Everyone makes mistakes, especially in college when you’re in a brand new place. At UCSD, there are some classic mistakes that freshman make. The best way to avoid these mistakes is to know them inside and out. Here are 10 things you should literally never do at UCSD!
Geisel Library consists of eight floors, each with its own specific use. The lower floors are for group work so noise is allowed. But the higher the floor, the more study groups or individuals are required to be quiet, with the eighth floor designated the silent study floor. Any reference to studying on the eighth floor equates cramming for stressful exams. That said, if any noise is made on the eighth floor, be it squeaky shoes or a cough, the perpetrator will be vehemently glared at by all the ultra-stressed students within earshot.
Library Walk transforms from a deserted walkway to a human stampede zone in the short ten minutes between classes. Hundreds of students pour out of the various lecture halls and scramble in all directions to reach their next class. Best of luck to you if your shoe lace gets untied in the rush because stopping to tie it again could mean becoming a traffic hazard for fast-walking students, bikers, skateboarders, and scooter-riders. And if no one crashes into you, people out flyering for school orgs or religious groups will catch you because you weren’t moving along fast enough.
These were used during pre-UC San Diego times when the facility was still a military base called Camp Matthews. But they are no longer commonly used as shortcuts between lecture halls so don’t go through them. If caught, you might get kicked out of school. But it’s still cool to imagine what you might find if you ever went down that manhole in front of Main Gym…
Scream away your stress every night during finals week in the five minutes before quiet hours designated for the primal scream. For five minutes straight, scream about your anxiety and stress over your falling gpa, non-existent social life, extreme sleep deprivation, crumbling career dreams, and anything else in between.
Lines for free food or anything free in general get extremely long at a school with a gazillion broke college students. So arrive early to minimize the amount of time you’ll be standing in line and decreasing the likelihood of the event running out of whatever free thing they are offering by the time your turn comes.
School events such as the Career Fair are heavily attended by proactive students. Lines to gain admission to the Career Fair typically stretch from RIMAC to almost Peterson Hall. Proactive students looking for part time jobs or internships arrive hours in advance to be among the first few hundred students, thus minimizing the amount of time required to wait in line for competitive companies (like Facebook) once they get inside the fair.
During orientation, you get to do the Sun God ritual—walking backwards under Sun God with your eyes closed and trying not to fall backwards—but you’re only supposed to do it once in your lifetime to mark your entry into UC San Diego and to garner good luck. Don’t mess it up by doing it twice because you might need that extra bit of luck when taking your organic chemistry final.
Library Walk isn’t the only busy place on campus between classes. Right on the hour every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and alternatingly on the hour and half hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays, hordes of students pour into Pines, the most popular dining hall on campus. Complex, intersecting lines for different food stations somehow manage to form within moments of the rush. Then lines forming at the registers loop in the opposite direction to add to the chaos. Anything that impedes the speedy movement of the lines are greatly irksome to both students in the line and people serving the food.
If you pull an all-nighter studying for that midterm, be double or triple sure you’ll wake up to take the exam after a quick cat nap. The same goes for those 8 am classes. Not everyone is a morning riser who habitually wakes up by 6:30 am to get ready for a day of classes.
Even if it means hauling your homework down to the beach because your classes are way too time consuming, make every effort to go to the beach. You might never get as great an access to the beach after you graduate because not everyone can afford a gorgeous beach front house.
*This is a sponsored post. All opinions are my own. Midterms are finally over and now you can look forward to…
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