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Housing Application Experience

This post is going to be a bit more serious since I would like to cover one aspect of college life here at UCI that took me off guard. Specifically the housing options for your second year at UCI.

At 7am on November 17th, the applications for housing next year, as in next academic year, were opened. To have the window open for applications for sophomore year housing while your still a freshman in your first quarter didn’t make sense to me. Either way with the application window opening at 7am, many students were left with 2 options, stay up or sleep way earlier than they are used to, so that they can apply for housing for their second year at UCI. My dorm decided to stay up and apply so we loaded up on snacks and plugged in. While everyone else was in the first floor kitchen readying themselves, my friends and I were up in my room working on various assignments and in my case, playing the occasional video game.

By the time 7 am rolled around, my roommate was fast asleep while the rest of the people in my room were in various states of sleep deprivation. Personally I was doing okay because a friend of mine logged into the game I was playing so I guess I got lucky. We quickly woke everyone that was still in the room up and started the application process. I fondly remember how quick and fluid the application process was, is what I wish I could say because the second you hit begin application, you could feel all the traffic that was going through the site. All the traffic caused my application to be submitted at 7:14 am which, after talking to some other students, is apparently a really late time to submit the application. Once the application was finished, I decided it was to my benefit to sleep until my alarm at 8 am wakes me up. So in essence, what I strongly recommend my readers to do when they start their undergraduate year at UCI is to try and get your R.A to get everyone to tour the off-campus and on-campus housing options or if your R.A is not down to go just grab a group of friends and tour them yourself. Either way you need to figure out where you are planning to stay the following year. The application will ask you to rank the various housing communities in order of preference so it would be in your best interest to tour all of them.

The communities are as follows: Vista del Campo Norte, Vista del Campo, Camino del Sol, Campus Village, Puerta del Sol, and Arroyo Vista.
So I strongly recommend you to check those communities out at some point during your first quarter and figure out which ones you like better than others.

 

Zot On!

Josh

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Dance at UCI

Coming to UCI, I had no idea how big of a deal dance was. With two left feet, joining a dance team was the last thing on my list but I’ve learned so so much about the UCI dance community in the last couple weeks and would love to share it with you guys.

During week 0 the teams held workshops to teach their choreography and promote auditions. I went to a couple of the workshops with my friends and even though I can’t dance, it was fun to get out of my comfort zone and meet some amazing people. That was my first taste of the dance community followed by ALL UCI 8.

At ALL UCI, the major dance teams like Urban Motus, MCIA, Kaba Modern, CADC showcased one of their pieces and I was literally amazed by how they’re so precise and passionate about dance. Watch this video of Common Ground’s piece, it’s insane. There were also 3 v 3 dance battle and that got so heated so fast. You could feel their energy around the room as we were mesmerized by their movements.

As the quarter started, the teams started their audition weeks. It varies from team to team, but generally, the team holds a week workshops to teach their audition pieces. I swear I never saw my dance friends before 2 AM during those weeks. Then on audition day, everyone comes to the student center stage and performs the pieces to try to get on the team.

I went to cheer on my friend during his MCIA audition and it was insane. Everyone auditioning has put so much time and effort into learning the pieces and they’re so passionate and energetic, it’s infectious. Based off the performances, the team picks dancers they like to interview and then chooses the people who make the team! (Shout out to my friend Robert who made Urmo!!)

Besides the audition teams, there’s also the KASA freshman dance off. It’s a freshmen only dance team that competes with KASA teams from other schools in this huge event in LA. I thought the auditions were intense but that’s literally child’s play compared to the amount of time and effort people in KASA put in. The week leading up to the competition, they practiced at least 7 PM-5 AM everyday. Every. Single. Day. However, it seemed like a really fun experience and you get to bond with other freshmen dancers too! Everyone makes it since there’s no auditions so this is definitely a cool option if you want to try out dance.

I’m definitely NOT an expert on dance teams, but I can tell the dance culture at UCI is huge. Teams like LVO give people a chance to join a team with no experience and teams like CADC give experienced dancers a place to thrive and show off their skills. No matter what level you are, there’s a dance team for you at UCI. There’s a sense of family you get when you spend twelve hours a week with a group of people that can’t be matched.