Alumni UCSD

I'm an alumni and I will never donate a single dollar to UCSD. I will never understand why Chancellor Fox and other UCSD administrators deliberately made the undergraduate years such an unfortunate experience prioritizing research instead of the massive alumni population. I am even more disappointed in hearing UCSD has gotten even worse with Chancellor Khosla by threatening to cancel SunGod (the major organized student activity), allowing departments to be grossly overpopulated and understaffed -- the CS major in particular, and giving a run around on parking/student commuting by firstly encouraging students to take public transit then dropping support for all that together. Are you F- kidding me? Seriously?

It isn't that hard to make a university experience enjoyable, even if the university administrators did nothing. They took deliberate actions in the past by taking all that California and tuition money to build a sprawling campus instead of a concentrated undergraduate quad needed for an active campus life. The six college system complicates matters by geographically spreading out all the undergraduates across campus with this pseudo-curriculum that neither matches the original Oxbridge colleges, nor does it give any significant distinction (compared to students separating out by majors at every other large research university). Graduation by college instead of by major is one of the most criminal offenses at UCSD because instead of graduating with my friends I made over the 4 years, I walked with 2 guys I dormed with freshman year. Another bad idea was UCSD's administrators choice to permanently lease all the nearby land next to campus to gated communities whom will dispatch the San Diego police on you if you pass by at night. Thus, there will never be local food vendors close to campus, there will never be an alternative book/print shop, nor a discount apparel store, nor a dollar store, nor a low cost grocery store, all of which could have helped a student control costs, especially students from low income families. Instead poor students are required to buy into the monopoly of offensively bad stores on campus with shit tasting overpriced food and goods.

As for academia, there are significant challenges which must be met. I don't blame this on the instructors. No, they and the graduate students were constantly overworked, trying to create programs - running writing centers on their own to alleviate the quality of students work overall. There were some criminally bad tenured professors who always volunteers to teach because his easy A's handed out was rewarded with high performance reviews by the students. The next professor in the teaching sequence would inherit this wholly unprepared cohort and will have to struggle to bring them up to par. The original bad apple professors obviously shouldn't be teaching, and wouldn't have been teaching in other public institutions, but UCSD takes exception to this. UCSD should hire graduate students who leave with a masters to teach fundamental courses, or hire them as graders/tutors, and rotate out the poor performing professors -- so they can focus on research. UCSD Masters students are the same people without jobs, and they surely would work as graders for $20-25/hr. Having more graders will allow professors to review and prepare their lesson plans, and/or coordinate teaching strategies (lol). As for the students, there was also the problem with cheating, massive cheating. Rotating test banks, even used in undergraduate courses should be outright banned by the institution. Else, every assignment, lab write up, thesis, paper must be crosschecked across all departments using some plagiarism service like turnitin.com. Every test, exam must be scheduled to a singular designated testing lecture hall, where the students will be recorded, there will be official hired proctors, cellphone blockers, and adequate seating, lighting, and desk space. The administration should also create a walk-in tutoring service instead of this bullshit OASIS which only tutored those who registered at the beginning of the year, and allow students to choose their the freshman writing classes across all 6 universities as equal standing.

I've got other gripes about being the administration being adamant on the outdated academic quarters instead of switching to semesters, being too focused on academia -- with no emphasis on practical skills or majors (accounting isn't a major, so recruiters don't even bother visiting UCSD, the huge pre-med population can't just get a BSN in Nursing to walk right in to a healthcare job), just awful, and not doing more to have job recruiters from all over California instead of just local San Diego firms. Just. no. Oh and did I mention that UCSD undergraduates had laughably low admission rates to medical schools (seriously look through searchreddit.com) and recently hired 2-3 staff to fix the solution? It honestly shows how much the administration cares about the student population because I really would want to go into serious debt for a near unrecognizable degree outside of San Diego.

I have helped out the homeless population at UCSD with a few bucks even after I've seen them use their money to buy cigarettes. But to donate $1 to UCSD administration as an alumni. No, and never; no fucks to them.