University of California-Santa Barbara Top Questions

There's a lot of partying! I don't mind it so much, but sometimes students shouldn't drink as much as they do.

The worst thing about my school is I'm from a middle class family and unable to receive financial aid. Since I'm an out of state student that means my parents pay about 42k a year for me to go to a really good school, but its not a great school academically. The alumni needs to be supportive. We could use a foot ball team and some more parking. People like living off campus but it is REALLY expensive. Rent for sharing a room is usually between 600-700 a month excluding utilities.

People are a little supperfucial, you just have to look through those people and you will find cool people

The Fraternaties and the Sororities. They fit a very stereotypical role and the worst people I have met have been members of the Greek system.

students taking unprescribe drugs to study better.

Huge lectures make it hard to learn sometimes. I had an 8:00am biology class I could hardly stay awake during and there were about 800 people in it. I could hardly hear or see the professors. I also dislike the surrounding community Isla Vista, mainly because sometimes I have classes in IV and driving around there is horrible; too many bicyclists that don't share the road. I also don't like the registering for classes procedure; it feels very competetive at times.

The drinking is extremely popular, there are not very many extracurricular activities besides that.

The party scene can be very intense at our school.

UCSB, although really cleaning up its reputation in recent years, is definitely known as a party school. This didn't detract from my experience, but if you aren't interested in a relaxed environment, then this school isn't for you. I'd say the biggest downfall of the school is that it isn't very racially diverse, and the students are rather cookie-cutter and superficial. It's more difficult here to make lasting friends and to network.

Its emphasis on researcu

There is alot of pressure to succeed, and students not at the top of their class can feel left behind.

if you don't find the right group of people freshman year, it can be hard to branch out of your friendship circle later on in your college career. there are a lot of people who drink and party a lot and if you accidentally make friends with them freshman year it can be tough to find others out there who don't need to drink all the time.

It's a little bit north of Santa Barbara, so if you have a job in the city, you need a car to get there. Santa Barbara is a very expensive place to live.

too many white people

I would consider the amount of drinking to be the worst thing about my school because it seems as though that is the only way that you will be accepted into the "cool" group of people; however, there are those few who don't participate in drinking and that is fun once you find them.

The worst thing about the school is annoying drunk people. There are parties every night of the week. I like to party in moderation, but people who don't care about school irritate me because I worked hard to get here.

There are a lot of large lecture classes and it is hard to avoid taking them because many times these classes are prerequisites for upper division classes.

It reputation for being a party school. Although a large percentage of the population engages in social events where alcohol is involved, UCSB is no different than any other college in terms of partying. The only difference is that the partying is more visible here because students all live within the same square mile, thus it creates more of a scene. Also, the cost to live in Isla Vista is OUTRAGEOUS for how slumy it is. The community takes advantage of the college students.

Number of rapes around campus because of sick, drunk men trying to take advantage of women. BE CAREFUL!!

Partying sometimes gets out of control, especially in residences closer to school. A lot of people seems to think college =party, which can get annoying from time to time. And house rents are off the roof, they want ridiculously high rents for mediocre apartments.

People only see our party repuation but this school offers a great environment to expand oneself academically and socially.

Lack of ethnic diversity, old lab equipment

You don't truly get to appreciate the expertise of the professors until your third year, so it makes finding the perfect major a bit difficult for some people.

That they use graduate students to teach classes because students are paying a lot of money to receive a faulty education. They also aren't willing to work well with financial issues and don't care to hear unique cases. They are money hungry.

Some of the outlets in the library do not work. It is annoying.

Although getting into the classes is usually not a problem, sometimes the class sizes are to great. Being in an impacted major, biology, often means being in a class of 800 students. This makes it difficult to interact with the professor as well as having personal questions answered. Such large class sizes make it difficult to concentrate in class and makes a student feel more like a number than an actual person.

Some of the neighborhoods around the school are not very high income oriented and the main neighborhhood right next to the school where most students live is technically a ghetto-like neighborhood but with very high rent prices. Some of the classes have very large lecture halls where too many students are in the class to where there is little chance of communicating with the professor.

There are no big sports teams that some colleges have, such as no football team.