that small towns in the South would have a higher possibility for social ruthlessness and norm enforcement given the prevalence of more dogmatic religious affiliations in the South, i.e., Baptist and Church of Christ [did you know that Church of Christ members believe that only Church of Christ members are going to Heaven? Not Presbyterians, not Methodists, just them?] and the long-standing social hierarchies in the South based on one’s grandparents and great-grandparents social standing. I would be willing to concede, however, given my intimate knowledge of several small farming towns in the agricultural Midwest, that any small town in the South might be as blissfully socially relaxed as the small towns I am familiar with. I don’t know what the opposite of the word ruthless would be, but that would be my personal experience with small town social structure/norm enforcement.</p>