Big Pond to Little Pond

I may go to one of the biggest law schools in the nation, but it sure doesn't feel like it coming from UCLA.

This past week, we had academic advising sessions where the Dean of Students sat us all down and told us exactly what the graduation requirements were: what classes we had to take, how many units we had to take, etc. He explained that although we might not get our first choices for next semester, most people don't have a problem have a problem getting the classes they want to take. After that, he gave us a guide to classes and a list of professors we could talk to about specific fields of law.

While some people felt overwhelmed with thinking about all this kind of stuff, I thought to myself "wow, I feel so...coddled."

I love love UCLA, but one criticism of the school was usually that people felt like a number rather than a person. Granted, it's a little hard when there's 26,000 undergrads as oppose to 1,600. Instead of having academic advising sessions with the dean, we were lucky if we could get a counselor who could give us the answer we needed. We were even luckier if we got the classes we needed, much less classes we wanted (especially as a political science major).

Fortunately most things worked out for me, and most importantly, "being a number" taught me to be more independent. It's not that there weren't resources for you at UCLA, you just had to look for them and take initiative. So now when I'm being spoonfed counseling over free lunches, I think it makes me appreciate it more but at the same time be less dependant on it.