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| My 'class planner' for the fall quarter |
For the first two weeks of the fall quarter at UCLA students are given the chance to enrol in and drop as many classes as they please*. Throughout the process I have come across three aspects of higher education at UCLA that differ quite significantly from UCL which I will discuss below.
- Majors and minors - This is perhaps the greatest difference between the two university structures. Degrees at UCL are entirely focussed on studying a your applied subject (with the exception of ancillary modules). However UCLA follows the majors and optional minors system which is dominant in the US. This means that though a student may have applied to study Geography, they can also take classes from a range of other courses during their university career. Thus students are able to wait until junior (third) year before being forced to declare a major. Once a major has been declared students must obtain enough credits within that field in order to graduate. While this system offers students a greater breadth of education, it is far more complicated than the arrangement at home. Though I am unsure which I prefer, I find this very different mode of education particularly fascinating.
- Class durations - Compared with UCL Geography, where each module involves two hours of lectures per week and counts for an equal amount towards your degree, the time, structure and value of each class at UCLA varies. For example, one of my six credit classes (FILM TV 106A) is composed by eight hours of lectures and a one hour seminar per week, while another four credit class (INTL DEV 191) is just a single three hour seminar. Another dissimilarity is that all exams take place during the quarter in which you are taking that class, rather than in the final term of the year as is the case in UCL’s Geography department.
- Class eligibility - Because of the vastly more flexible education system at UCLA, enrolment in a class is not restricted by what year you are in. Instead classes are divided into ability levels identified as lower and upper division. Though some classes are restricted by major, most are open to all students. Thus a fourth year (senior) student can take a lower division class, while a first year (freshman) could enrol in an upper division class providing they meet the required prerequisites. This contrasts with UCL Geography where GEOG1###, GEOG2### and GEOG3### modules are restricted only to first, second and third year students respectively.
These dissimilarities make for a very different university experience. While all three allow for a far broader and diverse education experience, they also make the process of creating a working timetable far more challenging. Unlike UCL Geography which attempts to organise its schedule to avoid clashing modules, the infinitely larger selection of available classes at UCLA means that clashes are inevitable and thus a major consideration throughout the enrolment process.
I have also noticed that this enrolment structure leads to an entirely different social experience. UCL students studying for the same degree generally take the same modules, thus large cohesive friendship groups evolve out of shared experiences within the degree. For example the mutual burden of three different deadlines falling in the same week! However at UCLA every single student appears to have an entirely unique schedule, even in the more vocational degrees such as medicine and architecture. Thus a person’s social circle appears much less contained as they make friends in more places such as classes, societies and dorms. Using my own experiences to verify this, I have so far only met one fellow geography student with the majority of my new friends coming from outside my major. This contrasting social structure leads also to a broader and more varied university experience as students come together to discuss their different fields.
* Beyond this point, students attempting to enrol or drop a class must pay a fee
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