University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego (popularly known as UCSD) is a public, coeducational university located in La Jolla, California. The university, one of ten University of California campuses, was founded in 1959 around the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
University of California, San Diego
| Motto | Fiat Lux (Latin, "Let There Be Light") |
|---|---|
| Established | 1959 |
| School type | Public |
| Chancellor | Marye Anne Fox |
| Location | La Jolla, California, USA |
| Enrollment | 21,000 undergraduate, 4,000 graduate |
| Faculty | 1,471 |
| Endowment | $184 million (FY 2004) NACUBO USD |
| Campus | Suburban, 2,040 acres (8 km²) |
| Sports teams | Tritons |
| Website | www.ucsd.edu |
Contents |
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. At UCSD, each college has its own campus and places of residence, and requires a different core writing course. Each college also has specific general education requirements.
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 approach to both Western and non-Western cultures; and Sixth College, founded in 2002 with a focus on "historical and philosophical connections among culture, art and technology."
Undergraduates can major in any discipline offered at UCSD without regard to their undergraduate college. However, the colleges issue undergraduate diplomas and hold individual commencement ceremonies.
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
Graduate and professional schools
- Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS)
- Graduate Studies and Research
- Jacobs School of Engineering
Research centers
- Scripps Institution of Oceanography
- San Diego Supercomputer Center
- California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
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 2004 academic period, UCSD received 41,395 freshmen applications of which 16,275 students were offered admission([1]) (a small number of these offers required students to enter in winter quarter). The admit rate was about 39%. The group of admitted students attained a mean weighted high school grade point average (GPA) of 4.01 and an average composite SAT score of 1307 ([2]).
Graduate admissions are largely centralized through the Office of Graduate Studies and Research, but the Rady School of Management and the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) do 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, with UCSD's perennial strengths lying in aquatic sports (swimming and water polo), soccer, volleyball, rowing (also called "crew"), and tennis instead. 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. However, due to its comparatively large student body and a lack of west-coast Division III opponents, UCSD moved up to Division II.
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 small grants to all intercollegiate athletes in order to meet this requirement.
In addition to UCSD's NCAA teams, the school fields a number of club sports teams. The UCSD surfing team has won the national title six times.
Recognition
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.
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. [3] The 2004 Princeton Review and Fiske Guide to Colleges 2004 both ranked UCSD's admissions as "most selective". The US News rankings placed the university 32nd in the nation and 7th among public universities in the doctoral research category. UCSD is often referred to as a Public Ivy. Compared to other public universities in California, UCSD is ranked third, behind Berkeley and UCLA, according to US News. In the 2005 Academic Ranking of World Universities, released by Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranked UCSD 11th in the United States, and 13th in the world 2005 [([4]). The Times Higher Supplement ranked UCSD as 24th in the world, and in 2005, the Atlantic Monthly ranked UCSD as 8th in the United States respectively ([5]). [6].
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.
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.
Public art
Numerous 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, each with their own personalities.
Notable people
External links
- Official website
- Official athletics website
- UCSD Associated Students website
- The UCSD Guardian. The official student newspaper
- Teacher Education Program
- Historical Overview of UCSD
- Stuart Collection public art projects
| University of California |
|---|
| Berkeley | Davis | Irvine | Los Angeles | Merced | Riverside | San Diego | San Francisco | Santa Barbara | Santa Cruz |
| Worldwide Universities Network |
|---|
| Bergen | Bristol | UCSD | Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | Leeds | Manchester | Nanjing | Oslo | Penn State | Sheffield | Southampton | Utrecht | Washington, Seattle | Wisconsin, Madison | York | Zhejiang |
