University of California Los Angeles - Bruin Life / Southern Campus Yearbook (Los Angeles, CA)

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PERSPECTIVE On the Fifth Circuit You were sure you ' d taken the wrong exit to UCLA—after all, since when is Sunset Boulevard University Drive? You kept your eyes open for School Crossing, Slow, Speed Limit 25, the signposts of academic life. You had learned these in Driver ' s Training, forgotten them on the license test. On your fifth circuit of the school though, a realization sideswiped you—this was life in the fast lane. Shifting gears, you soon exchange Freshman for a college identity. You become the commuter, the apartment dweller, the dormie, the athlete. Yet all share common bonds—a photo I.D., a registration card, a backpack. Surveying our stereos ' packing crate housing with satisfaction, we leave our rooms and enter Theirs. Moore 100. Rolfe 1200. Haines 39. Young 2500. These define the Space Age. Come with me and explore the cosmos of learning, the Professor intones, with a quizzical quirk of an eyebrow. Suddenly, empty seats verify the existence of black holes. The uninitiated ignore this as well as the apparently irrelevant statistics given in fine print on the syllabus: There are 1,680 hours in ten weeks. A normal person is expected to sleep only a third of that time. With the condensing of our time, we condense our language. The ten minute passing period becomes a forum for this lingo, a place to exchange abbreviations and monosyllables. How goes it? The same. 12 at the Coop. For sure. The casualness is deceptive; these communications become extremely vital for otherwise a student faces days of not seeing a familiar face. The majors we have chosen dictate our paths, both literally and figuratively. Friends with classes in Young Hall are unwilling to trek to North Campus for spaghetti; English majors are just as uninterested in discussing organic chem test results over Bombshelter falafel. We begin to distance ourselves geographically and mentally as we progress to upper division classes. Yet the stirrings of intellectual independence are soon put to the test, and we become as one again, all facing imminent grading. You appear as 003413784 on all the necessary documents, as do others in your position. Wearily, you have attempted to meet the demands of professors, students, administration. Shape up or we ' ll ship you out is a familiar threat. Depleted by midterms, you prepare for the last onslaught of studying. You are a UCLA vending machine during finals week. Unbeknownst to the College of Letters and Science, students can best be evaluated by monitoring their vending machine visits. For example, a student ' s progress through Lehninger ' s Biochemistry: a tale easily told by the number of empty M M packages littering his desk. He has hit bottom after package 9. This method truly realizes the notion of brain food. You know you ' ve really made it at UCLA when you ' re invited out for coffee. Notorious for their coffee consumption, students double their intake during the quarter ' s last weeks. Hot, cold or with ice cream, a swift infusion of cappucino gets me through to dawn, admitted several caffeine junkies. But the dearth of Jujubees in the vending machines is a clear indication that students do not live by sleeplessness alone. What do students live by then? Their deeply felt desire for truth and knowledge? Please—this can hardly be 18 STUDENT LIFE

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STUDENT LIFE How long the road is. But, for all the time the journey has already taken, How you have needed every second of it In order to learn what the road passes by. -Dag Hammarskjold

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expected of minors, much less undeclared majors. Their lecture notes? Not quite—if you need these to find out when the summer solstice is, you ' re already in trouble. No, the guiding principle behind the evolution of the UCLA student is that inevitable step beyond Darwin: Survival of the wittiest. Sure, extra sensory perception, that sixth sense, may get you on That ' s Incredible! , but it takes a finely honed sense of irony to make it at UCLA. How else can a student face the staggering blow of having the computer go down just as his turn comes? Or listing an out-of-state address and still getting Lot 32? Students have learned to deal with these crises through a special curriculum—Subject S or remedial sarcasm. Every morning, the UCLA student downs his Scorn Flakes, fortified with ten essential vitamins and irony, and hikes to the campus. He checks his schedule—Art, how to draw rhetorical moustaches on the moon-faced decrees of Murphy Hall; Military Science, how to remain stoically inattentive; Linguistics, how to ferret out the bourgeois origins of professors ' names; Meteorology, how to make lightning-fast retorts. Certainly a well-rounded schedule, but alas, the System rejects the course credit petition by simply pointing out that repartee merely fills a breath not a breadth requirement. You make a 180° turn. Coming to your senses, you realize that the next four, five or six years cannot be spent gathering cocktail party material. UCLA is rather a place to cultivate your sense of self, not to vegetate in. And in a society whose greatest reward is the expense account lunch, that idea becomes food for thought. —SJG STUDENT LIFE 19