rebies

I am currently a graduate student at Irvine. Yes, the place lacks the lovely urban centers that we might like to see, and have known from our past (my education was completed in London), and yet, this seems to me to hardly be a cause for calling the University itself "soul sucking," as if that term means anything anyway. Yes, there are strip malls. One of my favorites has a Soon Dobu restaurant (and the nice women running the place don't put fish in my soup - which is nice,) a vegan restaurant that makes damn fine sandwiches, and a north Indian restaurant. Certainly, there are also lots of nasty little big box stores whose parking lots are monitored by underpaid and inattentive security guards. But really, the portrait of Orange County is much more complex than that. I also would like to address two streams of thinking that run through the responses you have gotten so far: 1) that driving is evil, precludes you from going anywhere, and will eventually defeat your will to do anything and 2) that it is impossible to find affordable, accessible housing in or near Irvine that still allows you to have a social life, and that this social life is entirely dependent upon where you live. First, Southern California is a dispersed place, true, and this is to my mind one of its greatest assets. While there are certainly centralized areas of culture that graduate students are likely to flock (concerts on the East Side, galleries in Culver City and Chinatown, etc., --more below), we shouldn't assume that all graduate students or university faculty are interested in and likely to spend their time in the same place. Some of my peers commute to San Diego because they have families there; some from Pasadena choose to commute because they work at the Norton Simon; others live in Long Beach - including myself - and still others live in Irvine. Nobody's soul appears to have evaporated, regardless of where they live. I choose to live in Long Beach because it is halfway between the University and LA, where I spend every weekend, with only the rare exception, and near the beach and bars. It takes me 20 mintues carpooling and 30 minutes alone to get to school (door to door) and 30 minutes carpool/45 minutes alone to get to the furthest reaches of LA. True, traffic can be killer and I sometimes sit for a long while. But that is usually because I am going somewhere I want to be, and we sometimes just have to wait for what we want ...Moreover, delay occurs on public transit everywhere, anyway. Second, I find my rent to be reasonable, as it relates to my geographic area and my cultural map of the city. Traveling around the city really isn't that bad, and I find that life in the region is generally good. And certainly, depending on your interests and class schedule, the size of the region does afford a good diversity of activities, impeccable weather and natural beauty, and some great adviser at UCI. Hope this helps