UCI Students Know the Summer’s Over
There’s nothing like a college dorm room to coax hidden resourcefulness out of a person, and as Nick Corrado, a freshman at UCI, sits in one of the most unusual chairs around, he’s proud of himself. He grins.
The chair, which has arms and a back angled for good lumbar support, is made entirely of stacked Pacific Bell phone directories. For a chair made out of books, Corrado says, “It’s not too bad, is it? I guess this is what you do your freshman year. You just gotta figure stuff out.”
Corrado, whose home is near Vandenberg Air Force Base, is one of as many as 3,670 freshmen--and roughly 20,000 students all told--who began college Thursday at UCI. The campus was full of students like Corrado finding their way through the chaos: doing laundry for the first time, buying parking passes for spots that never seem to exist, buying books at an overwhelmed bookstore, enrolling in classes after a summer that, by all accounts, seemed too short.
“It really came up fast. It’s really overwhelming,” said Alonso Loera, 18, a freshman who moved to Irvine from Sacramento. “This Sunday, it was just me. I had no friends. Nobody. It’s better now, but it was really lonely to be here by myself.”
As it is every year, parking was a major gripe among students Friday, but this year, as construction workers block roads and continue to build new dorms and garages, it is expected to be an even bigger concern.
The university is building new parking structures (it expects to grow to about 40,000 students over the next decade), but building a garage on a former parking lot means hundreds of fewer spots in the short term.
“I hate this,” said Joel Prieve, a senior majoring in economics, who commutes from San Clemente. “It’s such an incredible pain to park here. I pay about $200 a year to park, and by the time they get the new parking garages done, I’ll be gone. I guess I’ll have to just live with it.”
Across campus, streets were cluttered with cars, students setting speed records on their Razor scooters and harried teachers carrying armfuls of paperwork and books. Fraternities and sororities set up booths to recruit new members. Students in dormitories spent most of the day decorating their rooms, putting up posters, setting up computers, moving tiny refrigerators.
“I’m doing laundry the first time here,” said Hugh Bang, a freshman from El Monte, waiting for a dorm washer to finish its cycle. “My mom did my laundry. I’m just trying to figure this out,” he said, nodding at an ice cream container filled with laundry soap.
Freshmen and seniors say they don’t figure they’ll ever quite get over the feeling of bombardment that comes on the first day. All the events. The parties. The boom boxes from dorm rooms. The gnawing feeling that they have to make all their friends on the first day.
Bang was no exception:
“I tried to get things under control before. I bought my parking passes online. I tried to avoid all the things that . . . I thought would overwhelm me, but it still is a lot to think about. This is the whole world now. There’s so many people. I’m thinking about a frat. I’m thinking about becoming an investment banker. I’m thinking about all the professors. I’m sitting in the front row, and they really are intimidating. I miss my family. They live in El Monte. Forty five minutes away. The way I drive now? Thirty minutes.”
Upstairs, Corrado still was sitting in his phone-book chair, smiling wider and playing with a small basketball, unworried that he has registered for only one class.
