This post serves as a text-based supplement to a video I recently made showing off each college’s dorms.
Also, it’s very important that you’re aware of some recent changes to the colleges in the past few years:
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A new Seventh college was founded in 2019, with its first students in fall 2020.
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Sixth College has since moved in 2020 from Camp Snoopy and Sixth Apartments in the southeastern corner of campus to north of Muir, which is in the middle of campus. The difference in quality of the dorms are very significant.
Many online resources are out of date, so be aware of these changes. I’ll cover the recent changes in my post below.
Colleges?
Unlike most universities, UC San Diego splits its undergraduate students into different colleges, which are like Hogwarts houses except you get to rank the colleges you want to get into, rather than some old hat.
Your college is just more than instilling pride for your college or to have a closer support group of advisors or students. Each college has its own GEs (graduation requirements), and the dorms that first- and second-years stay in vary greatly depending on the college.
The video above shows the diversity of the dorms between colleges; here, I’ll just give a quick summary on each college’s GEs.
Revelle
Revelle has a lot of GEs because it requires that you take five quarters of natural science courses, regardless of whether your major is a science major or not. Maybe that would be good if you intend on majoring in something bio, chem, or physics related, but otherwise the GEs are a lot.
Muir
Muir is nice. Their GEs have been known to be very flexible and light, so it’s a very popular choice.
Marshall
Marshall’s GEs aren’t very notable, I think. They’re somewhat easy.
Warren
Warren’s GEs are very good for engineering majors because they’re easier for them.
ERC
ERC is an international themed college, so its GEs require you to:
- Know a foreign language at a certain level
- Take three courses about some region of the world
- Take five courses of Making of the Modern World, which is ERC’s writing program.
ERC has a lot of GEs, which is not very ideal.
Sixth and Seventh
Sixth and Seventh’s GEs are both pretty nice as well.
Conclusion
Here’s a table qualitatively summarizing each college’s GEs:
| College | GEs |
|---|---|
| Revelle | pain |
| Muir | nice |
| Marshall | meh |
| Warren | nice if engineer; meh otherwise |
| ERC | pain |
| Sixth | nice |
| Seventh | nice |
If you don’t plan on living off campus for your first and second years, then you should also preview the dorms in my video comparing each college’s residential halls at UC San Diego.