Dear incoming students,
Welcome to UCLA. Before you actually start school, I have this column to offer as advice. As much as you may have done nothing for the last year besides worry about your GPA and whether or not you had enough extracurriculars to get into your top choice ““ and don’t worry, we all did this ““ it’s time to put that mindset aside.
Given, grades are not to be completely forgotten about in college ““ if you want to get into a decent graduate program, you may have to take a gander at your GPA every once in a while. And it’s probably more important to get involved in extracurriculars now than it was in high school but for different reasons. At a school this large, if you aren’t involved in something ““ be it Greek life, political clubs, community service or even the Daily Bruin ““ you will find yourself lost like a small fish in the proverbial ocean.
All in all, the next four years should first and foremost be about one thing: enjoying yourself. And more specifically, first year offers you the biggest opportunity to do just that. Once you get over the shock of being at a school that’s so large, start thinking about what exactly you want to do while you’re at UCLA. Being that it is so large, UCLA has endless opportunities for students.
I remember the activities fair on the Intramural Field right before Zero Week and how the problem wasn’t finding something I wanted to do, but filtering activities I was interested in from the hundreds that I did not want to pursue (Thanks but no thanks, Bruin Unicyclists.).
The point of all this is to find something you want to do. Don’t become involved in something because you think it will look good later on. Become involved because you know it will make you happy.
If you have to decide whether you will get involved in a major club, such as the Pre-Law Society, or a club that just sounds interesting (wine tasting, anyone?), give the more interesting one a shot.
You have four years to be serious about what interests you want to pursue, so maybe one quarter during your first year can be devoted to just trying something new.
Secondly, don’t worry about your GPA. For many of us, high school was just four years ““ well, three and a half if you consider the fact that many of us stopped caring about school when first semester of senior year ended ““ of worrying about whether or not we would get the desired 0.0001 increase in our GPA by the year’s end.
But now that you’re in college, if you want to take a class because you think it sounds interesting, don’t hesitate because people say it’s hard or that it will kill your GPA. Some of the more rewarding class experiences are actually those in which you don’t do well in the class but nonetheless leave more interested in the subject matter than you were when the class began.
Case in point: The fall quarter of my first year I took a class on Socrates. I didn’t really know anything about the class or the professor beyond that it was roughly about how the Greek philosopher’s theories fit into modern ideas of civil disobedience. So I decided to take it. The class required more reading than I had ever been assigned in high school. To top it off, the final paper was supposed to be a minimum of 15 pages long, and I had never written anything longer than seven, if you count the cover page and bibliography.
That said, it remains probably one of the best classes I have taken here, and it exposed me to levels of thought and discussion that I hadn’t seen in high school and frankly did not know were out there.
So students, if I can offer you any useful piece of advice, it would be to get involved and take classes you want to take to make the most of the four years you have ahead. Take Earth and Space Sciences 17 (the dinosaur class) or even a class on Disney movies ““ I believe this class was offered spring quarter last year.
Oh, and go out and have more fun than you probably should. There is nothing like partying in front of Powell along with thousands of fellow students in your underwear on the Wednesday night of finals week.