Why UCI’s Lack of Campus Culture Makes it Hard to Meet People

UC Irvine isn’t your traditional university experience. Rather, UCI has a very well known reputation for being a commuter school. UCI only has dorms for freshmen, and not all freshmen even live on campus. Many of them are local students from areas in and around Orange County. A repercussion of this is the lack of a central campus culture.

Older institutions have ingrained traditions that students are excited to participate in, but UCI being founded in 1964 and without even so much as a football team, is missing these traditions. According to a second year Biomedical Engineering major, “In the long term not having a football team causes the campus to have less social activity and takes away from connections between students.”

This lack of a central identity pushes people away from the university itself and towards other means of finding friends. This leads to the importance of clubs for UCI students. In fact, club organizations are the most prominent way to meet people at UCI.

Whether it be social fraternities and sororities, professional organizations, cultural clubs, dance teams (which have a huge community at UCI and are very good at what they do), or intramural sports — this is where people tend to find that sense of “home” at UCI.

It’s not just frats and sororities that have a social component to them — organizations like dance teams and ethnic clubs are known for holding a plethora of events such as beach days, kickbacks and parties. “For my sports club, there were a lot of both men and women, given a lot of opportunity to socialize and get to know them”, says a second year Business Economics student.

Though this is different from most other universities, these clubs will become the center of your life outside of academics at UCI, and can even lead to you meeting that special someone. A second year Informatics student says, “I met my significant other through one of UCI’s dance teams, I didn’t expect to spend so much time with them and falling for them, but it was fun!”

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