How to Use This Guide

Hello! Welcome to UCSC and the Unofficial UCSC Student Guide. Congratulations on your admission to UC Santa Cruz!

For new/prospective students

This guide’s purpose is to introduce new students to UCSC student life through tips and experiences shared from experienced, fellow UCSC peers. It seems that many UCSC sites are hard to navigate and not incredibly informative since they lack student opinions, so this guide will complement much of the important information from the UCSC sites with student perspectives and thoughts to give new students a more realistic and holistic introduction to UCSC.

For current/returning students

Some of the information in the Guide may already be known to you and some of it may not. If you find something to be inaccurate or would like to add more information, please let me know or see the Contribution Guidelines if you would like to try making a fix yourself!

Site navigation and use

There is a navigation bar on the left-hand side that will categorize all the different sections of the Guide, ranging from off campus housing to preparation for your major studies to student employment. Relevant links from UCSC sites and other official sources will be put as much as possible throughout the Guide so you can always trace back this summarized information to the source to verify its authenticity.

The right side of each page will have links to the different subsections of that page for easy access to particular information you are looking for or just to act as a summary of what the current page has.

The bottom of each page will have a link to the next section if you want to read and click through in order, but you can pick and choose any section from the navigation bar. The time the site was last updated will also be on the bottom of each page, so you know how up-to-date the information is.

We will try to put up as many preparation guide for as many majors as we can, but most of our contributors are computer science majors, so our expertise in other fields are not good enough to know how to make an appropriate guide for other programs of study. For these other majors, we will contact other students and department advising offices to put something together. This will be something along the lines of a “Things I wish I knew before starting [Your Major] at UCSC”.

There will also be more general UCSC student information in addition to specific majors and programs, such as info on dining halls, on/off campus housing, residential colleges, and financial aid guides.

Disclaimer

This guide is in no way affiliated with UC Santa Cruz, the Regents of the University of California, or the University of California. It is an unofficial guide put together by UCSC students.