Lisa
Oh my goodness, the bureaucracy. Seriously, everything administrative about this school is stuck on stupid. My freshman year the city buses went on strike. They keep making the rules more and more strict on campus. The academia is excellent, the students are cool, and it's a beautiful place to go to school, but trying to get a diploma is like wrestling a dragon for 4 years. Currently there are a bunch of tree-sitters protesting the expansion and it caused a lot of drama. The locals hate us a lot: there's a Santa Cruz Party Ordinance which makes it so that noise violations build cumulative fines that stay with the house after you move-so if you move off campus and throw one party at a house that had a lot of fines before, you could be looking at thousands of dollars over one night!
This place caters to the college crowd, but it isn't really a normal town. We have amazing places to eat, but no In N Out, no Arby's, no real drive thrus, and most places except for bars, Saturn Cafe, Santa Cruz Diner, and Longs close fairly early.
The school is actually getting too large for the town to handle, so there are probably going to be a few years where UCSC is harder to get into because of the limited resources.
There's some school pride(we're the Banana Slugs, after all!) but not much in the way of sports or school spirit events. There are a lot of athletic, active people, but most of them are more about fun than representing the college.
My experiences here are pretty amazing, and there's so many things I did(most of them I don't actually want published) that you'd have to try yourself, and it's an unforgettable experience.
Caitlyn
If I could change one thing, I would add more of a greek system. Until this year, I was part of the only international sorority on campus. When I wear my letters I can feel people judging me sometimes, and there isnt as much of a social scene because of how much santa cruz disapproves of greeks. Most everyone in the greek system complains about this, and people who aren't in it usually complain that there is not enough of a sports atmosphere, almost no one goes to games and we dont even have a football team. Even though there are almost 20,000 people here, it doesn't seem that big because it is broken up into 10 different colleges so you feel like you belong to a smaller community. There is a pretty good community in the down town area and a lot of student hang out and go to bars down there, but as long as you are living on campus you dont see much of it because its a 20 minute bus ride away. There is always a protest going on, which most of the time is pretty cool because it makes it easy to get involved, but sometimes it is taken too far and can even get violent. Recently we had a bunch of people tree sitting for almost 2 months on science hill and a whole parking lot was blocked off and they ended up blocking off a lot of entrances to buildings, which was pretty inconvenient. But people around here are very passionate about the environment and it shows. Its pretty obvious from our mascot, the banana slug, that we are not the typical college campus. We do still have a lot of the hippie traditions around like drum circles and the annual first rain naked run and a lot of other things that make you say "only in santa cruz". I think one of my most memerable experiences would be on 4-20 where hundreds of students flock to one large field and a huge cloud of pot smoke lingers above for the durration of the day. The amazing part, no cops or campus workers interfere.