The University of California San Diego

Date: Jul 08 2011
Major: Other (This Major's Salary over time)
Cog Sci Major. DO NOT enroll in this major, or if you do, do so elsewhere. Very poor lectures delivered by people who wish they didn't have to lecture. Inaccessible professors and TAs who are indifferent and or hostile to students. Huge amount of politics with respect to the TAs. I know of at least one TA who deliberately set the curve in her class to achieve an act of revenge against a particular student. This kind of thing is rampant. I know of another graduate student who was ejected by a fellow graduate student on a whim (slight personality conflict, the TA found this other TA "distasteful"), effectively forcing him to retool and/or end his career path all with the supervising PI's consent and or indifference. This is a department that is seeking to answer the question- "How bad can an undergraduate degree be and still have people enrolling?".

The campus is clean but bereft of any hint of school spirit. It's more like a business park. The places where students congregate are essentially some form of McDonalds or Starbucks, where you line up, buy your food , sit down eat it and leave. There is no RAT or anything of this nature. San Diego is interesting but also 12 miles away so if you're ON campus, the design of the campus really starts to weigh on you. In fact, the campus was designed to be riot proof, so for instance, each building is essentially a stack of identically laid-out, un-landmarked halls with doors. That's it. It's VERY easy to become disoriented since every hall looks the same and every floor looks the same. You turn the corner and it looks exactly like the hall you just walked down and so on until you come back to the place you started. This for five and six floors. Riot proof since it's hard to navigate unless you're there everyday and recognize the subtle navigational cues of THAT coffee spill on the carpet and THAT knick knack on some professor's door.

School spirit is non-existent. Essentially, it's hard to meet anyone casually since there's no place to just hang out. The people you know are those in your major during your gut classes and then after those are over and you're take electives, everyone is dispersed and you're back to square one socially. You never see those people again.

My department has a huge turnover in facualty year over year and what this appears to imply is that the assholes survive and drive the decent profs who take some interest in their students out. This is college where the profs are researchers- you, the undergrad are a waste of their time.

Every little society develops it's own culture and this one happens to suck. I blame in part at least the system of incentives that UCSD puts in place. Bring us money through research grants or be thrown overboard. taking an interest in your students gets you NOTHING, so do so at the risk of your continued employment.

No social life, petty politics determining grades, resource starvation by design. Any community college will offer a better educational experience than UCSD.