Thoughts on UCSD
I wrote this while waiting on the flight back (More accurately, while waiting on the plane sitting in Phoenix; more on that later.), and has sent it back through time to it's proper place here.
As mentioned previously I have been visiting the University of California at San Diego. On the whole I liked what I saw. Despite what it seems everyone says the campus actually isn't all that pretty. Mainly, all of the building look like parking garages. Well, most of them look like the designer knew he wasn't designing a parking garage, but that was all he really knew how to do. A striking feature was the balconies; every building there tends to be covered with them. In fact, combined with the usually external staircases these are the main ways to navigate some of the buildings, which may lack or have few internal hallways. Ina class of it's own is the library. All I can really say is that the building is named for and dedicated to Dr. Suess; it looks the part as much as any real structure can. Also, to me as a midwesterner, the vegetation of the area looks a bit odd, with scrub and bushes covering the ground wherever people haven't planted and irrigated grass.
What were really more important to me, however, were the people and research in the physics department. I got to meet with one of the experimentalist professors in both the areas of plasma physics and astrophysics, as well as a couple of graduate students. Everyone seemed quite friendly and genuinely excited about their work. The work itself sounded interesting too, both in it's breadth and depth. i got to hear all about how the plasma group studies single species plasmas using clever tricks with lasers, such as identifying ions by spin using the tiny differences in their energy levels. Very awesome.
I think that I'm glad that I didn't go to some place like UCSD for my undergraduate studies; the size of the place would have been overwhelming. Still it would be a great place to go now, and the Universities of Washington and Wisconsin are going to have to give pretty strong showings to beat it.