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.
Hello again readers! So midterm season has ended or is close to ending for many students here at UCI. So I wanted to share my experiences of going through the first midterm of my career at UCI. Just an FYI, I only had to take 2 midterms this quarter, one for Math 2A (Calculus) and one for Environmental Engineering Challenges (EngRCEE) 60. While I was not expecting to have anything from the professors to use for review my math professor gave us a .pdf for a sample midterm and told us the lecture before what specifically was going to be on the test. My environmental engineering class wasn’t so generous.
The way I studied for the Math 2A midterm was quite the story, so my roommate Felix, our friend Brendon and I were heading back to the dorm room after eating dinner at the Anteatery (the cafeteria for Mesa Court residents) and we are discussing how we got stuck on a question or two on the sample midterm. Then Brendon suggests we join him in the study room that one of the people in our dorm had reserved for themselves. It’s important to note here that we accepted the invitation because Felix and I were under the impression that we were going to get help with the problems we had problems with.
Either way, fast forward a few minutes and we are in the study room and introducing ourselves to the others in there and I brought up the questions I had issues with. From there I asked the group if they finished it and if I could see their work for it. To my surprise everyone looked at me like I was crazy then soon after said they didn’t even do the sample midterm yet. Keep in mind that this is the night before the exam. So as it ended up, Felix and I ended up teaching the other people in that 2 hour study session. Looking back, it was probably better for the both of us that we ended up teaching people how to do the problems because it helped us understand the process of how to solve such a problem.
In short, go to study sessions with your friends because even if you end up teaching the entire room how to do that problem, you will remember how to solve it better than everyone else in that room.
“You have to, in some ways, trust in the human spirit and in human ingenuity.” Ariel Garten
The studying for Math 2A continued later that night in my dorm room with Felix, a new friend we made called Wong, and I. We were discussing how to solve all the problem in the sample midterm again but we had no space to write out our work or to see it visually. Then I remembered that my dad gave me a huge roll of paper and said “You’re probably going to need this to write down ideas and what not.” So we hung it up on the wall next to my bed using one of Felix’s old belts and my tie connected to the bars that hold up the curtain in our room. One thing I definitely didn’t expect to do in college is use a belt and tie to hold up a roll of paper so that we could write math problems on it. From there we were able to write our problems down on paper and actually see the process in how to solve the many problems on the sample midterm. Fast forward to around 2am where we just finished reviewing for the last time and are in the process of cleaning up and getting ready for bed. In my extremely tired state was like “Hey Felix, you know what we should do with our work for the sample midterm? Make a scroll out of it like those you see in China.” Then I proceeded to roll up the paper and seal it with a sticky note. I really don’t remember what came over me but that’s how we decided to keep all the stuff we write on that paper from then on. So now we just have scrolls of test prep on top of my dresser.
Moral of the story here, learn in whatever way makes you remember the material best, for both me and Felix, we prefer to see things drawn out so that we can understand the process of how to get to the right answer. Also, don’t stay up late the night before a midterm!
My final story comes from the EngRCEE 60 midterm but before that we need to explain the circumstances of the story. So the night before the EngRCEE 60 lecture, Felix and I were browsing through the PowerPoint lectures that our professor uploaded and trying to review. We came upon this one slide about the Romans and how they were one of the best civilizations to study civil engineering from because of their aqueducts, public baths, fountains, and most importantly their toilets. On the slide that we were looking at showed the remnants of a roman toilet and I explained the photo of where the person would sit and do their business, where they would wipe themselves down, and where they would return the sponge stick after they were done. Felix believed that the professor wouldn’t test us on the role of each part of the toilet but I was adamant about it since she spent a solid 10 minutes in lecture talking about it but we continued onward until the end of the lecture PowerPoints. The professor actually didn’t fully finish the last PowerPoint we covered but just in case, we looked through it till the end.
Now on that midterm, the extra stuff we covered was actually not even talked about remotely so sadly we wasted time on memorizing things that were not going to be tested. But you know what was covered? The roles of the various parts of the Roman toilets. You wouldn’t believe the grin I had on my face when I turned the page and there was a grainy photo of a Roman with the directions Label. You know that feeling when someone doubts you but then you prove them right? Yeah that was me for the remainder of the test. Either way, I caught up to Felix after we finished and was like “So that toilet question…” He said that he didn’t actually expect the professor to actually ask us the roles of the various parts of the roman toilet and so probably got that question wrong. I could say in response was “I told you so”
I guess the moral of the story here is that even if the information may be strange, you will probably be tested on it in some way so if your professor talks about something strange like an ancient toilet for ten minutes, it’s probably important or at least going to be tested on.
Hellos and warm welcomes to all the fellow anteaters, allow me to introduce myself as Josh. I look forward to writing about my experiences here at the University of California, Irvine.
Some details about me are that I was originally born in Northern California, Fremont to be exact, and moved down to a small town called Eastvale when I was in the 3rd grade. A major I would be interested in taking would be Computer Science since that seems to be the trend for many jobs in the STEM fields. My hobbies are rather simple, I enjoy going out with friends, playing video games in my dorm room on the weekends, and just chilling out with some music.
My first two weeks were pretty exhilarating as the university campus is a new environment for me so there was so much to do. Week 1 was quite hectic because I held myself to a crazy standard of waking up a full hour before my classes started so that I would be sure that I would have enough time for my morning routine which, unsurprisingly, only took around 15 of those 60 minutes I afforded to myself. That being said, waking up an hour early did pay off one day when my roommate left for classes while I was in the shower. We have an agreement that if no one is in the room we would lock the door so that our stuff can be secured but my roommate forgot I was in the shower so he ended up locking my keys in the room as well. So I had to walk into the Mesa Court Housing Office in a towel and sandals and figure out what to do. As it turns out getting locked out due to a roommate was a common occurrence so that was, personally, a relief to hear I wasn’t the first instance. I was given replacement keys to my hall and room and was sent on my way. So the moral of the story here is… Always bring your keys with you when you’re on campus, even when in your own hall. Week 2 was definitely more relaxed than Week 1 because a couple hallmates and I went to the beach to just enjoy the sun before submerging the study submarine in preparation for the first midterms of our UCI careers. The lows of Weeks 1 and 2 were pretty much non-existent mainly because I can’t recall them at the time of writing this post.
Onwards to classes! Classes have been pretty well spread out through the week I am only REALLY busy on Wednesdays. Currently I am enrolled in Environmental Engineering Challenges (ENGRCEE 60), Math 2A, Writing 39C, and University Studies 1. If anything in my classes this quarter surprised me, it was how interested I was in the topics being discussed in my ENGRCEE 60 class. I think it’s in the way that the professor explains the topic that let’s you know that she is an expert in that field. That being said, Math 2A is like one of those classes where you just gotta suck it up and do it. Writing 39C is the last class for the lower-division writing requirement and it involves research and argument. My professor in that class is an absolute blast to be around and makes the class more like a critical thinking class than a writing class. University Studies 1 is in my opinion what it is advertised to be, an easy A to help your college GPA. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it and say that it has some work because that class has loads of just busy work but the thing is, if you end up getting ahead of the deadlines it’s a class you never have to worry about. In my hall, it seems that if you just sit around in the commons you are bound to meet a majority of the residents and so I made a few friends in that time.
Besides that there seems to be a large portion of people from my high school here at UCI so I have quite a number of familiar faces. Overall my time at UCI has been extremely fun and not too stressful, given that midterms haven’t started yet so there’s that. I hope to have an eventful first year with all of you.
