I’m sure you must be super excited when you first arrived in California! When the plane flew lower and lower, you couldn’t stop dreaming about your life at this wonderful place. Sunshine everyday, beautiful beach, splendid campus…
Hold a sec. Let’s draw our vision to something closer. Like how to make most of your first week! I’ll give you a brief introduction about things you can do for your personal life and academic life.
Personal life:
- Take care of your BODY.
First things first. The most important thing is to take care of your BODY! If you come from another country, jet lag will be your first challenge. After a long and exhausting travel, you might be sleepy during the day, wake up in the middle of night, have a bad appetite, can’t focus your attention. Oh, it sucks. I know there are so many things you are eager to do, but please don’t push yourself too hard and take good care of your body.
- Settle on a place to live.
You’ll definitely need a warm and safe place to settle down as your backup. You can choose to live on-campus or off-campus as they are quite different. There are no right or wrong choices and all you need to do is to find the place that fits you most.
Here’s the website of on-campus housing: https://housing.uci.edu/
Also, we have off-campus website: https://offcampus.housing.uci.edu/
After you find a place, get familiar with the surroundings, roommates commute, plaza around, etc.
- Buy furniture and groceries.
Since you just moved in your place, you must need to buy all kinds of stuff. Here are some recommendations on where to go:
Furniture: Ikea, Walmart, Target
American supermarkets: Albertson, Ralphs, Costco, Walmart, Target.
Chinese supermarket: 99 Ranch. Korean supermarket: Hmart. Japanese supermarket: Daiso.
Academic life:
- Get familiar with department and classrooms.
The main purpose of why we come to UCI is to study and achieve professional success. Although the personal life is the base of our life here, the key aspect should focus on the academic life. The key point is that we need to maintain a balance between personal life and academic life.
As for the first week or even before the first week, I think it’s necessary to get familiar with your own department and classrooms, so you could feel confident when everything goes crazy. Just go to your apartment, have a look around, drop by professors’ office, chat with colleagues maybe.
You can check the course information at webreg: https://www.reg.uci.edu/registrar/soc/webreg.html
Make sure to check where the classroom is before the quarter begins, get familiar with commute and things like that.
- Get familiar with resources on campus.
There are so many resources on campus that they are ready to help you and super willing to push you to success. A tip is that you can pay attention to the emails sent to you. Here are some resources:
International Center (IC): http://ic.uci.edu/
Graduate Resource Center: https://www.grad.uci.edu/services/grc/
Career Center: http://www.career.uci.edu/
Student Health Center: http://www.shc.uci.edu/
Dining Hall: http://www.food.uci.edu/
Above are some tips about how to make the most of your first week. Hope it helps and wish you have a wonderful start here at UCI!