Big school causes big problems

  Maegan Carberry Carberry is a third-year
political science student. E-mail her at [email protected].

With a campus of over 30,000, it’s no wonder that a lot of
UCLA students suffer from what I like to call Big Campus
Syndrome.

You may know the feeling. It hits you unsuspectingly ““
like the guilt of wolfing down six Diddy Riese cookies and three
milks at midnight. You’re trying desperately to make it
across the well-packed 15 feet that constitutes Bruin Walk. Along
your way you must battle the line of wide-eyed high schoolers on
tours, miscellaneous Christian groups, people with movie passes,
seven-foot-tall, 350-pound athletes, and the guys who walk around
with clipboards asking you to donate to the pancake breakfast next
Sunday. It’s a circus!

Then, like a light from the sky with the sound of gospel choir
music as you stand at the top of Kerckhoff steps, you realize:
there are way too many people here.

I often regret my decision to come to UCLA because of the
problems that come with a large campus. I’ve had a wonderful
time here, and had many opportunities to learn and be involved. But
it feels claustrophobic. And some days I think if one more person
bumps into me I might snap and just start ramming into people like
it was football practice and they were the sled.

Think of all the hassles we have to deal with.

Parking alone is enough to wreck your day. If you live off
campus, you know what I mean. I’ve lived in Westwood Village
the last two years and watched both of my roommates suffer from
parking drama. The waking up at 7:45 to roll out of bed and make it
to the car by 8; then the driving around for an hour with the 30
other people who were parked on a Thursday side ““ all with
greedy eyes and a die-hard mentality to find a space at any cost
““ is just ridiculous. Someone recently wrote an article in
the Daily Bruin about parking fraud (fake carpool permits). Duh.
Who wouldn’t fake a carpool to get a spot? It’s a
jungle out there! And there is no security. Just because you have a
little yellow tag hanging from your rear view mirror does not
guarantee you anything. You can still have a permit and never find
a spot.

Housing is another hunk of fun. When you’re a freshman,
they cram you into little closets called “triples” and
expect you to live there. I think it might be a conspiracy of some
sort to make you hate dorm life so much that you’ll want to
move off campus the next year. There’s a bad idea.

Stay as long as you can, freshmen! Once April and May roll
around, you’ll see little groups of four wandering the
streets of Westwood, knocking on apartment management doors and
fighting for a deal: to share a bedroom for $500 a month and have
one bathroom for four. What a steal. After rent, utilities and
groceries most of us don’t have enough money to see a movie.
And no one seems to care how outrageous the cost of living is for
students around here.

You have no parking space and you live in a box and have to
share it with someone else. The box costs so much that you have to
work a part-time job to pay for everything and to top it all off,
when everything is said and done, those high-quality professors the
brochure boasts of turn out to be some incredibly overworked
graduate students. It’s all taught by the TAs.

That’s what you should have looked for in a college back
in senior year of high school: how good are your graduate students?
Because they are the ones who hold learning at UCLA in their hands.
They teach, grade, hold office hours, and do their own work in
addition. And to think that last year the university had the nerve
to refuse to recognize their union! Without the graduate students,
there would be no undergraduate education. Talk about undervalued
and underappreciated.

I had originally planned to write this column about the
priorities of this campus, and I surveyed several students in my
classes by asking the question: “what should UCLA’s top
priority be?” What one student wrote down really spoke to me:
“This is a university, it should not be treated like a
business.” Whoever you are, I totally agree. It’s a
huge corporation, with tons of employees and fundraisers and
expenses. It is so much more than a place of education. It has to
deal with the business part of everything in order to maintain
itself, sheerly because of its size.

And that’s what sucks. That’s the part you
can’t change. It will always be big, and our educations will
always be, to the extent that we as students allow them to be,
somewhat ignored. It’s not the fault of anyone in particular.
I’ve met administrators, including the chancellor, and
they’re definitely committed to their jobs and to
students.

I’ve met great professors who give everything they have to
their classes, but they cannot and will not change the ones who
don’t. I’ve loved a lot of things at UCLA, but the
problem remains that we will always have to deal with these
grievances. It comes with the territory of a huge campus, and even
though it can be combated, Big Campus Syndrome is a powerful
beast.

But what it means is that we can’t allow ourselves to get
too sucked into feeling like small fish in a big pond. I know
sometimes I feel depressed when I think about how I’m missing
out on the intimate setting of a smaller campus, and that I will
probably go through my four years without a real feeling of
camaraderie with other students. But I have left a little mark on
the campus by being here. And I suppose in any situation you can
only deal with the things you have control over.

We have no control over the size of our campus, decisions made
by our administration, the performance of our teachers, the cost of
living, or other students. But we do have control over the attitude
we bring to campus every day, the one that shapes the way we allow
ourselves to be educated.

And it will be an education in more than academics because the
world is a lot bigger than the couple of miles that span our
campus. And in a few more years we’ll be asked to fit into
it, and make our mark on it. We don’t want to carry our
feelings of Big Campus Syndrome into a very lonely case of Big
World Syndrome.

I’m sure rent is still really high in the Big World, and
parking is hard to find. And I bet there are still people in
powerful positions who will treat our lives like a business and
pass their work on to others. I’m sure it will get
claustrophobic out there too.

So, instead of being overwhelmed by how small we are on our Big
Campus, perhaps we should just see this time as really good
practice.