UCLA students change direction

If statistics are any sort of benchmark, most UCLA undergraduates are pleased with their college experience.

UCLA has a freshman retention rate of 97 percent and a first-year transfer retention rate of 95 percent, according to Vu Tran, director of undergraduate admissions and relations with schools.

“Survey results (from 2006) showed that students don’t have problems with the academic program; 70-plus percent are happy overall with their undergraduate experience, and 82 percent of students who took the survey said they were at least satisfied,” he said.

Despite the norm, however, there are those whose paths ultimately lead elsewhere.

While some students choose to transfer out of UCLA for academic reasons, others go in search of a different social scene, different cultural surroundings or a different atmosphere.

Ian Hampton, now a third-year political economy student, was already enrolled at UCLA when he received a letter informing him he was no longer on the admissions waiting list at Georgetown University.

“Georgetown informed me that I could either defer my admission for a year and enter as a member of the class of 2011, or I could reapply as a sophomore transfer. I chose to do the latter option.”

Hampton said he “equivocated for some time,” but ultimately decided that Georgetown was where he belonged.

At Georgetown, Hampton found the academic environment he preferred, he said.

“I think that the class size is much smaller here, and I have intimate contact with my professors. Students here are more engaged,” he said.

The social transition was somewhat challenging, Hampton said, explaining that his identity as a Georgetown student is not identical to that of his peers.

“It’s kind of an alienating experience at first, and it takes about six months to meet people through classes and extracurricular experiences. Even still, you don’t feel that you have as much in common with your classmates ““ as much as those who have been here since year one,” he said.

But even after crossing the bridge, the grass does not always seem so green.

“It’s an ongoing question that remains to be answered,” he said. “There are trade-offs, but there are definitely times when I wish I could go back to Westwood, when life was good.”

Academics aside, some students choose to depart from UCLA in search of new social circumstances.

“I just wasn’t that thrilled with UCLA as a school in general. It may have been partially because of the big classes, but it felt impersonal,” said Niko Leyva, a third-year history student at UC Davis. “I got a little tired of that whole scene. I had a lot of friends at Davis who said they were really having fun at UC Davis and that I might have a great time there instead.”

Leyva, who was a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity while at UCLA, said his decision was in part swayed by a wish to distance himself from Greek life.

“I liked being in a frat at UCLA. I maybe got a little tired of it, … not the frat itself but the Greek scene, after a couple years. Part of the decision to move up here was getting away from that,” he said.

Shirley Birch, a third-year integrative biology and public health student at UC Berkeley, said she chose to leave UCLA for reasons that transcended both academic and social complaints.

“Academically it was totally OK,” she said. “It wasn’t an academic issue. It wasn’t a social issue. It was an atmosphere issue. I didn’t enjoy the general atmosphere at UCLA. It wasn’t nature-oriented enough; it wasn’t culturally diverse enough; it wasn’t different enough from what I had experienced before, so I didn’t think it was quite the full college experience I had wanted.”

Birch said that the change was just what she needed, and while she looks back fondly on her time at UCLA, she’s glad to be where she is now.

“It’s been amazing. I couldn’t ask for more. I love it at Berkeley,” she said. “It’s got the Northern California vibe that I just wasn’t used to, and that’s what I wanted mostly. I love it. It feels like home now.”

For some, the decision to transfer out of UCLA holds a great deal of personal and sentimental significance.

Natalie Chung, now an undeclared second-year student at Pomona College, entered UCLA in fall of 2007 convinced it was the right fit.

“I think UCLA is a great school, and it was a good choice for me at the time to go to such a large school because I felt there were many opportunities to do research. I didn’t feel that UCLA was exactly what I wanted, but it was good enough,” she said.

Chung said she eventually decided that she wanted to experience a smaller school, but found the transfer application process to be quite different from her initial application experience.

“I put more time and effort into that one application than I did to the 16 in high school,” Chung said. “It meant so much more to me because I wasn’t desperate to get into another school. I feel like I have more experience in what college is and what I want out of it, so the transfer application process was much more meaningful.”

Tea Ho, now a first-year art student at Berkeley City College, left UCLA at the end of last quarter because of a personal academic realization.

“The final thing about the school was that I realized I was paying $24,000 a year to sit in lecture halls with 300 kids. I thought it was really alienating and I felt like I wasn’t getting an education I couldn’t get somewhere else as an undergrad,” she said.

While at UCLA, Ho had been a pre-psychology student, but said that she has since decided that her interests lie elsewhere.

“I did that for my parents. A lot of the decision to leave was me just making a choice for myself,” she said.

UCLA does not keep records of the eventual destinations of students who leave the university.

“It is very difficult to collect that data,” Tran said. “But I can tell you that 86 or 87 percent of people who start here (as freshmen) finish in 4 years and in 2 years for transfers.”

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