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California | Xatal

I saw Sonoma State University last Sunday

Last Sunday, I took my girlfriend to see Sonoma State University. She’s unsure of where she wants to go to school next year, so I figured I’d take her to a few schools so she can have a quality tour to remember them by.

Right now, Sonoma is her top choice for a CSU, and since I’m always curious about schools I’ve never been to nor heard much about, I decided to take her to see it.

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Keep an eye on the A-G Requirements

If you’re aspiring to go to a UC or a CSU, it’s important to keep a close eye to make sure you’re going to meet all of the A-G Requirements.

When I was in high school, the counselors drilled all of them into us, so that by the time we were in our sophomore year, we knew them by heart. However, I know that not all schools do this, and some may not even have heard of them at all. The A-G Requirements are basically an addition to your high school’s graduation requirements. They require you to take so many years of each subject and to pass.

Chances are you’re already doing a lot of work to prepare yourself for college and to look great for your applications, but it can be very easy to miss one or two essential requirements, disqualifying you from eligibility from both sets of schools.

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Which CSUs and UCs use the quarter system? Which ones use the semester system?

Earlier, I made a post about the differences between the quarter and semester systems that are used to divide the academic year in college. I also wrote about the difference between UCs and CSUs.

However, I didn’t state which CSUs and UCs are on the quarter system and which are on the semester. Here’s the list of schools in both systems and what academic system they use. With the exception of CSU Stanislaus, all are on either the quarter or semester system.

Schools that use the quarter system are listed in green, and schools that use the semester system are listed in blue.

CSU Campuses:

  • CSU Bakersfield: Quarter
  • CSU Channel Islands: Semester
  • CSU Chico: Semester
  • CSU Dominguez Hills: Semester
  • CSU East Bay: Quarter
  • CSU Fresno: Semester
  • CSU Fullerton: Semester
  • Humboldt State University: Semester
  • CSU Long Beach: Semester
  • CSU Los Angeles: Quarter
  • California State Maritime Academy: Semester
  • CSU Monterey Bay: Semester
  • CSU Northridge: Semester
  • Cal Poly, Pomona: Quarter
  • CSU Sacramento: Semester
  • CSU San Bernardino: Quarter
  • San Diego State University: Semester
  • San Francisco State University: Semester
  • San Jose State University: Semester
  • Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo: Quarter
  • CSU San Marcos: Semester
  • Sonoma State University: Semester
  • CSU Stanislaus: 4-1-4

UC Campuses:

  • UC Berkeley: Semester
  • UC Davis: Quarter
  • UC Irvine: Quarter
  • UC Los Angeles: Quarter
  • UC Merced: Semester
  • UC Riverside: Quarter
  • UC San Diego: Quarter
  • UC Santa Barbara: Quarter
  • UC Santa Cruz: Quarter

California’s nutritional standards in a high school setting

In 2005, the California state legislature passed a bill for stricter nutritional guidelines on foods that could be sold at public schools. The new policy took effect during my sophomore year in high school, and I noticed an immediate difference in students reactions around my school.

Before the policy went into effect, a major income source for our student government was from the student store. There we could buy sodas, chips, crackers, and other snacks for rather cheap prices. Vending machines around campus were always properly stocked.

California has strict nutritional requirements about what schools can offer for lunch.

California has strict nutritional requirements about what schools can offer for lunch.

However when the new standards kicked in, snack bar sales plummeted. My old high school has an open campus lunch, and often vendors will come right up to the school boundaries to sell food to students during lunch time. Immediately, these vendors started selling all of the foods that the school no longer could. Students that couldn’t drive flocked to these like wildfire, and students that could drive went out to lunch more often.

Because the student government primarily used food sales to stay financially alive, they ended up in a massive debt when the sales dropped. School and class activities were cut down to bare-bones celebrations.

Twice a year, our school also held a food fair: all of the clubs would sell some sort of food. Of course, the clubs were held to the same state regulations. This greatly limited the types of foods that could be sold, meaning many foreign foods had to be substituted for healthy alternatives. So much for cultural awareness.

The biggest problem with the nutritional guidelines is that the only foods that can be sold rarely taste good. As a kid, taste is most important. If I’m eating a chicken sandwich, I want it to taste like chicken, not some healthy junk that tastes more like rubber. I didn’t receive discounted lunch, so my choice was simple:

Do I spend $2.25 and buy an awful school lunch, or do I go to Taco Bell and get a couple of burritos for the same price? It was really a no-brainer.

In the end, the stricter nutrition guidelines hurt much more than they helped. A lot of this was caused by our school having an open campus at lunch. What would have happened if we had a closed campus?

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What’s the difference between a UC and a CSU?

In California, public universities are divided into three tiers: Community colleges, CSUs, and UCs.

Community colleges are pretty simple: they’re local 2-year schools that can get you an associates degree and/or help you transfer up to a 4-year university. On the other hand, both CSUs and UCs are both 4-year universities.

When I was a senior, people from all three tiers came to talk to us. I listened to both what the CSU representatives and the UC representative had to say.

The basic difference is that UCs are the next tier above CSUs. That’s not to say that UCs are necessarily better, but that the main focus is different. CSUs are more oriented towards practical use, whereas UCs are much more research-based. Take a look at the majors offered by both types of schools: you’ll see what I mean.

Here’s a further break-down about the differences:

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California’s ELC Program

ELC, short for “Eligibility in the Local Context”, is California’s way of guaranteeing you admission into one of the 9 University of California campuses (not the CSUs — know the difference).

ELC is given out to roughly the top 4% of every high school senior class based on the grades and classes of students. However, to me it seemed like far more than the top 4% were finding out. I came from a class of 450 students — 4% of that is 18, and I know more than 18 kids who received letters. So you might have a better chance of receiving a letter than the 4% implies, I’m not too sure.

My letter came around October 20th. Yours probably will too. What that letter will say is something to this effect:

As an ELC student, you are guaranteed admission to one of our nine outstanding campuses

What does this mean?

Exactly what it says. If it’s your life’s ambition to go to a UC, then be happy! You’ll definitely be admitted into at least one. Unfortunately, this doesn’t guarantee you into every UC (sorry, no instant admission into UCLA just yet!), but the fact that you even got one of these letters already signifies that you have excellent chances of getting into some of the less-competitive schools and even some of the more-competitive ones.

Be ready for some more mail.

You might be thinking, “Big whoop, I figured I’d at least get into Merced or something”, but the ELC program will do far more than guarantee your admission into one school.

After receiving the initial ELC letter, within the next couple of weeks I started to get mail from some of the UC campuses encouraging me to apply or, in most cases, directly guaranteeing me admission into the school. Here’s what I ended up receiving:

  1. UC Davis: Guarantee of admission, as well as guarantee of first-choice major.
  2. UC Irvine: Guarantee of admission into nearly all majors
  3. UC Merced: Guarantee of admission
  4. UC Riverside: Guarantee of admission
  5. UC San Diego: Encouraged to apply
  6. UC Santa Barbara: Guarantee of admission

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