My daughter got her first College acceptance letter! UC santa cruz! ** UPDATE: GO SLUGS!

[wackadoo wabbit]

22. That's my alma mater; &, at least when I attended, there wasn't a finer school for an undergraduate

education anywhere. I actually transferred to UCSC from UCLA after a year specifically because of this.

At UCLA (and, I'm fairly certain, at Berkeley as well), undergraduate students will find themselves to be just faces in the crowd in huge classes of literally hundreds of students. When I was at UCLA, tests were often just multiple choice scanton exams. I probably could have hired someone to take my exams for me.

At UCSC, on the other hand, classes were small and intimate. And you learned, a lot. The professors knew not just your name, they knew you. I was offered many opportunities — working in a lab training a monkey, being encouraged to take graduate classes while still an undergraduate, being invited to attend small teaching staff seminars given by visiting professors from other universities, etc. — that would have been unheard of in the feedlot-sized classes of UCLA.

Plus, there were some amazing alternative classes that I would have been unlikely to find at a larger, more traditional college. A course I took on utopias, in which, for my grade, I was tasked with writing a paper explaining what my idea of a utopia would look like and how it would operate, has influenced my thinking ever since.

Of course, things may be very different now from when I attended many moons ago, so what I'm writing may be totally out of date. But if UCSC is still close to what it once was, your daughter might want to seriously consider it.


P.S. And the campus really is gorgeous!