Hate UCLA? Stop grumbling, start changing

This summer, I took a few classes at UC Berkeley. I really had
no reason to. I’m a Southern California guy. The classes I
took weren’t special Cal-only courses. I wasn’t going
north to hang out with the bums on Telegraph Avenue, and based on
the reputation of Berkeley girls (a reputation which I will neither
confirm nor deny), I certainly wasn’t headed up there to
check out the females. I stayed in a motel-style apartment ““
with no dishwasher ““ on a poorly lit street not too far away
from the site of a recent stabbing, because after two years and one
summer at UCLA, I was ready for a change.

I’ve been to several recruitment events, and one sentiment
I inevitably hear is, “I loved UCLA the minute I stepped on
campus, and I just knew that I had to come here!” I
don’t ever want to screw up a speech but sometimes I have
felt like raising my hand and asking, “Why?”

Was it the constant construction? Or the fact that no matter
what time of the year it is, somewhere on campus there is green
fencing barricading this building or forcing us to take that detour
to get to our next class? For the first time in my two years here,
Bruin Walk has been opened up to its full glorious width near
Pauley Pavilion. Some people may have enjoyed being herded through
a narrow little walkway to the slaughter of their next midterm, but
not me.

And whoever falls in love with the architecture of this
university is obviously not a South Campus student. Sure, Royce
Hall is beautiful, in an asymmetrically charming kind of way, but
the campus must have drained the creativity fund jar by the time it
came to designing Boelter Hall and the McDonald’s-ish arches
of Knudsen Hall.

But of course we can always escape to our great college town of
Westwood when campus life gets to be a little too much. Oh wait,
you don’t feel like watching a movie, getting some food, or
just wandering aimlessly tonight? Well gee, I guess you’re
out of luck. With no nightclubs within walking distance, many of us
have no outlet for the undying need to shake our booties. And as
for our wonderful neighbors, non-student Westwood residents had
fits over the novelty of our very own sex shop before it was
slapped with restrictions tighter than the store’s rubber
vaginas.

All these things add up after a while and a brief change of pace
was just what I needed this summer. I enjoyed my time at Berkeley
and sometimes I do wonder how my college experience would have been
had I sent my statement of intent to register to Cal instead of
UCLA.

I recently took a slow walk through the sculpture garden. I
thought about the people I’ve come to know and love here.
Life would be unimaginable with out some of them. I thought about
how damn lucky I am to be attending a university offering so many
opportunities and such an excellent education.

Who’s to say that I wouldn’t eventually have had
similar complaints about any other school I might have attended?
With familiarity comes boredom, and that’s when the
nitpicking begins. But in reality, there are so many places and
things on this campus and in the Los Angeles area that I have not
yet explored, so I cannot even begin to call myself familiar.

My new resolution for this school year is to stop grumbling and
to start changing. If you find yourself similarly disenchanted by
your school’s supposed greatness, do something about it. Go
join one of the hundreds of clubs on campus. If there is no
organization based around your interests, go create one. Get a
couple of friends to co-sign with you and you could be one of the
new presidents of the train-spotting club.

If you’re bored by the same types of classes quarter after
quarter, sign up for a course that has absolutely nothing to do
with your major. If Westwood is synonymous with ennui, hop on the
Big Blue Bus and turn Los Angeles into your playground.

And most important of all, appreciate your school for the
chances it gives you every day, and yes, for its greatness. And
never, ever find yourself writing an article like the first half of
this one.

Vaszari is a third-year cybernetics student.