University of California-Santa Barbara Top Questions

I wish I had known this public school would end up costing more money than I can afford.

Before entering college, I wish I had known just how different the quarter system was going to prove to be. It is much more fast paced than the semester system of high school and this contrast is very much felt, particularly in the beginning of the freshman year of college.

How many different social activities there are. It's hard to know of all the campus clubs, but there is almost one for every interest.

I wish I had known how amazing my life would turn out to be at UCSB.

I wish that I would have known how to manage my expenses better. I have learned my lesson and will be a lot more careful about spending my money wisely.

It is ok to be the bookworm who also wants to have fun and just hang out with friends. They dont judge you for wanting to be successful because they all want to be successful too! They want to support you, and there are more than enough people here to help you be successful in any endeaors, whether they be personal or professional. And the faculty and staff are here to support you as well:)

To be honest, I wish no one told me anything about the school before I attended. I wanted to experience it for myself, and see what I can make of my life there. Anyways, if I took anyone else's word for what the school was like, I'd probably live in the world they described to me as UCSB, rather than what I really thought of it while going there. Most of all however, I wish I knew where everything was, because not knowing where everything was, I eventually landed in a dorm a mile off campus.

Faculty and administrators say "It's not a party school, but we do know how to party." Not entirely true. It is a party school.

I wish had known more of what I truly wanted to study. I feel that I spent a lot of time in my first two years here on classes that I did not enjoy and that served little purpose to me or my future. I also wish I had come to school with more of an idea of how to prepare for the college workload. High school came way too easy for me and so the transition to college served as somewhat of a wake up call. My grades suffered my first year here because of this.

Before I came to this university, I wish I had been taught how to better balance my time. While, I have learned good balance techniques and grown to understand that a certain amount of prioritizing is necessary at a university, especially in the quarter system, it was a definite challenge in the beginning. Lerning how to balance my social life with my academic one would have been an extremely valuable skill to have mastered before I stepped foot in Santa Barbara.