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
