While UCLA students settle back into their school routine after spring break, Alessandra Lopez-Hutchison will be hours away from the university, settling into a completely new environment.
The second-year business-economics student plans to go to UC Santa Barbara though the University of California Intercampus Visitor Program, which allows students to attend a different UC for one quarter.
“The program is an academic opportunity to enrich your school experience,” said Cathy Behrens, a counselor for the UCLA College. “Maybe you want to take a class with a renowned professor or maybe you want to test the waters ““ classes at another college are so different.”
Lopez-Hutchison took an economics class at UC Santa Barbara during summer 2006 and said she liked going to school in a different environment. She took a class with Professor Robert Crouch, who worked in the Reagan administration and is the highest-paid professor in the UC system.
“I liked the professor because the information he taught us actually related to the world,” she said.
Many students who partake in the visitor program do so to take a class with a well-known professor in their field of study, Behrens said.
“We’re a UC system. If there’s a faculty member in a UC that is renowned, they should be able to take the class,” Behrens said. “It can better prepare them for grad school.”
From her experience in summer school, Lopez-Hutchison said she really liked it and feels that UC Santa Barbara is a lot different than UCLA.
“Here it’s more go, go, go, fast-paced, people are competitive and keep to themselves,” she said. “At Santa Barbara it’s a lot more relaxed and slower-paced and the people are more friendly.”
Lopez-Hutchison later learned about the visitor program and jumped at the opportunity to go back to the school. UC Santa Barbara was her first choice, but when she got into school here, she said she could not let the opportunity to go to UCLA pass her by.
While Lopez-Hutchison said she is looking forward to her stay at UC Santa Barbara, Alex Cohen, a student from UC Santa Barbara who came to UCLA through the visitor program, hopes to transfer to UCLA next year.
Cohen liked UCLA so much during his visit he decided he did not want to go back to UC Santa Barbara. He enrolled in UCLA’s extension program and plans to transfer next year. He said he likes the intercampus visitor program because it allows students to test the waters.
“I think that the program is really good because it gave me the opportunity to see a UC campus and experience the campus without transferring schools,” Cohen said.
But there are some limitations on the program. In certain schools, students cannot take classes in impacted fields because spaces are limited to students who attend that university. For example, even though Lopez-Hutchison needs economics classes for her major, she will be unable to take them at UC Santa Barbara. Instead, she will be taking only general education classes.
But she said she does not mind because she wants to take a class on Mexican history, which is not offered at UCLA.
Housing can be an issue as well for some students. Lopez-Hutchison has applied for university apartments, but said she is unlikely to get one. She said she plans to find a random roommate from Craigslist.
Behrens said some students live with friends or at home, if they are close enough, when visiting another university. But she added that one of the students who took part in the program slept on a friend’s couch for the entire quarter.