The University of California, San Diego. Online College Degrees

The University of California, San Diego (also referred to as UC San Diego or UCSD) is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, in the United States. The university occupies 2,141 acres (866 ha) near the coast of the Pacific Ocean with the main campus resting on approximately 1,152 acres (466 ha).  Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is the seventh oldest of the 10 University of California campuses and offers over 200 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, enrolling about 22,700 undergraduate and 6,300 graduate students. UC San Diego is one of America's Public Ivy universities, which recognizes top public research universities in the United States. UC San Diego is a highly regarded research institution, ranked 14th in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities, 18th Top World University in U.S. News & World Report 's 2015 global university rankings, 21st in the world by the Center for World University Rankings, 39th in the world by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and 44th overall in the world by QS World University Rankings. UC San Diego is also ranked 9th among public universities and 38th among all universities in the United States according to U.S. News & World Report.

UC San Diego is organized into six undergraduate residential colleges (Revelle, Muir, Marshall, Warren, Roosevelt, and Sixth), three graduate schools (Jacobs School of Engineering, Rady School of Management and School of Global Policy and Strategy), and two professional medical schools (UC San Diego School of Medicine and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences) UC San Diego is also home to Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the first centers dedicated to ocean, earth and atmospheric science research and education. The UC San Diego Health System, the region’s only academic health system, provides patient care, conducts medical research and educates future health care professionals.

The university operates 19 organized research units (ORUs), including the Qualcomm Institute (a branch of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology), San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, as well as eight School of Medicine research units, six research centers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and two multi-campus initiatives, including the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. UC San Diego is also affiliated with several regional research centers, such as the Salk Institute, the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, and the Scripps Research Institute. According to the National Science Foundation, UCSD spent $1.076 billion on research and development in fiscal year 2013, ranking it 5th in the nation.

UC San Diego faculty, researchers, and alumni have won twenty Nobel Prizes, eight National Medals of Science, eight MacArthur Fellowships, two Pulitzer Prizes, and two Fields Medals. Additionally, of the current faculty, 29 have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, 95 to the National Academy of Sciences, 45 to the Institute of Medicine and 106 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Academics and administration

UC San Diego is a large, primarily residential, public research university accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges that offers a four-year Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degree to undergraduate students.  The full-time undergraduate program comprises the majority of enrollments at the university. The university offers 125 bachelor's degree programs organized into five disciplinary divisions: arts and humanities, biological sciences, engineering, mathematics and physical sciences, and social sciences. Students are also free to design special majors or engage in dual majors.] 38% of undergraduates major in the social sciences, followed by 25% in biological sciences, 18% in engineering, 8% in sciences and math, 4% in humanities, and 3% in the arts.

UC San Diego's comprehensive graduate program is composed of several divisions and professional schools, including the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, School of Medicine, Institute of Engineering in Medicine, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, Jacobs School of Engineering, Rady School of Management, and Skaggs School of Pharmacy. The university offers 35 masters programs, 47 doctoral programs, 5 professional programs, and 9 joint doctoral programs with San Diego State University and other UC campuses. UC San Diego has highly ranked graduate programs in biological sciences and medicine, economics, social and behavioral sciences, physics, and computer engineering.

The university also offers a continuing and public education program through the UC San Diego Extension. Approximately 50,000 enrollees per year are educated in this branch of the university, which offers over 90 certificate and 12 specialized study programs. Courses are offered at Extension facilities, located both on the main campus and off-campus, and also online.[ UC San Diego Extension offers programs in the fields of Arts, Business, Education, Engineering, English Language, Foreign Languages, Humanities, IT, Law, Leadership, Life Sciences and Public Service.

Residential colleges

UC San Diego's undergraduate division is organized into six residential colleges, each headed by its own provost. They all set their own general education requirements, manage separate administrative and advising staff, and grant unique degrees. In chronological order by date of foundation, the six colleges are:

1. Revelle College, founded in 1964 as First College, emphasizes a "Renaissance education" through the Humanities sequence which integrates history, literature, and philosophy. It has highly structured requirements.

2.John Muir College, founded in 1967 as Second College, emphasizes a "spirit of self-sufficiency and individual choice" and offers loosely structured general-education requirements.

3. Thurgood Marshall College, founded in 1970 as Third College, emphasizes "scholarship, social responsibility and the belief that a liberal arts education must include an understanding of one's role in society".

4. Earl Warren College, founded in 1974 as Fourth College, requires students to pursue a major of their choice while also requiring two "programs of concentration" in disciplines unrelated to each other and to their major "toward a life in balance".

5. Eleanor Roosevelt College, founded in 1988 as Fifth College, which focuses its core education program on a cross-cultural interdisciplinary course sequence entitled "Making of the Modern World", has a foreign language requirement, and encourages studying abroad.

6. Sixth College, founded in 2002 with a focus on "historical and philosophical connections among culture, art and technology."

Students affiliate with a college based upon its particular philosophy and environment as majors are not exclusive to specific colleges. Muir and Warren enroll the largest number of undergraduate students, followed by Sixth, Revelle, Roosevelt, and Marshall. Each undergraduate college sets different requirements for awarding graduation and provost's honors, separate from departmental and Phi Beta Kappa honors.

Rankings and admissions

Global Rankings

The University of California, San Diego is ranked 14th by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and is ranked 21st by the Center for World University Rankings. U.S. News & World Report named UC San Diego the 18th best university in the world in 2014 for research, global and regional reputation, international collaboration and number of highly cited papers. In 2015, UC San Diego was ranked 39th in the world by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings[ and in 2015, UC San Diego was ranked 44th overall in the world, and 14th in life sciences and biomedicine, by QS World University Rankings. In 2014 the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University named UC San Diego 14th in the world for scientific impact.

National Rankings

Washington Monthly has ranked UC San Diego first in the nation since 2010 based on its contribution to the public good in three broad categories: social mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and service (encouraging students to give something back to their country). UC San Diego ranked fifth in the nation in terms of research and development expenditures in 2013, with $1.076 billion spent.  Kiplinger in 2014 ranked UC San Diego 14th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. UC San Diego was ranked 37th among the top universities in the United States and 8th among public universities by U.S. News & World Report's 2015 rankings. The Daily Beast ranked UC San Diego 38th in the country out of the nearly 2000 schools it evaluated for its 2013 Best Colleges ranking. The university is ranked 12th and 15th in the U.S. by Academic Ranking of World Universities and Center for World University Rankings[83] respectively. Money Magazine ranked UC San Diego 46th in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2014 Best Colleges ranking. ScienceWatch ranks UC San Diego 7th of federally funded U.S. universities, based on the citation impact of their published research in major fields of science and the social sciences and 12th globally by volume of citations. Research centers under university administration are the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego Supercomputer Center, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, and Center for US-Mexican Studies.

Graduate School Rankings

The UC San Diego School of Medicine is ranked 17th for research-intensive programs and 19th for primary care in the 2016 U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Schools Guidebook. The Rady School of Management at UC San Diego is ranked 17th in the world for faculty research and 8th for alumni entrepreneurship in the 2014 Financial Times’ Global MBA. In 2014 Rady School ranked 1st in the nation in intellectual capital by Bloomberg Businessweek, which measured faculty research published in the top 20 business journals from 2009-2013.  UC San Diego was named 8th in the nation among doctoral institutions for the number of students who study abroad for a full academic year, according to the Institute of International Education Open Doors report. Three doctoral programs at UC San Diego—biological sciences, bioengineering and Scripps Institution of Oceanography—are 1st in the nation in the National Research Council’s Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs report.

Admissions

UC San Diego is categorized by U.S. News & World Report as "most selective" for college admissions ratings within the United States. For the Fall 2015 admissions cycle, the school received 94,280 applications from both freshman and transfer applicants, the third highest among the University of California campuses.

In 2009, UC San Diego mistakenly sent Admit Day welcome emails to all its 47,000 freshmen applicants, instead of just the 17,000 who had been admitted. However, school officials quickly realized the mistake and sent an apology email within two hours.

Graduate admissions are largely centralized through the Office of Graduate Studies. However, the Rady School of Management, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) handle their own admissions. For Fall 2012, the UC San Diego School of Medicine offered admission to 5% of its applicants.

Student life

In 2010, The Daily Beast ranked UC San Diego as one of the happiest colleges in the United States, based on nightlife, number of student organizations, retention rate, and sunny days. In all, the university offers classical orchestras, intramural sports, and over 550 student organizations. Thirty-eight national and local Greek organizations are hosted on campus. with fraternity and sorority members representing 20% of the student population. The university operates on an academic quarter system, with three primary quarters beginning in late September and ending in mid-June. 44% of undergraduate students receive federal Pell Grants.

The undergraduate student body government is the UC San Diego Associated Students, organized as a cabinet and senate,  while graduate students are represented by the Graduate Student Association, a proportional representative body with membership depending on the number of students in each graduate department. Additionally, graduate students who serve as teaching assistants are represented by the UC-wide union of Academic Student Employees. Each of the six residential colleges has its own student council as well. Most student media publications distributed on-campus are services provided and governed by ASUCSD, including Triton TV, a film studio and TV station, and the KSDT radio station. A notable exception is The Guardian, which is directly governed by the university's Student Affairs department.

Price Center, often referred to as PC, is the main student hub and is located in the center of campus, just south of Geisel Library. The building houses multiple restaurants, the central bookstore, a movie theater, and office space for student organizations, organization advisers, and university faculty. A student referendum was passed in 2003 to expand the Price Center to nearly double its original size. The Price Center East expansion was officially opened to the public on May 19, 2008. There are also three campus centers that cultivate a sense of community among faculty, staff, and certain students: the Cross-Cultural Center, the Women's Center, and the LGBTResource Center. UC San Diego was the last UC campus to have such centers. All three, especially the Cross-Cultural Center that was created first, were founded in the mid-1990s as a result of student movements that demanded change despite opposition by the campus administration.

The Ché Café is a student worker cooperative and social center that is perhaps best known for its role as a venue for underground music scene. It is an on-and-off again vegan cafe and catering operation as well. The Ché also acts as a resource for the music and art departments on campus through hosting art shows, performances, and film screenings. Some of the most notable touring bands or musicians who have played at the Ché include: Bon Iver, Green Day, Rise Against, Jimmy Eat World, Matt & Kim, Billy Corgan, Blonde Redhead, Bomb the Music Industry!, The Get Up Kids, Deerhoof, Bright Eyes,Chumbawamba, Mike Watt, Hella, Dan Deacon, Unwound, and Jawbreaker. Prominent local San Diego bands such as The Locust and Pinback, and national tours such as Mates of State and The Dillinger Escape Plan have given the Ché Café some fame and praise as a radical vegan collective despite its small size and limited sound equipment. 

Traditions

The student body government coordinates a wide variety of concerts and events during the year. UC San Diego begins the fall quarter with Welcome Week to introduce new students to campus clubs and activities starting the week with the All Campus Dance. The Hullabaloo music festival takes place every November as part of the university's Founders' Celebration. Bear Garden, a carnival held near Price Center, takes place every quarter throughout the year. Additionally, events are frequently held at the Loft, a performance lounge within Price Center.  Sun God Festival, named after the statue part of the Stuart Collection, is the largest and most significant event of the year, held annually in mid-May on the seventh week of the spring quarter. The festival has grown over its thirty-year history into a 20,000 person event, featuring an eclectic mix of art, dance, and musical performances. Past performers have included: Kendrick Lamar, Porter Robinson, Macklemore, Silversun Pickups, Wiz Khalifa, Drake, T.I., Third Eye Blind, Ludacris, Michelle Branch, Sara Bareilles, The Roots, and My Chemical Romance. The 2014 festival featured Diplo, Young the Giant, and Juicy J.

Two other popular campus traditions include the Pumpkin Drop and the Watermelon Drop, which take place during Halloween and at the end of the spring quarter, respectively. The Watermelon Drop is one of the campus' oldest traditions, famously originating in 1965 from a physics exam question centering on the velocity on impact of a dropped object. A group of intrigued students pursued that line of thought by dropping a watermelon from the top floor of Revelle's Urey Hall to measure the distance from the splat to the farthest travelling piece of fruit. A variety of events surround the Watermelon Drop, including a pageant where an occasional male but generally female "Watermelon Queen" is elected. The Pumpkin Drop is a similar event celebrated by the dropping of a large, candy-filled pumpkin from 11-story Tioga Hall, the tallest residential building on the Muir college campus.

Housing

The six undergraduate residential colleges have separate, unique housing facilities for their students. First-year students are usually housed in the residence halls while upperclassmen live in the college apartments. Transfer students are housed in separate facilities from the residential colleges, in an area adjacent to Eleanor Roosevelt College called The Village at Torrey Pines. The housing facilities vary in design, though nearly all of them are of modern or brutalist style. The vast majority of entering freshmen and about forty percent of all undergraduates in Fall 2012 chose to live in campus residence halls or apartments, with roughly seventy percent of all incoming freshman living in triple occupancy rooms. Graduate students can choose to live in one of six apartment complexes apart from undergraduate housing. Three of these facilities are several minutes away from UC San Diego while the remaining are located on university grounds.

Accommodations are made for students with specific needs. Undergraduate couples and families have the option of living in housing facilities that are normally available only to graduate students. The university also dedicates a portion of its facilities for those who wish to live in gender-neutral or LGBT housing. Reflecting UC San Diego's diversity, International House, a complex of apartments located in Eleanor Roosevelt College, is dedicated to cross-cultural exchange between American and international students, housing about 350 students from more than thirty countries. International learning is fostered through formal programs including current affairs discussions, cultural nights, and a community newsletter. Upper-division undergraduates from all six colleges, graduate students, faculty, and researchers are eligible to live in International House, located in the Eleanor Roosevelt College townhouses. Demand is very high for this special program and there is often a waitlist. Spaces in International House are not guaranteed and admission requires a separate application.

 Housing plans also offer students access to dining facilities, which were named by PETA as the most vegan-friendly in the United States. Each student is allotted a certain number of "Dining Dollars" to purchase meals at any dining hall and groceries at any on-campus market. Six distinct dining halls are located at each of the six colleges, with markets located adjacent or near them, except at Eleanor Roosevelt College which shares a marketplace with The Village. In addition to the six dining halls, there are also four specialty dining facilities and two food trucks on campus that accept dining dollars. UC San Diego currently offers two years guaranteed housing to both its incoming freshmen and its incoming transfer students.

Sources: Wikipedia