UC Davis Applications Rise 2012
The Bike Culture
Challenging Academics
UG Research Emphasis
Run by Students for Students
Despite the buffets of budget cuts, the UC System is more popular than ever. This year, UC applications hit over 161,000, up 13% from last year. UC Davis, located just 15 miles west of Sacramento, best known for its biology, agriculture, and engineering programs, was up 5% from a year earlier with slightly more than 62,000 applications. This in the face of the ill-conceived Davis police pepper spraying of students protesting student tuition increases. The steady rise of applications-despite the pepper spray gaff-speaks to the resources and boundless educational opportunities Davis offers.
Davis is a large campus of over 23,500 undergraduates, yet, it has a much smaller and personal feel. Some of this can be attributed to its ‘bike culture.’ The campus consists of 5,300 mostly flat acres—including a 100-acre arboretum and over a thousand buildings webbed together by an extensive network of bike paths. A bike is essential student transportation at Davis. To keep the paths safe, there is a bicycle police force empowered to write tickets for infractions-even for issuing BUI (biking under the influence) citations.
Chances are the academic workload will not allow for many BUIs, as the 10-week quarter system, and the usual load of 3-4 classes, will demand the full sober attention of most students. If this academic pace doesn’t challenge, then possibly an invitation to Davis’s Integrated Learning Program, which is by selection from the incoming freshman class, or the Davis Honor’s program, which any ambitious freshman or sophomore might elect to enroll in, will ratchet up the challenge.
Davis is demanding. The College of Engineering, offering 15 majors, from biomedical to optical engineering, enrolling over 5,000 students, has a national reputation. The College of Agriculture has one of the top pre-veterinary medical programs in the country, and the best viticulture (winemaking) program; it also offers pre-professional programs in Landscape Architecture and Managerial Economics (reminiscent of Cornell U:niversity’s College of Agriculture with its variety of applied economics degrees).
If the rigors of a major are not enough of a challenge, or, to the contrary, are too overwhelming, changing majors, or even colleges, can be done with relative ease. Davis acknowledges that over three-quarters of its students will change majors at least once, and it seeks to accommodate. Within majors and departments there are faculty advisors, though most of the best advising comes from peers who are familiar with the structure of majors, the professors, and the challenging courses, and helps an advisee plan accordingly.
Davis places an emphasis on undergraduate research and internships. Davis’s ICC program assists students in obtaining research and internship positions. Over half of the UC Davis undergraduates work on research with a faculty member before they graduate; annually, more than 5,000 perform internships. Furthermore, to abet research efforts, Davis’s library system has over 3.5 million volumes, making it the 48th largest college library collection in the country and, through the UC Melville System, a student can access all books and resources from any UC library collection. A bus even runs regularly to UC Berkeley’s 27 libraries and 10.1 million volumes (the 5th largest library in the country) should a personal search there be required.
UC Davis, in many areas excluding its police department, sports an air of great efficiency. One key reason is it is a college that is run, to a great degree, by students for students. The campus’s Unisys bus system, which contains a preponderance of double decker British buses, is completely composed of student bus drivers. The Davis fire department consists of UC student volunteers. The COHO student union, which houses in its basement 18 bowling lanes, is almost completely run by students.
Davis, like many large public universities, is what you make of it. There is no reason a student cannot attain a Rhodes Scholarship, play on one of Davis’s 27 Division I teams, and become a volunteer fireman while majoring in viticulture, and minoring in chemistry or classical studies. Davis has the tools, departments, and people to enable unparalleled intellectual growth; the rest is up to you.