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I haven't been talking much about graduate school applications since I took the GRE and started applying in earnest. I'm not the superstitious type, but maybe somewhere inside I didn't want to jinx anything. Now that everything's completely decided, though, I can discuss what's happening without fear of recrimination from whichever twisted pixies are charged with yanking the rug out from under you just when you think you've got everything worked out. I hope.

Rebecca and I will be attending the University of California at Irvine this fall. It's a great compromise for our chosen majors (Computer Science for me, Urban Planning for her), so we're happy about it academically. But I must say that we had our doubts about its location. You have to admit, Orange County isn't on a lot of people's List of Favorite Places in the Universe. (This is a personal belief which I maintain despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.) And, having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and being a current resident and fan of said Area, I must admit to my own set of prejudices to overcome related to Southern California.

Last month, we took a road trip down to Irvine to see if it would be a livable situation for us. We visited the school and investigated our housing options.

Irvine's history -- what there is of it -- is pretty interesting. In the late 1900's, a rancher named James Irvine acquired 110,000 acres in the area that is now Irvine. He incorporated this land into the Irvine Company. In the 1940's and 1950's the Irvine Company began offering some of this land for urban development. But it wasn't until 1959, when the government of California asked for 1,000 acres of the land to build a new university, that full-scale urban development began. That development was masterminded by the Irvine Company.

As a result, Irvine is a vast, neatly planned, suburban sprawl. This goes against the grain of a San Franciscan such as myself. Even Irvine's poorer areas have a cartoony feel to them -- Compton cum Walt Disney -- that creeps me out a little bit.

(You can read more about the history of Irvine here.)

But any negative feelings about the area were forgotten when we visited the school. The UCI campus is beautiful. (Click on the pictures on the right for examples.) The people were friendly, and the facilities ample. We're planning to stay right off campus so we can continue to avoid driving. This seems quite possible, as there are a number of apartment complexes right at the edge of campus that seem nice. (Never mind the fact that they were all built an are all owned by the Irvine Company, so there's no real competition between them; let the price gouging begin!) There are decent grocery stores in walking distance -- it'll be a leg up on where we are now in that regard. As far as the surrounding areas: fortunately, the University is on the southern edge of Irvine, and it's isolated from the rest of the city by the San Joaquin Freshwater Marsh Reserve. The marsh is not only an important stopping point for many species of birds during migration, but it serves an important buffer zone that insulates the school from contamination from the rest of Orange County. And on the south side, the only thing that separates UCI from the coastline is a few miles' worth of Newport Beach, which is not such a bad place, if a little yuppity.

I'm beginning a whole new chapter in my life. I've been spending a lot of time hammering out the details, but hopefully I'll be posting more and more as I make accomplishments and as interesting things happen.

Oh -- and I have some particularly interesting plans for this website. Stay tuned.

May 20, 2003 in old_site | Permalink

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