Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Having an Esri site license means the ArcGIS software can be distributed to anyone on campus with a Windows-based computer. The Office of Information & Technology manages the site license and charges an annual fee for faculty and staff to use the software.
UCI students can receive free one-year copies of ArcGIS Software. The “student copy” (or student trial or student license) of ArcGIS is actually identical to the full-capacity, professional copy of ArcGIS which is distributed to faculty and staff. The student copy is simply limited in its distribution to students. Students attending GIS classes on campus can request a copy of the software from their professor. Students not attending a GIS class can request a copy of the software from.
The license expires the first week of March of every year. If you receive a warning that your license is about to expire, return to the form to request a new license. For pricing, installation instructions, and software usage details go here: http://licenses.oit.uci.edu/arcgis
QGIS
A free alternative to ArcGIS that is available on both Mac and Windows is QGIS. It is much the same as ArcGIS minus a few advanced features, but it is a good program to get started with general GIS practices. You can download it here: http://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html#
For Mac you can download it directly from here. Each of the components under “QGIS Standard” is required to work on Mac, so download and install each of the following from that link: “GDAL Complete 1.11 framework package,” “Matplotlib Python module,” “GIS 2.8.1-1 “