University of California, San Diego
 | |
| Motto | Fiat Lux Let there be light |
|---|---|
| Type | Public Space Grant |
| Established | 1960 |
| Endowment | US $422.5 million [1] |
| Chancellor | Marye Anne Fox |
Academic staff | 1,471 |
| Undergraduates | 21,369 |
| Postgraduates | 4,878 |
| Location | , , |
| Campus | Suburban, 1,152 acres (4.66 km²) |
| Colors | Navy Blue and Gold |
| Affiliations | University of California<br\> AAU<br\> WUN |
| Mascot | Tritons |
| Website | www.ucsd.edu |
 | |
The University of California, San Diego (popularly known as UCSD, or sometimes UC San Diego) is a public, coeducational research university located in La Jolla, a seaside resort community of San Diego, California. The university, one of ten University of California campuses, was founded in 1960[1] around the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. UCSD tends to attract students who are interested in science and engineering due to the prominent San Diego biotech sector that developed nearby because of the presence of the university. The university is also near several well-known and respected research centers, such as the Salk Institute, the Burnham Institute for Medical Research and the Scripps Research Institute.
UCSD is consistently ranked among the top ten public universities for undergraduate education in the United States by U.S. News & World Report[2]. For graduate studies, most of UCSD's Ph.D. programs are ranked in the top 20 for academic quality in the United States by the National Research Council. In 2006, the Academic Ranking of World Universities released by Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranked UCSD 11th in the United States and 13th in the world in terms of quality of scientific research leading towards a Nobel Prize. UCSD has a total of 12 Nobel Laureates affiliated with it.
History
When the Regents originally authorized the San Diego campus in 1956, it was planned to start as a graduate school of science and engineering comparable in quality to Cal Tech. Citizens of San Diego enthusiastically supported the idea, voting the same year to transfer to the university fifty nine acres of mesa land on the coast near the Scripps Institute. General Dynamics Corporation donated a large sum of money to be used for recruiting a distinguished founding faculty.
In 1957, an undergraduate curriculum was planned as part of the general science curriculum, and Roger Revelle, Director of Scripps, was named dean of the new school. UCSD was the first general campus of the UC to be designed "from the top down" in terms of curricular and research emphasis. Stellar faculty were recruited as they became available as opposed to the dictates of a pre-planned curriculum or academic schedule. The graduate division of the school opened in 1960, with instruction offered in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry and earth sciences, with 20 faculty in residence. Classes initially meet in the Scripps Institute.
Before the selection of San Diego was made final, however, the Regents requested an additional gift of 450 acres (1.8 km2) of undeveloped mesa land northeast of Scripps, as well as 500 acres (2 km²) in Camp Matthews, a Marine Corps rifle range adjacent to the site. The city voted in agreement to its part in 1958, and the UC, convinced that all its other conditions would be met, approved construction of the new campus in 1960. Herbert H. York was designated its first chancellor, and he worked out the planning of the main campus according to the "Oxbridge" model, relying on many of Revelle's ideas.
By 1963, new facilities on the mesa been finished for the School of Science and Engineering, and new buildings were under construction for Social Sciences and Humanities. Ten additional faculty in those disciplines were hired, and the whole site was designated the First College of the new campus. The campus accepted its first undergraduate class of 181 freshman in 1964, and was designated Revelle College the next year.[3]
Organization
Undergraduate colleges
Undergraduate housing is organized around a system of residential colleges modeled after those at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, and somewhat similar to the systems at UC Santa Cruz and Princeton University. The colleges each have their own campuses, places of residence, and offices. In addition, there are unique core writing courses as well as other general education requirements that are exclusive to each college.
UCSD's six colleges are: Roger Revelle College, founded in 1964 as First College, which has highly structured requirements; John Muir College, founded in 1967 as Second College, which emphasizes a "spirit of self-sufficiency and individual choice" and offers loosely structured general-education requirements; Thurgood Marshall College, founded in 1970 as Third College, which emphasizes "scholarship, social responsibility and the belief that a liberal arts education must include an understanding of [one's] role in society"; Earl Warren College, founded in 1974 as Fourth College, which 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; 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; and Sixth College, founded in 2002 with a focus on "historical and philosophical connections among culture, art and technology."
Undergraduates may major in any discipline offered at UCSD, regardless of undergraduate college. However, each college issues unique undergraduate diplomas and holds an individual commencement ceremony.
Student life
The campus's undergraduate population is represented by a formal student government, known as the A.S. Council. Recently, the council made national news over a controversy regarding pornography broadcast over the A.S.-funded television station by members of The Koala. The A.S. Council also funds three quarterly festivals during the year: FallFest, WinterFest, and Sun God. Sun God, named after the statue created by artist Niki de Saint Phalle, is the best-known of the three festivals. During the event, there are day long series of concerts, performances, free items, and celebration before the final free concert takes place in the evening.
Two other popular campus events include the Pumpkin Drop and the Watermelon Drop, which take place during Halloween and at the end of the third academic quarter, respectively. The Watermelon Drop is one of the campus's 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 size of the resulting splat. A variety of events surround the Watermelon Drop, including a pageant where an occasionally male but generally female "Watermelon Queen" is elected. In 1979 the Queen rode to Urey Hall in a theatrical-prop sedan chair that had been knocking around the Revelle dorms for years. The Pumpkin Drop is a similar event celebrated by the dropping of a large, candy-filled pumpkin from the tallest residential building on the Muir college campus.
Each of the undergraduate colleges focuses on enhancing student life through various programs and organizations as well as through residential life programs. Upon admission to UCSD, each undergraduate student is assigned to a college. Currently there are six colleges--Revelle, Muir, Marshall, Roosevelt, Warren, and Sixth College (not yet named). The college a student is assigned to determines their General Education requirements. Each college also has a unique college specific writing class that all students must take.
The campus's graduate population is represented by a separate formal student government, known as the Graduate Student Association (GSA). The Association's membership comprises representatives from each of the graduate departments. The number of representatives is proportional to the number of graduate students within that particular department. Additionally, graduate students who serve as teaching or research assistants are represented by the UC-wide union of Academic Student Employees, UAW Local 2865.
There are also three campus centers that cultivate a sense of community among faculty, staff, and students: the Cross-Cultural Center, the Women's Center and the LGBT Resource Center.
One of the more controversial aspects of student life at UCSD is the student-run comedy paper, The Koala, a satirical paper often criticized for its bad taste and lack of political correctness and also funded by the A.S. [4]
The campus does host a small independent radio station, KSDT, which no longer broadcasts over the airwaves, but still operates online. There is a music venue on the campus grounds of some fame called The Che Cafe, a collective organization serving multiple functions as an underground music venue, vegan food collective, center for grassroots organizations such as Food Not Bombs, and similar groups and activities. Due to occasional protests and political rallies, UCSD administration has taken steps to limit activites there. Prominent local San Diego bands such as The Locust and Pinback, and national tours such as Mates of State and Dillinger Escape Plan have given the Che Cafe some fame and praise as a radical vegan collective despite its small size (it fits a few hundred people) and mediocre sound equipment.
Built in the late 1960's, UCSD does have a unique layout specifically designed to prevent student demonstrations, gatherings, and protests of any large size.[citation needed] There is a system of underground tunnels designed to allow police to quickly access any area on campus and disrupt and control crowds.[citation needed] Parts of the tunnel system are featured in one of The Locust's music videos.
Major divisions
In addition to academic division by college, courses and programs at UCSD are also divided into the following divisions:
- Division of Arts and Humanities
- Division of Biological Sciences
- Division of Physical Sciences
- Division of Social Sciences
- Jacobs School of Engineering
Graduate and professional schools
- Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS)
- Graduate Studies
- Rady School of Management
- UC San Diego School of Medicine
- Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
- Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program
Research centers
- Scripps Institution of Oceanography
- San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)
- California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
- Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR)
- Whitaker Institute of Biomedical Engineering (WIBE)
Charter school
The Preuss School is a charter school established on the UCSD campus in 1999 to provide an intensive college preparatory curriculum for low-income students from the greater San Diego area.
Admissions
For the 2007-2008 academic period, UCSD received 45,093 freshmen applications of which 18,547 students were offered fall admission, making the admission rate about 41.1%. Also, the number of students applying to UCSD makes it the second most popular UC campus, after UCLA. [2] Admitted students attained a mean weighted high school GPA of 4.06 and average SAT scores of 635, 670, and 640 for Critical Reading, Math and Writing, respectively. Of the 18,547 freshmen that were admitted, 99% were in the top ten percent of their high school class. [3]. [4]
Matriculating students tend to indicate a preference for the University's large environment and largely renowned professors and programs. The top four overlapping schools for applicants are UCLA, UC Berkeley, USC, and Stanford.
Graduate admissions are largely centralized through the Office of Graduate Studies. However, the Rady School of Management and the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) handle their own admissions.
Athletics
UCSD’s sports teams are called the Tritons. This mascot is largely unknown due to the university lacking a football team. However, without such a large financial draw, the university can support a large number of other sports, including swimming, water polo, soccer, volleyball, crew, track and field, fencing, basketball, golf, cross country, softball, baseball, and tennis. Many of which have become perennial strengths and national contenders. UCSD participates in the NCAA's Division II, in the California Collegiate Athletic Association, although water polo, fencing, and men's volleyball compete at the Division I level. Before joining Division II in 2000, for years the school participated at the Division III level and won numerous national championships there.
Until the 2007-2008 school year, UCSD is the only NCAA Division II school that does not offer athletic scholarships. In 2005, the NCAA created a rule that made it mandatory for Division II programs to award athletic grants; a measure has been proposed to begin offering 500 dollar "grants-in-aid" to all intercollegiate athletes in order to meet this requirement. In February 2007, a 78 dollar fee referendum was voted on and approved in the largest vote in UCSD history. This fee increase puts the UCSD athletic department budget on par with rival DII schools for the first time since the transition.
In its best season since moving to DII, in 2006-2007 19 of its 23 programs qualified for post-season competition, including 17 to the NCAA Championships. Eight of those teams finished in the top-5 in the nation at NCAA's. Women’s crew was the national runners-up for DII finishing 6 seconds behind Western Washington University. Men’s water polo finished third in DI behind USC and national champion Cal. Women’s basketball, men’s tennis and women’s swimming also finished third in the country. The women’s volleyball, women’s soccer and men’s swimming teams all finished fifth in the nation.
As part of the University's ideology for students to have ample involvement with their lives and future, UCSD fields a number of club sports teams. The UCSD surfing team has won the national title six times. UCSD has consistently been rated one of the best surfing schools in the nation with its proximity to some of the best surfing beaches in California. UCSD also has sport clubs in badminton, cycling, dancesport, dance team, equestrian, ice hockey, lacrosse, roller hockey, rugby, sailing, soccer, snow skiing, table tennis, triathlon, ultimate frisbee, volleyball, water polo, and water skiing.
Recognition
In the 2006 Newsweek Magazine review, "America's 25 Hottest Colleges," UCSD was selected as the "Hottest for Science," noting the school's location, research grants, tradition, and diverse topics of study as key points [5]. For 2006, US News and World Report ranks UCSD as 32nd in the nation overall and 7th among public universities for its undergraduate program. When compared to other public universities in California, UCSD is ranked third behind Berkeley and UCLA. The 2006 Academic Ranking of World Universities released by Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranked UCSD 11th in the United States and 13th in the world in terms of quality of scientific research leading towards a Nobel Prize. In 2005, The Times Higher Education Supplement ranked UCSD as 42nd in the world overall, 14th in the world for biomedicine, and 48th in the world for science [6]. Also, in 2006, the Washington Monthly, which considers community service in addition to conventional criteria, ranked UCSD 6th. Kiplinger's ranked UCSD 11th in the nation for “First-Class Education at Bargain Prices." [7]
The most recent 'National Research Council review of PhD programs' performed in 1995 ranks UCSD as 10th overall (2nd among public universities, behind UC Berkeley), including 4th in biological sciences, 9th in physical sciences, 9th in engineering, as well as 12th in social sciences and 19th in arts and humanities.
In 2007, US News and World Report ranked the graduate School of Medicine as 14th in nation for medical research and 33rd for primary care. UCSD's graduate program in behavioral neuroscience was ranked second in the nation while its cognitive psychology program was ranked third. The Jacobs School of Engineering overall was ranked 11th in the nation, and 6th in the nation among public universities. [8] All five of the Jacobs School's academic departments were ranked in the top 20: The Department of Bioengineering, ranked 2nd in the nation for biomedical engineering behind Johns Hopkins. The department has ranked among the top five programs in the nation every year for the past decade. The Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), ranked highly in all categories surveyed: computer systems (9), computer science (13), theory (14), programming language (17) and artificial intelligence (19). The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, ranked 16th in mechanical engineering and 19th in aerospace engineering; the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), ranked 16th in electrical engineering and communications, and 17th in computer engineering; and the Department of Structural Engineering, ranked 17th in the specialty of civil engineering. The interdisciplinary Bioinformatics program, which is offered jointly by eight UCSD departments including the Jacobs School's bioengineering and computer science and engineering departments, ranked 6th in the nation. The Jacobs School of Engineering is also the 9th best in the world for engineering/technology and computer sciences, according to an academic ranking of the top 100 world universities published online in February 2007 by the Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. [9] This is the first year the ARWU ranked universities by subject fields. Other fields in which UCSD is ranked among the world’s elite universities include: Life and Agriculture Sciences (14th); the Natural Sciences and Mathematics (19th); Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy (23rd); and the Social Sciences (25th).
According to US News and World Report rankings of graduate programs, UCSD biology program is ranked 2nd in neuroscience and neurobiology, 6th in genetics and genomics, and 10th in cell biology. UCSD physics program is ranked 6th in plasma and 10th in condensed matter and low temperature physics. UCSD chemistry program is ranked 7th in biochemistry. UCSD earth sciences program is ranked 5th in geophysics and seismology. UCSD computer science program is ranked 9th in systems, and math program is ranked 2nd in discrete mathematics and combinations. UCSD Economics department is ranked 10th in the nation, Econometrics, subsector of Economics, is ranked 2nd in the nation, right below MIT.
Graham-Diamond report ranks UCSD 8th overall in the country, including top-10 rankings in biological sciences (3rd), economics (5th), social and behavioral sciences (7th) and physics (9th).
UCSD has total annual research funding of more than $600 million. The National Science Foundation has ranked UCSD first in the UC system and sixth in the nation in terms of Federal research expenditures. Some 200 San Diego companies have been founded by UCSD faculty and alumni, and over 40% of the people employed in the San Diego biotechnology industry work in UCSD spin-offs. Science Watch ranked UCSD fifth in the world for highest research impact, based on papers published and cited in the field of molecular biology and genetics [10].
Sixteen UCSD faculty members have won the Nobel Prize, nine of whom are currently on the faculty. UCSD faculty also include nine MacArthur Fellows and 146 Guggenheim Fellows. UCSD ranks sixth in the nation in terms of National Academy of Science membership.
In 1995, the National Research Council ranked UCSD faculty the 10th-best in the nation, and ranked numerous graduate programs among the top ten in the United States in terms of quality: neurosciences (1st), oceanography (1st), bioengineering (2nd), physiology (2nd), pharmacology (3rd), theatre and dance (3rd), genetics (6th), geosciences (6th), cell and developmental biology (7th), anthropology (9th), biochemistry and molecular biology (2nd), political science (2nd), aerospace engineering (10th), and mechanical engineering (10th).
UCSD also counts among its research centers the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
UCSD's biological science related research, aided by a strong local biotechnology sector, is especially well-respected.
Public art
More than a dozen public art projects, part of the Stuart Collection, decorate the campus. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Sun God, a large winged creature located near the Faculty Club. Other Stuart Collection art includes a collection of Stonehenge-like stone blocks, a large coiling snake path, a building that flashes the names of vices and virtues in bright neon lights, and three metallic Eucalyptus trees, the Music Tree, the Literary Tree and the Third Tree commonly referred to as the Silent Tree. One of the newest additions to the collection is Tim Hawkinson's giant teddy bear made of six boulders located in between the newly constructed CALIT buildings. Another notable campus sight are the graffiti tunnels of Mandeville Hall, a series of corridors that have been tagged with graffiti by generations of students over decades of use. Students in the university's visual arts department also often create temporary public art installations as part of their coursework.
Notable people
References
- ^ UCSD History
- ^ "America's Best Colleges 2007". U.S. News & World Report.
{{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - ^ Stadtman, Verne A. "The University of California, 1868-1968," pages 407-411
- ^ "Shameful hypocrisy alive and well on campus" UCSD Guardian
External links
Informational links
Student government
- UCSD Associated Students website
- UCSD Graduate Student Association website
- Triton Engineering Student Council website
Student publications
- The UCSD Guardian. The official student newspaper
- The Koala. Student Run Humor Newspaper
- The MQ. Onion Like Newspaper
- The Saltman Quarterly. Student Run Undergraduate Journal of Science
Student organizations
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